Lets Go! Gujarat - 1. The Preparation
- Krishna Prabhu
- Oct 31, 2019
- 3 min read
Updated: Nov 17, 2019
The Motivation:
It was raining heavily that day in early September, when I started to seriously contemplate a trip to Gujarat. I always wanted to visit Gujarat to to see the famous and well known places like Akshardham temple in Gandhinagar, Great Rann of Kutch, Dwaraka and Somnath temples and Gir forest, to name a few. I also wanted to see the level of development, in our honourable PM Modiji’s home state - but the time hadn’t come for it so far! The Dussehra festival was coming soon and my son’s school was scheduled to be closed for vacation for a few days. Since we hadn’t taken a family vacation in a long time, I saw an opportunity finally knocking at the door to go places!
The Planning:
Initially, I wanted to avoid the hard work and prolonged efforts to plan the entire trip by myself. As recommended by some, I tried the easy way - of contacting well known travel sites like MakeMyTrip (MMT) and TravelTriangle (TT) with my travel requirements, but was quickly disappointed by their lack of response. MMT never even bothered to answer my many mails and reminders and same was the case with TT. It was quite funny that I later got an SMS from TT that they tried to reach me (when I was already almost half way in middle of my trip! chuckle!) and that I can call them back to help me plan my trip! The easy way ended quite abruptly for me!
I then got down to the brass tacks and started to completely plan the trip from scratch. Using some references, I contacted a few native folks from Gujarat, read through hundreds of online reviews and took help of Google maps and few other sites to painstakingly jot down my travel itinerary. I am grateful for all those folks, who wrote those many reviews that helped me a great deal to plan my trip. It was just that, the information was scattered everywhere and I had to look at a lot of places to finalize my trip. This took me almost a good one month’s time to plan everything! My sincere hope in writing this travel blog is that, it might help someone to better plan their visit someday, to the beautiful state of Gujarat.
We were a group of four who traveled - Myself, my wife and son and my sister. The trip was planned for a total of eleven days. By smartly adjusting our itinerary and choosing the right travel dates by slightly tweaking them, we ended up saving a total of almost Rs.13,500/- in flight tickets. Same was the case with Car hiring charges. I checked the hired car with driver option first and found that it would cost us almost Rs.3,000 to 3,500/- per day for a sedan type of car (like Toyota Etios or Swift Dzire). This included Car hire charges for minimum of 250 kms, driver allowance, Toll charges and Parking. The self-drive option like Zoomcar and others were no different and here it would cost even more to my surprise - almost Rs.4,000/- per day for a sedan on an average, excluding Toll and parking! For our trip of eleven days, if we had hired a car (with or without driver), it would result in a whopping cost of almost Rs.35,000/- to Rs.45,000/- in total. I dropped this ridiculously expensive option like a hot potato and instead decided to traverse the state by either inter-city GSRTC or private buses. I could then hire whole day or point to point taxis/ auto after reaching each destination for the local travel there - by sacrificing some comfort and for a fraction of the cost. This option again resulted in a total savings of almost Rs.20,000 to 25,000/- in travel charges, which delighted me!
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