3 nights in Delhi

We got into Delhi during the day on the 15th after camping near Chandighar next to a roadside tearoom thingy.

We stayed off to the northwest of the city at a hotel called Orchid Garden, although Shane and I slept on the hot truck the first night for security and missed out on the nice aircon'd rooms for one night. I spent a lot of our time here feeling unwell and ended up going to see a homeopath who gave me some white pills to take which helped for a couple of days, but then I started on the antibiotics again to try to get rid of it for good. There are a few of us who have actually felt so bad that they have flown home for a rest and will join us in Kathmandu later. So we gained 2 and lost 3 - Alison, Jasper and Patrick.

We spent a fair bit of time in Delhi on the internet and hanging out in the cool rooms, since it was too hot to do anything in the afternoons. In the morning we did go and see the Red Fort. It's a massive fortress that was turned into an army barracks after Independence and didn't actually open to the public until not long ago. The interior has amazing architecture - open buildings with columns and beautiful marble inlay. A lot of the buildings have waterways running through them and would look beautiful since the spaces in between the buildings is very green as well. There were a lot of Indian tourists there, and we were asked if they could take our pictures quite a lot. It's not nice being a tourist attraction yourself.

After the fort we walked around to the mosque, the Jama Masjid. It is also a massive red sandstone construction and very open and hot. Not as nice as the ones in Iran but it was nice to see how other countries do it.

Another highlight of our Delhi time was that one morning we went shopping for gear for the Bollywood Party we are going to have in Jaipur. The girls were taken to a (rather expensive) saree shop and shown all sorts of beautiful and sparkly sarees. I ended up with a purple pure silk one which I love - can't wait to wear it :)

On the last afternoon we went to the uber-posh Imperial Hotel for high tea. It was 600 rp each but we could have as many cucumber, egg, tuna and smoked salmon sandwiches and cakes as we wanted, and as many cups of tea and coffee. We ate until we couldn't eat more and enjoyed the cool and quiet surroundings, but I felt a bit too grubby to be in there.

For supposedly the dirtiest city in the world, it's not that bad. It still stinks and there is rubbish everywhere, but the buses and autorickshaws are all run on natural gas and there are trees everywhere and people sweeping the streets so it doesn't feel too horrible.