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This post is in continuation of Meeting with Monalisa and Mr. Eiffel - Part 1.

We had already met Monalisa and were going to meet Mr. Gustave Eiffel (The person engineered Eiffel tower).

We left Louvre and were really hungry by that time. It was around 4′o clock in the evening and we hadn’t taken our lunch as yet. So we started searching for a place for a quick bite . We saw some of the coffee places on a road outside Louvre and chose one of them. I don’t remember what I ate, probably an omelet, few breads and a coffee but it was very expensive. We ended our lunch and after paying bill we came back on the road.

When we decided to plan for Paris, I had done this agreement with my fellow traveler (Ankur) that we would not hurry to cover too many places but would stick to only few places and spend enough time there. We started our trip with only two things in our itinerary 1) Louvre & Monalisa 2) Eiffel tower. After reaching Paris and Completing 1st one we still did not want to disturb our itinerary. We knew that we had enough time to cover the next step.

We started walking towards the main road to come out of the market place (where we had our lunch), and reached an entrance of a park. I guess this was the park mentioned in Da Vinci code just outside Louvre. Its name is Jarden Tuileries in French, which means Garden Tuileries in English , I guess. It is a huge garden and was looking even bigger because of less people there.

Garden Tuileries just entered
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Background: I read Da Vinci Code when I was in Switzerland. This book is a piece of art and believe me, I read the last 300 pages in just one night and completed this book in morning around 4:30 am. The aftereffect of reading the book was that I started dreaming about Paris and Louvre. Irony of situation was that we were in Geneva (Switzerland), hardly 5 hrs away from Paris, but could not go there as we did not have a Schengen visa. I remember sharing this helplessness with Ankur (one of my colleagues) and he reminded me a line which I used to speak a lot, ‘Kismat se Zyada aur samay se pahle kuch nahi milta’

Anyway, our project was near completion and we came back to India in end of November 2004. We worked in Switzerland as consultants on an Anti Money Laundering product and at that time ABN Amro was starting their global implementation for the same. Existing team was divided for different places for the work and I was appointed to lead the team and go back to Switzerland’s Lugano Data center of ABN Amro. The same colleague (Ankur) with whom i shared my helplessness was appointed to go to Amsterdam. Amsterdam meant Schengen visa, i.e. he could go to Paris and visit Louvre. I wasn’t too excited about the Swiss visit as I’d already visited the place. So the same line crossed my mind again ‘Kismat se jyada aur samay se pahle kuch nahi milta’!
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I am basically from Lucknow and live in Noida. Normally I board a night train to visit Lucknow. We were visiting my parents in Lucknow on new year’s weekend and this time decided to drive down because of two reasons. One, we had to pick up some stuff from my parent’s house for which we needed a vehicle. Second and more important was that, having completed the big road drive (Delhi - Jaisalmer- Jodhpur - Delhi in 4 days) on previous weekend, we were high on driving!

The distance from Delhi to Lucknow is approximately 500 kms by road. The standard route is Delhi - Hapur - Moradabad - Rampur- Bareilly - Shahjahanpur- Sitapur - Lucknow. I had been hearing about the bad road conditions on some stretch on this route. Another new route that is becoming popular is the Dellhi - Kanpur - Lucknow route. Some of my friends tried this route few months back and said that it is fast as it’s a 4 lane road but longer than the standard route by about 50 kms. We decided to take the longer and the faster one.

Delhi-Kanpur-Lucknow route can be divided into 4 parts:

a. Delhi - Agra ~ 200Kms

b. Agra - Etawah ~ 125Kms

c. Etawah - Kanpur ~ 150Kms

d. Kanpur - Lucknow ~ 80 Kms

Delhi - Agra: Started early (around 5:45 am) from Noida and reached NH-2 via Kalindi Kunj. Road was clear in the morning so we covered the first 150 kms quickly. Delhi-Mathura-Agra road is an important road (because of Agra) so generally one doesn’t experience bad roads here. But this time, I guess maintenance was due and we met some rough stretches. Arrived Mathura (160 km) around 8:30 and stopped at McDonals to get fresh, but couldn’t resist the smell of fresh burgers and ended up having burger and french fries for breakfast. You can not miss this McD while driving as its huge in size and is a good place to stop for breakfast if you start early in the morning.

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Background

This post is in continuation to my previous post A day trip to Zermatt(Switzerland).In the starting of October 2004, we had covered almost all the popular tourist places in Switzerland. This was the time when parents of one of my colleagues visited Swiss to meet her. That colleague is my wife now so, I can say that my in-laws visited us in Swiss

The overall mood was to cover as much of Swiss as we could. Since we had covered most of the ‘conventional’ places, our Manager suggested Zermatt as not many tourists visit it.

We did some research over Internet and found the place quite interesting. The main attraction there is Matterhorn, one of the most famous Swiss peaks. To add to the town’s charm was the Glacier Express, a train from Zermatt to St. Moritz, that travels between the alps and covers spectacular views. So we decided to spend a weekend in Zermatt.

Started from Geneva

Started very early morning from our apartments in Geneva. After riding a bus and then train and around 4 hour journey, we reached Zermatt around 10am.

Our youth hostel was right next to the station so we checked in and settled our baggage there and confirmed our rooms.
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