About Hyderabad - Golkonda Fort, Charminar, Hotel

Well I am home in Alaska again! It is good to be home and reunited with Amber. I am trying to get back into the swing of things at work but the time difference and the jetlag is a killer.

I regret not spending more time in Hyderabad. I did a little sightseeing in Hyderabad, but the trip was very short. I was only there for three full days and there were doctor appointments to go to. But I did get to see the Golkonda Fort and Charminar (in the old city).

I think it is good that Amber and I had been on two previous trips to India. If this (short!) trip had been my first India experience, I would have been completely wrapped up in my initial exposure to the country. As it was, I was barely able to discern some of the differences between Hyderabad and Andra Pradesh and Mumbai and Maharashtra, of which there are many, like the local languages, food, and so on.

The area around the Charminar was pretty cool. I bought some cute baby outfits for our niece Alice and tried some of the fruits and vegetables for sale there, like sugarcane juice, Paan, etc. Plus I tried to bargain for some beads for Amber. Amber likes to do beading crafts and I thought I would see if I could buy some supplies for that. More or less I was unsuccessful because 1) I don't do the bead buying normally and don't know the first thing; 2) it’s a different culture and I am obviously a good candidate to be taken advantage of and 3) I had no idea where wholesale beads are bought and sold! But it was fun to try! I ended up buying two (leftover) emeralds and a ruby (beads) for 900 INR. And a string of American Diamond glass beads for 1,000 INR. Around $40 altogether.

I went to Golkonda Fort on Wednesday. I saw a family picnicking after sitting down with a Popsicle just after arriving and rebuffing the guides. The guides were more than usually persistent. 700 INR was the initial offer and the price dropped precipitously as I walked away, but the decision was made! And others did keep trying. As you walk into the Golkanda Fort you go under the first of many dome structures that have very unique and amazing acoustics. Reminded me of the great acoustics at the Karla Caves between Mumbai and Pune. Well this was really just as neat but in its own different way. Basically when you stand centered under one of these domes and you clap your hands, you hear a million tiny, diminishing echoes. And they say that acoustics were set up in a way that someone at the very bottom gate in the wall that stretches into a 15 (?) km circumference could be heard by the king in his palace at the top of the hill. It was magical sitting at the top of the hill and hearing the calls to prayer echo up from the valley below as the sun's shadows got longer in the late afternoon. At the very end of the walk through Golkanda Fort I was being followed by three teenage guys. When we got under one of these domes we started clapping and eventually we started doing cadences and rhythms. Kinda neat! I posed for lots of photos and was called "uncle".

About the Golkanda Hotel. Some things reminded me a lot of Best Western the Emerald in Mumbai. It was roughly the same class of hotel, definitely a business clientele and a good number of foreigners. Unlike many of the hotels it is not on the Hussain Sagar, it is a ways off from that. (I never did get to see that lake, the one with the big Buddha statue, except for glimpsing it from the IndiGo airplane after takeoff). The hotel has three sides and a big atrium that goes up to the roof in the center. At the bottom of this atrium is the hotel lounge, the Mélange restaurant where they have the breakfast buffet. I enjoyed the hotel breakfast and lunch buffets very much. Lots of good options. There is another restaurant, Jewel of the Nizams, that I never got a chance to try even though I had coupons from PH. The breakfast buffet had a little bit better selection than the Emerald. The rooms at the Golkanda are very nice and spacious. I was very happy for them except for the internet quirks. Wow the technical difficulties with Skype and the internet were frustrating and took forever. Although it did function, the connection dropped frequently and was cumbersome. I really do think the skype/internet problems were with the Golkonda Hotel. I put that down on the feedback form. At one point two of their IT staff came to my room and did get it working. Otherwise the hotel was great. I liked that they always gave you a complimentary bottle of water every day. Overall the deal Planet Hospital arranged was for 4,000 INR/night inclusive of taxes. I did some laundry but I didn't mind the cost of that because it was such a short trip. There was some room service too, including my first night in. Plus some overseas and local phone calls. Even with all of that it was right at $100/day.