I have made a slight change to my itinerary, bumping my return date home by six days. When I planned India, I built in six days of completely unscheduled time — no flights, trains, hotels, etc. I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do after Mumbai.

My early return is motivated by my need to work on my book before its due date and the fact that Asia is more exhausting than Europe and I’d rather have five "really good weeks" than six "pretty good but super tiring" weeks.

What this means is that after Mumbai I’m probably going to New Delhi, hang around there, and then fly direct to Hong Kong, and then out. Unfortunately I have tons of Bangalore and Hyderabad contacts. My sense my next trip to India will be "strictly business" and it would be better to just focus on meetings in the southern IT cities. This trip will be mostly tourism, and Delhi has more tourism than Bangalore or Hyderabad.

I haven’t made a firm decision so if you have any experience in these cities I’m all ears.

There’s a new mosquito epidemic in India that’s affected 180,000+ people in Southern India as well as international travelers to India. It’s a virus spread by mosquitos and there’s no vaccine for civilians (only US military has that capacity). The only thing you can do is try to avoid mosquito bites.

Ouch.

My attitude is you can always find good reasons not to travel somewhere. But at some point you have to just do it, and go there, and be as safe and vigilant as you can be.

I’ll be there in a few weeks.