Greetings from Delhi – following day one of our official tour of India, book table for dinner, have tea and cookies, Indian meal in eve (most yummy!) and slept like logs in enormous VERY HARD bed in the Leela Palace; I am pleased to say, all is sunny, pretty hot and good …..
This morning breakfast was an offering of a fine assortment of ‘fried stuff’, cereals, fruit, pastries, curries etc – we carefully chose, avoided fruit and produce with flies having had a first taster(!) and then met cox and kings rep in reception for collection of various hotel vouchers and train tickets. We met our tour guide ‘Kansion’ who spoke incredibly good English, had a sense of humour and gave us enough info en route and freedom to explore various palaces and temples from dynasty’s (invasions!) across the ages (our bad, BRITS last in!!). She warned of beggars, street vendors and disfigured people we may encounter in New and Old Delhi, and explained how to deal with these (basically ignore!) – we saw just one, a chap with one arm trying to entice us to buy his beads for 2 pence through our car window – I have to confess, after the ‘build up’ it almost felt like a part of Delhi life was missing without multiple encounters…
The temples etc were not as glamours or breathtaking as Thailand in our opinion, though we appreciate we shouldn’t compare ….. UNESCO (united nations world heritage fund) are donating to restore architecture to original vibrancy – believe we may have come a few years too early though as chaps chipping away with one hammer between them, a ‘cleany cloth’ and a pile of stones might take a while!
Sadly didn’t see much of the hustle/bustle as our tour guide very aware how much traffic there was and zoomed us around at speed to avoid …. still, motorised rick shaws, bikes everywhere, cars with incredible ‘dimples’ and NO health/safety rules (men wear helmets, women don’t have to, Sikhs don’t have to due to hefty turbans and nor does the baby hanging over the handlebars!) quite entertaining; cars tooting at everything part of the language, random cows wandering in the middle of the roads and chap getting punched in the face with a crowd of onlookers (for probably running over a toe or something!) all part of day to day activities ….We have since bought a travel book and do not feel we have missed much – Delhi probably can be ‘done in a day’ if you don’t stop for long!
Probably the strangest thing, how the men, women and children stare at ME (yes, huge lol!) – our guide assures us it is because the people from poorer parts of Delhi/villages rarely see ‘western’ people and with my hair colouring, I am ‘different’ (mousey blonde not that unusual is it?!) – two men asked to have their picture taken with me today, this really is so very weird for me and not a great feeling – though watching a small child getting whopped over the head with a water bottle for staring for longer than his mum and dad did tickle me a little!!! Hopefully ‘jungle animals’ might be a tad more subtle!!
Late afternoon, after a rather lengthy negotiation with taxi driver over rate, we ventured to local ‘market’ – I say market, more a street with a few random shops of seemingly ‘end of lines’ interspersed with Benetton, Crocs and Nike! Seems young Indian population are loving the newly arrived McDonald’s, KFC and Starbucks – preferring these to curries by all accounts – apparently they want to be more ‘westernised’ – mmmm, I feel we won’t need to travel soon, the whole world will be identical!
So, tomorrow we are up at 4:15am to catch a train (4 hours) to Jaipur … Wonder what that will bring ….