My God..............India!

We're in India and our first few days have been an absolute assault on the mind, body and senses! We arrived in Delhi at night only to have to negotiate the airport with it's car and human traffic to find ourselves a place to stay and what an experience! We found a taxi driver who couldn't speak English but we decided to chance it anyway and hoped by some miracle we would find a place to lay our heads. It was in deed a miracle, the driver was a maniac and by Delhi standards that's something. We dodged cars, rickshaws, people and dogs in between breaking down and Andrew having to jumpstart the car while other vehicles nudged and jostled with him for a position on the road. We did make the centre of Delhi but the driver had to hand us over to a rickshaw driver for the final part of the journey because he had no idea where we wanted to go. We crammed into the rickshaw with our backpacks and held on for dear life! As you can tell we lived to tell the tale, found a place to sleep and managed to eat some good Indian nosh after the ordeal. Although I have developed a nice hacking cough caused by the pollution in the air....lovely.

Delhi
The pollution hangs in the air like a fog, there are throngs of people everywhere, the beeping of vehicle horns is constant, dogs fight on the streets and there is poverty like we have not seen so far on this trip. We have seen some horrible things and been on the receiving end of a couple of attempted scams too. It really is a culture shock like no other.

In 2 days we have visited The National Museum, Humayan's Tomb, The Red Fort and Chandi Chowk (the backbone of Old Delhi) and munched our way through samosas, dosa's, biryani's, butter chicken, jelabis and benghal sweets......none of which are good for the waistline. We also squeezed in an Indian cookery course with Lubna, the lady who runs our B & B. Absolutely exhausting, thankfully our B & B was a restful retreat.

www.delhibedandbreakfast.com

Delhi is hard work but I think we managed to discover it's charms too.

Agra
We caught a really early train this morning, in the fog, to visit the Taj Mahal. I'm not sure what we expected but the Taj is actually a very peaceful place in the middle of another polluted part of India. Agra is the chemical production capital of India so you can kind of imagine what that might mean for Agra itself. The authorities are introducing eco-friendly projects to the area although I'm not convinced by their efforts so far. We are both feeling the effects of the pollution and this is after just 4 days. Incidentally, the Taj Mahal by sunset is rubbish! The pollution hides the sunlight so it's like viewing it on a cold, foggy morning.

Another early start tomorrow as we set off for Jaipur, the pink city.