Pit Stop at Paris

There is an inherent benefit when you are living in the USA and your hometown is in India. The benefit is that you get to make pit stop trips to the cities where you get flight connections to India. My final destination was Mumbai but I found a wonderful route via Paris. The flight was SFO - Paris - Mumbai (March 2014). It was a quick 3 1/2 days trip to Paris. My wife and I landed in Paris around noon. It took a long time for our bags to come in at the baggage claim. Finally they arrived and off we go. Firstly I exchanged my US dollars to Euros at the airport. Per our research the train service from the airport to the city is very straight forward so we were very keen on taking the train to the city. We looked up the signage started walking towards the train. It was a long walk. We finally reach the ticket counter and I picked up 2 train passes for 3 days. We took the train to Gare du Nord. Our hotel was near Gare de L'Est. So we had to change the train and hop onto the local metro. This is when we realized that we made a mistake to be adventurous with 4 bags in hand in a new crowded city changing train. We got off Gare du Nord and could not really figure out where to go. It was dark and crowded in the subway and we were with a lot of baggage. From the research I had done for the city we were warned of the thieves that operate on the stations. So it was very very uncomfortable. Finally a gentleman helped us out but pointing towards the direction as he could not speak English and we could not speak French beyond "Bonjour" and "Merci" :). We crossed over to the local metro . We were supposed to go further down the staircase to get to the metro that would take us to Gare de L'Est. We had 4 bags and there was no elevator or escalator. I picked up the 2 big bags and my wife picked up the 2 small bags and in a classic touristy fashion in stress and confusion we reached the at the right platform. We took the train to Gare de L'Est. Once we got off the episode repeated and we found ourselves again lifting the bags this time climbing up the stairs. Somehow we managed to get out of the subway to breath some fresh air on the road. Thankfully the hotel was right there. We checked in to the hotel. The trip did not start in ideal scenario but still I find it very adventurous today when I write this article. It is definitely a memory to remember.  I cannot explain the sigh of relief  we felt after we checked in to the hotel. It was the smallest room that I have ever stayed in. Untill Paris it was New York City that held the baton. Now its Paris. It was dark, gloomy and small. We did not care much as we knew that we are not going to spend much time in the hotel anyways.

A quick nap and a shower got us ready for the city. Despite of the uncomfortable arrival to Paris, the excitement was still at its peak to explore the beautiful city of Paris. We picked up the travel guide and metro train map from the hotel and we took off to Notre Dame. It was not to far from the hotel. Just a few stops away. This time the train ride was very smooth since we did not have any bags with us. We got off the station and quickly walked up to the Notre Dame Cathedral. It was a very beautiful structure. There were a lot of people outside as well as inside who were mainly tourists. The structure is covered with La Seine river on both sides. The cathedral is widely considered to be one of the finest examples of French Gothic architecture and among the largest and most well-known church in the world. The art and the architecture takes you in the past and makes you feel how it must have been. We almost spent an hour at the cathedral. The most memorable visual of the cathedral in my mind were the staint glasses that I have added a picture of here.

After the cathedral we walked around in the area. We were hungry so we were on the look for some food. That hunt took us to the Saint Michel area which is very close to Notre Dame. We walked around the area. Saint Michel was buzzing with performers on the street, restaurants, tourists and great scene with La Seine in the background. 

We found a great roadside option to eat. When in Paris what better to eat but a roadside Crepe !  It was delicious. We spend some more time in the area. We made a quick trip to Champs-Elysees which is a boulevard near Arc de Triomphe. It is famous for its theatres, cafes and luxury shops and we were keen to see it. We walked around for very little time as we knew we had a plan to come back and spend more time here on the 3rd day of the trip. We were awed by the size and the buzz of the street. We tried to get tickets for the famous Moulin Rouge show but everything was sold out. We realized that we should have planned and purchased earlier for the show. We took off fairly soon as it was the first day and we were tired and hungry. We took the train back to Saint Michel and had dinner in the latin area of Paris in Arr #5. It was a very authentic place and it gave us a first hand feel of a French restaurant. Thankfully I found my vegetarian meal at the restaurant. We were at the restaurant for a long time. We enjoyed the ambience. Post dinner we retired the day. Took the train back to the hotel.

