“
Overall very good tour, I was happy and felt safe. Enjoyable in general, hotels and food fine, our guides for both parts of tour were really knowledgeable and the guide who joined us for Ranthamborne was lovely and sweet. Awesome to see tigers in the wild (although I wished that litter by a temple in the park had been picked up by rangers as rest of place was clean)! It was also good to see guide looking out for one member of our group after a monkey had got on her.
The points to raise are:
- I felt very rushed with arrival transfer. He did not ask if I wanted money exchange, like my transfer had in Jordan. He ran out the airport at great pace so it is a good job I was not old or with a disability!
- In Delhi the market tour could be pushed back a little, I know it would be too difficult when crowded, but just a little later as stalls were opening would be nice as as it seemed pointless to be there with everything deserted.
- Our guide took us to 3 "local workshops", which were basically soul-less over-priced shopping trips between Agra and Jaipur. Many hours were spent between these as the guide did not hurry people (guess because he gets a cut of spending). On a short 1 week tour which includes a lot of travel, these were too many hours wasted. We came to see the country, not spend hours in a shop. A real locals market would have been more enjoyable to do any shopping at, but we did not do this - in fact we lost chance to do Jaipur market due to length of time at the expensive workshop. A couple of people were getting very fed up - but no one wants to make a big fuss in the moment and cause trouble.
- At our Jaipur hotel a few of us asked if there was anywhere we could walk out to to go and visit, our guide discouraged us, whether it was because he wanted us all to definitely be there for dinner or because there really wasn't anything about it we didn't know, but we felt we did not get as much from our time in Jaipur as we could have.
- It would have been nice to see a Hindu temple somewhere on the tour as it is the main religion in India.
- I understand about cultural sensitivity but it would be good if there was someway OTG could help encourage awareness with their contacts about the awful littering problem in India as it was very concerning to see; we mentioned to our guide, and although he understood and didn't drop any himself he said that the government had tried - clearly they haven't as there were few bins and people were uncaring about dropping showing a lack of awareness on this subject!”
