In July 2011, Mon, Mahi and Mayank went to Kolkata, India to see our family. I had about 3 weeks before I too was going to join them. It was quite difficult to kill time, so as usual I started planning a trip. However this trip that I was planning was to Kashmir (Srinagar, Leh and Ladakh). However Mon was not very keen on this. She kept siting all sorts of reasons why this would not work. I also wanted to take my parents and hers which would have made 8 of us all together. I had been looking at houseboats and had also tried to tie things up with a close work friend who is from Kashmir and was there on holiday.
However I realized that I had left it quite late and it had become almost impossible to get 8 tickets on the same plane as the Amarnath Yatra had begun and thousand os pilgrims were going to Kashmir. So I asked Mon to look for alternatives and Thailand came to mind. She had seen some package deal adverts in Kolkata. She made some prelimnary enquireies and it seemed possible, to plan this in very short time.
On my arrival in India, the first thing that I did was to meet up with these travel agents – Neptune Travels. They did most of the legwork and carried out the bookings on our behalf. HOwever once I had done this a Tropical cyclone emerged over Bay of Bengal, the same weather system that would affect Thailand. For the next 5 days it rained nonstop. I thought I might have flushed my money down the toilet, but since we had paid we were going anyway. Here is the itenary that we planned. Some of the site seeing was included in the package and some we did independently.
15th Aug 2011 – Arrival in Patong, Phuket via Bangkok, overnight at Royal Paradise Hotel
16th Aug 2011 – Trip to Ang Phang Na, overnight at Royal Paradise Hotel
17th Aug 2011 – Trip to Ko Phi Phi, overnight at Royal Paradise Hotel
18th Aug 2011 – Phuket site seeing, flight to Bangkok, overnight at Amari Atrium
19th Aug 2011 – Bangkok site seeing, overnight at Amari Atrium
20th Aug 2011 – Safari World, overnight at Amari Atrium
21st Aug 2011 – Bangkok site seeing and Siam Niramit in the evening, overnight at Amari Atrium
22nd Aug 2011 – Flight back to Kolkata, India