It was the next morning. It was really hard to wake up due to the heavy first day with all the action with the trains and baggage plus the jet lag set in as well. But the action packed second day motivated us and we were up and running again. We grabbed our Starbucks and chocolate croissant at Gare de L'Est and were ready to go. The destination for the first half of the day was Palace of Versailles. Versailles is a suburb of Paris and has a lot of history associated with it. The court of Versailles was the center of political power in France. It was a hunting cottage for King Louis. Eventually after several rebuilds King Louis XIV expanded it to be one of the largest palace in the world. 

It was an hour plus long journey to Versailles. It surprisingly got very cold but no rain. We did not have the tickets. So we had to stand in a really long line first to take the tickets and then to get into the Chateau. These lines took away a lot of our time but there is no other choice but stand. Finally we get in to the most amazing palace that I have ever visited. The grandeur, the show, the shine was simply too good to be real even after soo many years of development. The palace seemed endless as there were rooms one after the other and each room better than the other. Every room had a history. We tried to keep up with the radio commentary. There were huge gardens surrounding the palace. A place not to miss !! 

It got very tiring at the end of it as the jet lag played its role in it.  We wrapped up our final photographs at the site and started the walk back to the train station. By this time we were very comfortable with the metro and the route. We changed the metro's and the connections very smoothly. The train network in Paris is amazing. We grabbed something eat on the way and headed back to the hotel. 

We took a quick nap and we were ready for our next activity. We headed to the La Seine night cruise. It was a 9PM cruise. It was a very good experience. The city looked beautiful in the night. The highlight was the close look at the Eiffel Tower that was fully lit. It was shining bright and tall. The view was really good from the cruise. We had dinner after the cruise and retired for the day.

We woke up early next morning as our destination was The Eiffel Tower. We had decided to go early since the lines can get significantly long. We reached the site by 8:30 AM. The line was long but not too long so we were in a good shape. We purchased the tickets to go all the way to the top of the tower. Standing in the line with people from various parts of the world, gave me a very good feel that I am actually at the Eiffel tower. One of the wonders of the world. We went up one level and then the other. We were on top of Pairs at the peak of the tower. I made atleast 3 complete rounds at the top. The weather was good too. No rain, nice and bright. The views were spectacular. We did not want to get down. Following were the pictures in all four directions from the top of Eiffel Tower.

Finally we get off the tower, a few final pictures and we were out of there with very fond memories of the Eiffel tower. We grabbed quick lunch at one of the restaurant near the tower.After Eiffel tower we headed straight out to the Louvre museum. It is one of the largest museum in the world. It has a various collections of Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Islamic, African, European arts, paintings and sculptures. I am not a big fan of museum but I covered the two most important art that I wanted to see. I saw Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa painting and Michelangelo's Dying Slave.  

We spent a few hours at the Louvre and finally went to the final destination of the trip Champs Elysees. We walked the entire street. It was lit up in the evening. Went into a few stores to only realize that we cannot afford anything here :) But it was still a great experience to walk around . Buzzing with great restaurants, music, young people. We dinned at a fine restaurant on Champs Elysees to get a feel of the place. It was wonderful. We retired the day and headed back to the hotel for the last night.

I had requested for a taxi to return to the airport. Learnt a lot from my arrival. DO NOT TRAVEL IN PARIS METROS WITH BAGS. Next morning the taxi driver same in early we were extremely tired but were ready to go and it was time to say goodbye to the wonderful city of Paris. We might have missed a lot of places but I thought with 3 days in hand we did cover a lot and we had a lot of fun. 

Alaska – You Beauty !

The only impression of Alaska in my mind was that picture in my Geography text book where there were two Eskimos who lived in an Igloo. Being in the hot lands of Mumbai where the only beauty appreciated were the torrential rains, I never imagined that there will be a day when I will actually land in Alaska to see what a beautiful place it is. 

