This article is written by K.K.Mehra, an avid traveler and travel writer

I am an avid traveller and have been to the remotest part of the country as also to the USA and Canada. My wife and I went to meet our son in USA recently. We had the most memorable time of our life when we travelled to the west coast of America.

Las Vegas

We reached Las Vegas and from there went by road to Los Angeles and San Francisco. For our return journey, we chose to travel by the Amtrak train from San Francisco to Providence, Rhode Island, from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean, with stopovers at Chicago, Washington and New York.

Our tour started by boarding a flight from Providence, the capital of Rhode Island, to Las Vegas en route to Philadelphia.

We were overwhelmed by the breathtaking beauty of Las Vegas, one of the most exciting and entertaining cities in the world. We stayed at the famous MGM Grand Hotel.

On the Las Vegas strip, we got a glimpse of the world famous New York skyscrapers, the Sphinx and Pyramids of Egypt, the Eiffel Tower, the gondolas of Venice, the Dutch architecture and huge Greek sculptures.

It is the city where nobody sleeps. Even late in the night or at dawn people were revelling and enjoying the fun filled life. The next morning we left by bus to visit the Grand Canyon South Rim, en route to Hoover Dam, which is 275 miles from Las Vegas.

The next morning we headed for Los Angeles by road taking a Greyhound Bus and the journey between Las Vegas to LA was awesome with vast no man’s land on either side of the road making for a great view.

The famous Kodak Theater

Our first stop in the city was Kodak Theatre where the Oscar Awards ceremony is held and just standing there was dream come true. We also visited Third Promenade, Grove, China Town, Griffith Park area and China Town.

Our next destination was San Francisco and we boarded a Greyhound Bus to reach by the evening.

The next morning we started our city tour and reached the two-mile long Golden Gate Bridge. In the afternoon we started our tour of Alcatraz Island. The ride in the steamer was very entertaining and the view of the city from the bay was great.

The next morning we started our excursion to the Muir Woods, Sausalito and wine country.

We travelled across the Golden Gate Bridge and reached the quite, beautiful town of Sausalito, nestled in the jungles along the bay. A two-hour drive took us to Sonoma Valley, which houses hundreds of wineries. A tour of the wineries was also very knowledgeable. After that we came back to our destination.

K.K.Mehra

18 June 2010

http://travel.hindustantimes.com/travelogues/a-memorable-trip-to-las-vegas.php

Average Rating: 4.4 out of 5 based on 278 user reviews.

An entertainer dressed as Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean poses for a photo with an Indian tourist outside the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles

In India, May is the cruelest month. The short spring is already a distant memory, and the heat- and dust-quelling monsoon rains are still weeks away. There’s no better time for Indians to take to the road.

All told, some 550 million Indians travel to other parts of the country each year. Once school lets out for the summer, many families set off on annual visits to grandparents in their native town or village. Another 12 million Indians choose to fly overseas. Wealthy families from Punjab and Gujarat, in the north and west of India, respectively, flock to cosmopolitan meccas like Switzerland or Dubai, where women can indulge in brand-name shopping and don the revealing, Western-style fashions they don’t dare flaunt back home.

But while more than half a billion Indians take a holiday each year, the appeal of travel has traditionally been less about exploring someplace new than about simply getting out of town. Many Bengali families in the eastern corner of the country, for instance, escape north in the summer to the cooler Himalayas — an unfamiliar land and landscape. But they typically join large tour groups, interacting almost exclusively with other Bengalis and eating only Bengali-style meals.

There is, however, a quickly growing segment of Indian travelers — mostly young, rich and hailing from India’s larger cities — who are decidedly more adventure-seeking. Unlike their parents, they visit uncommon places and pursue unconventional activities — a safari in Tanzania, a ruins tour of Turkey, an F1 race in Singapore — with an interest and curiosity about other cultures that previous generations may not have had.

It is still a small proportion of Indian travelers who are so venturesome — but, by the numbers, even a small proportion qualifies as a mass movement, globally speaking. So it is no surprise that the travel industry has taken note. From New Zealand to Namibia, government tourist boards have designed campaigns specifically to woo Indian travelers, and luxury-tour purveyors like Cox & Kings and Kuoni, both based in Britain, advertise hard for Indian rupees. Kuoni, for instance, has joined hands with fabled Bollywood production house Yash Raj Films to offer the “Enchanted Journey” tour of movie locations, letting travelers ski the Alps or boat on Lake Zurich in the footsteps of their favorite stars.

