Goa - Club Mahindra Varca Beach Dec 2006

In December we went to Goa to celebrate the new year. It was a much looked forward to vacation with a stopover at Mumbai at my Maasi's place. We stayed at Club Mahindra Varca beach resort. Our room was in the main building initially, it had its own advantages. The activity centre was close by and both our children had a good time over there. The 'waterfields' quite literally are great in the resort. And then further on we could just walk upto the beach.

The beach was clean and had quite a few sporting activities as well. We tried a hand at parasailing , waterscooting and went for a dolphin cruise to spot Dolphins.

The transport from the resort was a problem with the taxi union acting smart and charging exorbitantly for sightseeing for the rest of Goa. We hired two two wheelers on our penultimate day and rode into Panjim with a child on each of our bikes. That was a stupid thing to do actually and we also paid a fine at one of the crossings for being an a non taxi bike. It seemed that the crossing was a favourite place for the cops to catch unsuspecting tourists.
New year was ushered in walking along the beach. And enjoying a magnificent display of fireworks by our resort and the neighbouring one.

Khajuraho as a venue for a conference

My husband recently went to Khajuraho to select a venue for a conference he plans to hold there in the near future. It seems an ideal place for a conference with many hotels in a small area and a major tourist attraction. The problem is that none of the hotels have large conference halls. The best hotel is Jass Raddison previously known as Jass Oberoi. Among other good hotels are Hotel Chandela of the Taj group, the Clarks group.
From Lucknow the journey by road was approx 300km it took around 7.5hrs. While returning he took a different route over a pantoon bridge over Yamuna river which was shorter and the road was better.

Using the readymade currency converter on your computer

When planning a vacation abroad, you often need to convert currency into your own country's and vice versa. A readymade converter is available on everybody's browser window the GOOGLE SEARCH.
I use the Firefox as my browser. It has the google search box at the top right hand corner which can be used as below.


for rupee use INR
for US dollars use USD
Pounds use GBP
Euro use EUR
Malaysian Ringgits MYR
Singapore Dollars SGD
This post is inspired from a post at Digital Inspiration

Las Vegas : The dream destination

We plan to first go to Seattle, spend two days there, proceed to San Francisco. We are planning to hire a car from San Francisco and keep it with us till we leave west coast, spend three days there, then proceed to Las Vegas, six days for Vegas will not be enough but we will have to manage in that man. While in Vegas we are planning to take a tour to Hoover Dam & Grand Canyon Rim, including a flight over Hoover dam & Grand Canyon. Then there are other tours like Vegas Strip tour, Red Rock & Valley of fire tours and so many other things to do & see.

Start planning for Summer vacations

The hot destinations would be
1. The United States of America
2. Manali, Kufri and Dharamshala
3. Scotland and London
4. Malaysia and Singapore
These are the destinations we had in mind for this summer. Now lets explore the possibilities.
The United States of America
We are planning to fly from Delhi via Paris with Delta airlines as they were offering the cheapest fares till now on the net. Another friend of ours is planning to fly from Chennai to Chicago by Air France which he is saying is the cheapest. The itinerary so far is Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Orlando, Niagara falls, New York.
The biggest hitch is to procure the visas and then only plan ahead. We came to know that an International Driver's license is not required in US and a license from your own country would suffice. This is important as we are planning to rent a car for the journey from LA to las vegas and maybe Sanfrancisco also as they seem to be nearby.