My wife and I decided very late to join our friends onto this trip. It was the most un-prepared trip that I have made to so far. I was scrambling to make my last bit of bookings in Alaska a few hours ahead of my flight to Anchorage. However in the end it all worked out and it almost felt that I was destined to visit the Great land – Alaska (Alyeska, the "great land"). I never felt excited about this trip and hence the build up was very low. I had no interest in getting my bookings done and left all of it till the end. My work was heavy too so that played a role as well in the delay for the bookings. If you have not been to Alaksa and not read about it the first thing you think of is snow, 21 hours of darkness and lack of food. When you start booking *in summer* and do your research you will find it to be completely opposite. We wrapped up our plans and schedule with all the bookings and we were ready to go.

Friday evening 6:30pm flight to Seattle and then a connection to Anchorage was the route. Twist in the tail was Delta Airlines did not let me do the online checkin. Hence that made me very nervous and had to go all the way to the check in gate to get my seats assigned. This delay was very discomforting as I had all my bookings done but no flight seats assigned. I kind of laugh at it now as Delta has this cheap policy of reserving the seats until the end. I know the reasons why but will refrain from writing it here. Finally we get the seats assigned at the gate and off we goto Seattle. Same story repeats, no seats assigned for the next flight and I am scrambling at Seattle. Eventually we get our seats and I got a sigh of relief and could start dreaming of Anchorage. We landed in Anchorage past midnight. Tired and exhausted due to a heavy work week assisted by Delta airline. My friends had reserved a rental car at the airport and we were all very happy that soon we will be at the hotel and can rest for the night. We walk up to the rental car office and to add to the complication the rental car lady took surprisingly long time to process our car. It was adding to the frustration then but seems very exciting to me now. She assigned us a Dodge Avenger. We get into the car and my friend started it. It made a sound on start up and made an even bigger sound on braking. It was hilarious. We were all smiling out of frustration if that even makes sense. We go back up park the car and rush back to the counter. They had no cars for us to exchange. After a lot of back and forth and arguments the only car they had to offer us was a truck. Being of Indian origin we prefer smaller cars and now the lady offered us big bad beast Ford F150. It is a pick up truck and none of us had driven it before. We were skeptical but had no choice. We took it. Dumped our luggage and I drove it away. Much to my delight I loved driving the truck. In the middle of the night in Anchorage Alaska there were 5 tiny Indians in an American authentic Ford pick up truck. Can’t get any more funny. We reached our hotel at 2AM.

Technically a lot of excitement happened even before the first day of the trip in Alaska. The adrenaline rush due to the flight and the rental car was actually very exciting and gave us a kickstart to the trip. It was Saturday morning we are all up by 6:30 AM and ready for a quick breakfast. We had to drive up north east for about 2 hours for our first day activity. We drove up to Matanuska for our Glacier hike ! The drive up to Matanuska was one of the most serene drives. Snow clad mountains with greenery all around and a perfect road with no bumps. I was impressed with the roads in Alaska. We reached our activity point in our Ford F150 J. Our group was assigned to Phil as the guide for the glacier hike. We were very excited. We were all mandated to take bag packs, water and layers of clothes since we were going to HIKE THE GLACIER !

An interesting thing was that we were given special hike shoes and clamp-on. These clamp ons are like metal paws that you can wear around your shoes. Never understood the point until I got to use them. We drove in their van to the glacier point with helmets on. We could see the Matanuska glacier and could not wait to get up there. Phil started our journey immediately. One of the first things he said is that the land on which we are standing is the Marine that is settled on top of the glacier. So essentially there was all ice under the land. This was a wow moment. We walked further up and got a proof point of what he was saying. There was water bubbling up from the land. The land had become like spung and the water would bubble up. Phil explained that it is the ice underneath that is melting and escaping in the form of bubbles. We walked further up and saw black ice. It was very slippery and that was the time to wear the clamp-on the metal paw on the shoes. I got the point later that it was only because of that I could have done the glacier hike. A glacier is nothing but high pressured ice and hence very slippery. We began out hike onto the glacier. Beautiful landscape with ice all around. We explored the Matanuska glacier and asked Phil for more adventurous routes. So we went a little higher and steeper. It was just so exciting. We ended up in a back drop that looked like the following picture. I have seen these type of places only in movies.

