Fodor's Travel Talk Forums - Indian Itin for travel with Children

Some random thoughts:

1. You are going at an excellent time of year weather-wise in every city on your itinerary. Good temps (cool at night in some places), very little or no rainfall. Take a look at weatherbase.com. Gardens will still be in bloom in places like Delhi.

2. One of the major and most fun Hindu holidays of the year, Holi, the spring festival, is being celebrated all over India starting March 3, so you will get to participate in some of the celebrations in the lead-up to that. And your kids will love it because it involves throwing water balloons filled with colored powered at themselves and perfect strangers. Read more about it in guidebooks.

3. Get the Fodors guidebook, the Lonely Planet guidebook and the Frommers Guidebook, which all usually have sections on things to do with kids. These will be invaluable to you in planning your trip as well. The DK/Eyewitness guidebooks are excellent guidebooks for sites, as they have cutaway drawings and maps and good explanations.

4. You are moving a lot, and this may be too much for 3 kids, esp the 8 year old. I would agree that 5 days in Mumbai would be a lot. I would encourage you to stay down in Kerala (Kochi) for a few days at a beach resort where you can make day trips to see wildlife (this may be one of the only places you will be able to do so). I think you should skip Chennai (a long flight across all of India from Kerala) and stay in Kerala and then go up to Mumbai for 2 nights or so and your flight out. I also don’t know that 1 night in Hyderabad is going to be worth the flights and the disruption. I think Hyderabad is very interesting and will be quite different from other cities (it has a large Muslim population), but if you are only there for a day, it will be a rush to see it, there is not really much there for children. I hesitate because there is the Golcanda fort outside the city, so if you actually skipped the city itself and went to the fort, this might be interesting. However, if you could stay behind in Delhi and perhaps do a trip to Agra to see the Taj Mahal, this might be a more interesting trip and easier on all. I don’t know if you want to follow your husband more closely, but IMO and experience traveling with kids in India, you don’t want to move too often (and you also have to leave time for jet lag and in case one of them gets ill). My suggestion for an itinerary would be as follows:

Delhi: 4-5 nights, with 1-2 night trip to Agra
Bangalore – 2-3 nights
Kerala/Kochi: 5-6 nights, 2 nights houseboat if possible
Mumbai: 2-3 nights, someplace like the JW Marriott would be ideal for their huge pools and its on the beach

For wildlife, as you will be in large cities (and huge cities, like Mumbai) you may not be able to see a lot. However, Kerala would give you very good opportunities to see wildlife in various parks. (You can also swim in the ocean, which I would NOT suggest you do elsewhere, e.g. Mumbai or the city of Chennai, both of which have raw sewage outfall pipes on their public beaches.) I recco 2 nights on the houseboat if you can because you need to get out into the back canals to really see the countryside, you may not get too far in only 1 night. Outside Agra there are several bird parks and Chambal park, but both are 2-3 hour drive, which is why you need at least 1 night there and 2 is better. I can do some reading on what may be outside Bangalore other than Bannerghatta National Park and can repost. There could be closer things to Delhi, but my recollection is that there is not much near to Delhi.

You could also change this completely and go someplace like Ranthambore National Park where you have the possibility of seeing tigers, that is a longer trip, but certainly doable, that would mean cutting out say Bangalore completely. There are other tiger parks in India as well, read the guidebooks. India is a huge country with lots to offer in terms of wildlife, but you do have to get outside the main cities; so you have to determine how closely you want to follow your husband’s itinerary. There are also very holy pilgrimage cities like Varanasi which are very interesting as well.

5. For classical dance, thirty kilometers from Bangalore is the Nrityagram village, housing a classical dance academy. For info on tours, look at http://www.nrityagram.org/wisdom/prog/prog.htm. If you go to Chennai, there is also a classical dance academy in Bharatanatyam, about 10 miles south of Chennai. Go to http://www.kalakshetra.net/. I don’t know that much about centres for classical music, the guidebooks may have info, although I will say that at the dance centres you usually also find fine musicians as well.

6. I assume you have some hotels books through your husband, if not do so ASAP as hotels in the major cities you have mentioned tend to fill up very quickly. Also if you are going to go off on your own, you will need to make bookings as Feb and March are still the high season. A hotel guidebook I have come to just love is Alistair Sawday's book called Special Places to Stay India. This has literally hundreds of very interesting places to stay, many in the range of less than US$60 a night and several in the range of less than US$30 a night. They also have a website at http://sawdays.co.uk/, click on the book for India. The vast majority of these hotels are not in the luxury range and some are in the very low budget range, but all look interesting. Two good operators generally in India are the Oberoi group (http://www.oberoihotels.com) and the Taj group (www.tajhotels.com. ). The Aman group also has two properties open in India and is opening others that would definitely be worth considering if they are in your budget. Take a look at amanresorts.com. There is a small Indian chain called Neemrama which operates a number of unique hotels in palaces and other old buildings,, go to http://www.neemranahotels.com.

7. For train schedules look at www.indianrail.gov.in., the state railway of India. Obviously for the longer trips between the cities you will be flying. For good private airlines in India, try jetairways.com or Kingfisher at kingfisher.com. I would avoid Indian Airlines if you can, they simply can't compete IMO with the private carriers. I can recco some private drivers in Delhi, they are not expensive and a good way to get around the city. They can also arrange for longer trips, i.e. down to Agra (although the train is a good way to go as well.) Others on this site can recco drivers for an entire journey in a region. Your hotel can arrange for a car and driver, or you can step outside the hotel grounds and bargain for one for the day at a lower cost than the hotel will charge you.

Finally, while I have had very few health problems in India, stomach upsets are very common and of course of more concern in young children because of the risks of dehydration etc. Make sure they drink plenty of water. Outside of large cites like Delhi and Mumbai, the health care system is extremely basic, and of course sanitation and air pollution are a concern as well as children have more intense reactions to these things. Finally, having travelled in India with children, assuming your children are not Indian they will be an enormous source of curiosity to Indians, and your children may find this frightening and upsetting. The be a source of constant questioning and peopling stopping you on the street and at sights to ask questions and talk to the children. All of this will be done in the most polite and well-intentioned manner, but I have found that even older children get annoyed after a while at being a constant source of attention. Young children who are not used to strangers approaching them may not like it at all. You may need to give them some “down time” each day at your hotel to let them have a break from the attention.