In February came another nod to the Indian traveler’s increasing clout: international travel-guide leader Lonely Planet launched an Indian version of its eponymous monthly travel magazine (other editions of the magazine are published in the U.K. and Brazil). And in October, the bible of luxury travel, Condé Nast Traveler, has plans to follow with an Indian edition, building on the established successes of the publisher’s Indian versions of Vogue and GQ.

The target readers of the new magazines are Indians who are traveling more and traveling differently — many as singles or couples without children or parents in tow. “You’ll be surprised by how many married women there are traveling without husbands and single women traveling with girlfriends, ” says Sumitra Senapaty, 49, a travel writer who has run Women on Wanderlust, a travel club for women, since 2005 and has watched her business grow many times over. “I quite struggled with it initially, ” she says. “I didn’t have the pocket to advertise, so everybody’s mother, friend, aunt and sister spread the word. I just wanted women to come onboard.” Today, Senapaty’s tours — which usher female travelers to hard-to-reach places like Ladakh, a high mountain desert in the Himalayan foothills — are usually sold out.

In addition to seeking girlfriend globetrotters, the industry is going after the growing number of travelers who embark on longer, activity-driven trips and seek novel experiences, rather than just another jaunt to the hotel pool. More and more, Indian travelers are going deep-sea diving in Australia, for instance, and booking yoga retreats in the Himalayas. “There are more people choosing adventure travel over conventional holidays, ” says Vaibhav Kala, who runs Delhi-based Aquaterra Adventures and arranges trips for more than 3, 000 customers per year. “Since four or five years ago, our clientele has turned on its head. From catering to largely inbound foreign tourists, we’re now catering to mostly Indian travelers.”

But catering to Indian travelers means catering to certain Indian preferences and peculiarities, no matter how far-flung or exotic the vacation. Lonely Planet Magazine India always gives readers the requisite practical information about obtaining visas and finding consulates overseas, but it also has a section called Fancy a Curry? that locates Indian restaurants and vegetarian options in foreign cities. “Indians are getting a bit more adventurous, but we still need a little hand-holding, ” says Vardhan Kondvikar, editor of Lonely Planet Magazine India. “We’re a bit like Nemo right now — the big world outside is very exciting, but we still need the anemones nearby for security.”

The worldview of the Indian traveler strongly influences the editorial choices that the magazine’s staff make, Kondvikar says. For instance, the magazine tends to highlight mainstream tourist destinations — which are perhaps familiar to world-weary travelers but new to the Indian populace. The tone of the magazine is also much more introductory, friendly and informative than that of its British and Brazilian counterparts. Recent feature stories introduced readers to Rome, Vietnam, Los Angeles and Puducherry in peninsular India; another popular article covered five weekend getaways from several major Indian cities. “[The U.K.] magazine was designed for experienced travelers who want to see the unexplored sides of places they’ve already been. So it has a lot of stories that bypass traditional tourist sites and find hidden alleys and restaurants, ” says Kondvikar. “We couldn’t do too much of that — many Indians are only going to the major destinations for the first time, and we didn’t want to ignore them.”

The travel lust of this budding demographic has largely survived the global recession, which has otherwise diminished international travel overall. In fact, a stronger rupee has seen more Indians traveling abroad, especially to long-haul destinations. The U.N.’s Madrid-based World Tourism Organization estimates that by 2020, some 50 million Indians will be taking foreign holidays each year.

So while Lonely Planet and Condé Nast may be wading into a shaky market already cluttered with dozens of travel titles, they have high expectations for success. “[In terms of] advertising revenues, not only have we dominated market share in the categories we operate in but also we are growing at an exponential rate, ” says Alex Kuruvilla, managing director of Condé Nast India. “So we are very bullish on the opportunity.” If the rupee continues to rise, this May might not end up being so cruel after all.

Madhur Singh
2010
http://www.time.com/time/travel/article/0, 31542, 1989633, 00.html

Average Rating: 4.4 out of 5 based on 231 user reviews.