In no time we realized we have spent 3+ hours and it was time to head back. As usual the return trips are not that fun but the awe of the place and the disbelief of seeing something like the picture above superseded everything. We drove back in their van to the office where our F150 “yeah baby” was parked. We drove back to Anchorage to our hotel . We were dead tired and it was almost 4:30PM. We took a quick nap since we did not sleep well in the night. We took off again at 7pm. Drove around Anchorage for a little time. Not much to do there. We were all hungry and to our surprise we found an Indian restaurant called Bombay Deluxe where we ate authentic Indian food. Considering it was in Alaska they had decent food and we could all eat well. We were tired but the next day we had to travel and it was going to rain and hence we had to give up our F150 and get a covered trunk car. So we retuned back to the rental car office and exchanged the car for an SUV. We retired the day as the beginning of next day was early as well.

It was day 2 on Sunday we woke up early, had a good breakfast. It was the cruising day. We were booked for the cruise in Prince William Sound. The timeline was critical. The cruise was starting from Whittier which is about 1 ½ hours away from Anchorage. There is a tunnel that we have to cross to reach Whittier. The tunnel is tricky since it is only a one lane one way tunnel. So we had to time our travel to perfection. The tunnel would open only at half hours like 10:30, 11:30… Our cruise reporting time was at 12 and we had to take the 11:30 tunnel. If we would have missed the 11:30 tunnel we would have missed our cruise. Thankfully we made it in time to the tunnel by 11:30. The drive from Anchorage to Whittier is the best drive that I have taken in my life. It was raining. Land, sea, mountains, snow, greenery, cars and train all in one sight ! If I said Matanuska drive was serene, this drive was something more than serene if at all there is something like that. We had spend a lot of time in deciding which cruise to take. We had a couple of options the one in Kenai Fjords and the one here in Prince William Sound. The difference between the two was more sea wild life in Kenai vs more Glaciers and Calving in Prince William. After a lot of thought we picked more glaciers and calving in Prince Williams. We hopped onto the cruise post noon. It was another beautiful day. The cloud were almost at ground level or may be the ground was at the cloud level. Don’t know what was true there but you get the point that there were mountains, ocean, snow, cloud, cruise and glaciers ! 

We departed on time and headed deep into the waters. Due to the landscape we were surrounded by beautiful mountains on both sides. We went deep and our captain spotted a couple of whales. We stopped there and everyone was out on the deck to get a glimpse of the whales. It was a breathtaking moment. If you have seen National Geographic and have seen the tail of the whale going down into the water, you can relate to what we saw. We waited for a long time to keep watching the whales. Eventually we had to move on. We cruised further along and finally we knew we were getting closer to the Blackstone glacier when we started seeing ice floating in the water. Remember Titanic iceberg? Well these were not icebergs but similar looking ice blobs floating around in the water. We soon reached the glacier and we waited there to see a calving. We were lucky enough to see a very big calving. It was unbelievably beautiful. Never seen before moment. 

We spent a lot of time cruising and eventually turned back to base as we had to catch the 6PM tunnel back out of Whittier.  We made it out of Whittier in time to catch the tunnel and drove off 2+ hours to Seward. The entire stretch from Anchorage to Seward gives you the best driving experience. It was heavenly. We reached Seward and ate awesome Thai food at Woody’s. We stayed the night in Seward. The scene from the room was something to die for. Snow clad mountain range right in front of the window all the way from left to right till your eye sight can reach. The clouds hanging half way down the mountain, cruise liners parked at the port. Wanted to enjoy the scene since it was bright and sunny even at 10:30pm but next day was going to be another beautiful day and had to wake up early for that too.

