aeronaut and medium cafe bag at indra gandhi international airport, new delhi, india

[maverick]

hi timothy,

good luck with the bar! i hope it goes well!

i haven't been up to the kashmir region, but a couple of my friends have been and had a fabulous time! it helps to have a good guide with you.

getting a visa for india is quite easy. if you have a u.s. passport, india and the u.s. have a bilateral agreement that allows u.s. citizens to get a 10 year multiple entry tourist visa for india. you fill out an application online. if you live close to the place that will process your visa, you can drop off your application and passport in the morning and pick it up in the evening. otherwise, you mail it in and get it back pretty quickly. they say it takes 3 days for non-u.s. citizens, but my wife has a canadian passport, and we dropped hers off in the morning and got it back the same evening.

but don't travel there without a visa. the airline attendant checking you in / boarding you should be checking your passport to confirm that you have a valid visa so that you don't get there only to have to come back.

having said that, a friend of mine traveled unknowingly on an expired visa to india. after a bit of hassle, the authorities at the airport in new delhi issued him a tourist visa. but at first, they wanted to put him back on a plane.

just plan a few weeks in advance and getting a visa for india should not be a problem.

Maverick: If I end up being able to go next spring, I'll be sure to ask for advice here -- thanks for the offer. It will depend on several things, though:

- Will I have taken the bar, and felt confident about passing? If not, I might not feel good about going on a big trip.
- What will the airfares be like? There have been some great ones in the last year, but a year hence ... hard to say. I paid a lot for my tickets to Israel, not in global-historical-cost-per-mile-divided-by-hourly-income terms, but Hey, I've got a fair amount of school debt I'm chipping away at.
- Global political situation, though I have no *special* worries about that wrt visiting India. Friend of mine visited the Kasmir region 2 years ago -- something that I'm sure the average tourist agency would discourage, but he had a good adventure.
- Visa hassles; I hear they're pretty bad for visiting India. (Semi-) funny story: a different friend of mine, a real world traveler in general, got cheap tickets there from London ... and (uncharacteristically foolishly) didn't realize that a visa would be needed for a short stay. So she flew there ... and had to fly right back. Which I can chuckle at now, but I did something similar once. (I assumed that I could visit Korea for a short time with no special visa -- and while I was happily correct, realized with heart-in-throat that there could have been some document necessity I'd overlooked only on disembarking in Seoul. I shall remember that feeling of dread forever ....)

timothy

[maverick]

shiva, you're a braver (crazier?) soul than i! :)

But I love all the craziness of it---and I guess I still drive there, although it gets harder and harder!!

[lauragayle]

maybe they ran out of regular tags??

[maverick]

maybe they ran out of regular tags??

oh - sorry, i think i was making a joke that wasn't very funny :).

i think they just grab whatever tags they have the most of and put them on the handbags. what the tag says isn't of significance. the tag is just something to get stamped when you go through security.

i'm sure when this tag is put on a checked bag, it is because the bag is over a certain wieght.

[lauragayle]

ah! Thanks!!