DEL-UDAIPUR-MOUNT ABU-DEL

Every year QAIT takes its employees to a 2 day trip and it is planned in the 4th quarter. This practice has been followed for last 4 years and employees look forward to two days of non stop fun. The favorite destination is Rishikesh and followed by Mukhteshwar. Last year, my friends from other team had planned for Mukhteshwar and I wanted to join them. However, the company wants it to be a team event rather than a group of friends going out together. Therefore, I had to go to Rishikesh. With the advent of fourth quarter of 2008-2009, teams had started planning their destinations for 2 day trip and as expected, most of them decided on Rishikesh again. However, my group of friends was interested in visiting Udaipur and Mount Abu and all the planning was done in time, courtesy our event manager Koul Saheb.
On Friday evening, we were raring to go to Udaipur through train scheduled at 7 PM from Nizamuddin railway station. I had promised my mates to reach QAIT by 5:30 sharp but reached, around 5:40, due to professional commitments at Adobe. Our event manager had organized two cabs for railway station and asked all of us to sit in them. After 10 minutes into the cab journey, I got a hunch to check if our event manager has kept my luggage in the cab or not. To my dismay, my luggage is not in the cab and I realize it is with a junior who is standing outside the B-8 office premises. Suddenly, joy and happiness gets converted to anxiety and anger. Event manager takes a quick action and turns his cab towards office. Finally, all of us are able to board the train and we start our march towards Udaipur. Males were happy with the young college crowd in our compartment and they were assessing the female crowd in either ends of the compartment before moving to any one. All males followed this pattern but only one of them was caught red handed and we got one more reason to laugh at him. During our journey, we noticed a drunken man who was staring at us through his upper sleeper berth. Our event manager gave him a hard look and stern warning. Navneet was ready to fight with him as he had fallen on him while making his way to the ground. After few minutes, we noticed that he was selling tea in our compartment and all of us had a laugh. Then, there was Manik, who was busy chatting to his fiancée on mobile, giving her minute details of the train journey. Akshima, Amit, Rahul and Vijay were listening to music on I-pod. Others, me, Navneet, koul, jitu with the support of her wife, were busy playing cards.
By 7 in the morning, we had reached Udaipur, our first destination and checked into the hotel. Meanwhile, we had decided to visit Mount Abu on Saturday and Udaipur on Sunday. We had Aloo ka Parontha as our breakfast and started our journey to Mount. The hired cab to Mount Abu had a small plasma screen with “Bachna Aee Haseno” songs playing on it. Me, Amit and Navneet with our cool goggles were eager to dance on the tunes of the movie and actually danced a little bit. In order to involve the entire crowd, we started playing antakshani and sung love, vulgar, sad and party songs. After traveling for about 5 hours, we reached Mount Abu. To our delight, sun was hiding in clouds; a cool breeze was blowing with little rain. We started our sight seeing by visiting an old jain temple known as dilwara temple. We were enthusiastic to visit our next destination because its name was Honeymoon point. In my view, lots of emotion is attached to the word Honeymoon because you and your beloved spend quality time together. Then, we went for normal boating and moved to Sunset point, our final destination in Mount Abu. Few of us reached sunset point through horse ride of 10 minutes and we could have imagined ourselves as Rats who is marching towards Meow. If you are wondering who is Rats and Meows, you need to watch “Jane Tu- Ya Jaane Naa”. The most interesting, scaring and adventurous part of Mount-Abu was our return journey to Udaipur. According to locals, there is a stretch between Mount-Abu and Udaipur that is unsafe particularly in night because of the tribes who have attacked vehicles in the past and killed people. This breaking news was confirmed by restaurant owner where we had our dinner during our return journey. Thus, we decided on a safer route but a longer one. Around midnight, our driver halted at a tea stall to drink his favorite black tea and then, we had to leave the highway and move on a deserted single road. Within 10 minutes, we were traveling on the deserted single road and Akshima, Amit, Rahul, Navneet and I were awake. As we traveled in the dark night on deserted single road, we were busy sharing ghost stories. The frightening road had curves, crest and trough and mountain terrain. All our eyes were glued to the front enjoying our adventure and seeing the mystery unfold step by step. We as software testers were raising What If questions such as what would happen if cab halts and luckily we did not experience any such situation and safely reached Udaipur around 3 in the morning. To be very honest to my audience, I had never traveled so late in the night on a deserted, frightening and curvaceous road and all of us were little scared. Through this return journey to Udaipur, we had our share of adventure and we could compete with Rishishek’s guys in terms of adventure.
Koul ensured we started our Udaipur sight seeing by 10:30 and Udaipur palace was our first destination. We had hired a guide who was educating us about the palace and clicking photos for us. I and Navneet managed to pose at every nick and corner of the palace and I have heard good reviews on my pics. We were able to annoy our event manager because he wanted us to wrap the palace asap and it would enable us to cover all sight seeing places. Second destination was cable trolley ride, in which were taken to the top of the hill through cable trolley. Over there, we posed as group and individuals in front of the camera. The time was passing by quickly and everyone wanted to shop for their loved ones. Therefore, we went to a wholesale shop and almost all of us purchased suits for moms, wife and sisters. Personally, I wanted to gift something to my mom and she liked the suit. Our final sight seeing destination was Vintage Car collection with a soft drink. All males were eager to click photographs in front/with vintage cars and managed to do it successfully. Finally, we started our return journey to Delhi and reached at 6:15 AM on time.
All of us enjoyed our two day NON-STOP fun trip to Udaipur-Mount Abu and have loads of sweet memories.