It was day 3 and we wake up to the beautiful Seward morning. We are all set to head out for breakfast and head to the exit glacier hike. We reached exit glacier early and did a not so long hike. It was raining and we were hiking. It was a great experience. I would do that any day any time once again J It was beautiful and it reminded my of my Puerto Rico trip where we had a similar hike done there in the rain forest to reach the water fall. This time it was uphill to the base of the glacier. Once we reached the glacier it was very beautiful but since we had done Matanuska and Whittier we were not as impressed as it was made sound by our research. May be they did not visit Matanuska or Whittier. Still a view not to miss. Still recommend going there as the who experience with the hike is worth it and you don’t want to miss it. We returned back by noon. Now it was the long drive time. 2 + hours back to anchorage followed by another 2 hours to a town called Talkeetna. We head out of Seward, take a late lunch break at Anchorage and reach Talkeetna by 5:30PM. We straight goto Talkeetna Air Taxi office. We did not have bookings but we still wanted to do this activity of glacier landing. We go to their office and explore their packages. Unfortunately due to the weather condition we could not take the longer ride but it kind of worked out for us since we could save up a lot on the shorter ride and still get the best of it since we got free glacier landing as we were on their last tour of the day at 6:30PM. It was a small little flight very similar to the one I flew some months ago. Our pilot was Brian who flew us up high. In no time we reached the mountain ranges and all of sudden the landscape changed. There was snow all around. There were multiple glaciers and I could not figure out if this was real or hoax. I kept taking pictures as if I probably will never ever experience something like this again. Brian did a smooth glacier landing of the plane and what an experience it was. Hard to believe that you are actually landing on a glacier. One thought in my mind was what if the glacier cracks J. But I had similar uncomfortable thoughts of parachute not opening while sky diving, the zipline breaking off and the rock puncturing the raft while we white water raft J. Anyways we landed there and I could not stop starring at the sight. It looked something like this.

We did not want to return but all good things come to an end and so was this activity. We flew back after a very memorable experience. We drove into the Talkeetna town and ate some hot pizza there. We retired the day as the next day again was very heavy with lots of travel.

It was day 4 and we were ready by 6:30AM, a quick breakfast and we departed on a 2 ½ hour journey to Denali national park. By this day we felt completely satisfied and accomplished with what we had seen and done. My friend and I almost did not care much on how the 4th day went. I guess we were still awe struck with Matanuska, Blackstone Glacier and the Glacier landing experience. Anyways we drove up to Denali. It was a long drive and it did not match up to the Seward drive. So it was a bit frustrating. If we would have driven to Denali ahead of Seward we would have enjoyed and loved the drive because it was still so beautiful. We reached Denali where were had a 10Am bus to catch. It was a 8 hour long tour in the Denali National Park. We departed sharp at 10 into the park with the hope to see the beautiful landscape and some good wild life. We saw almost 14 grizzly bears, moose, reindeers, etc. The road was very beautiful in patches. It got very pretty on the way to Eilseen.

 It was a decent experience. Not as exciting as the other activities though. May be that’s just me. I like to do more activity rather than sit in the bus and stare at the nature. Still a great experience. We returned back and had to rush a bit since we had to drive about 2 hours to Fairbanks that same day. We reached Fairbanks and again had some Thai food. Options tend to get limited when you are a vegetarian and hence sometimes you have to repeat the cuisine. But hey no complains it was great to find good food in Alaska. We finished a good dinner, returned our rental car at the Fairbanks airport and flew out to Seattle and back to San Francisco in an over night journey. Back in town at 9AM and ready to get to work J.

It is hard to say which was that one thing that I really liked. I know Exit glacier and Denali will be the last two but between glacier hike, glacier calving and glacier landing I just don’t know which one is rated higher. May be it is glacier landing, glacier calving and then glacier hike for me. Overall a great express trip with lots of nature, lots of wilderness, lots of adventure and lots of travel. Alaska – You Beauty !