We didn't see Delhi, really.

Leaving Agra on another alarmingly cold night our train was delayed by 5 hours. Exiting the station with our heads hung low we spied 3 Australian boys haggling with drivers. Quickly they called out to us and we were included in their private car trip to Delhi.

The trip which was supposed to take 3 hours ended up taking 6. At some point this was due to our unscheduled toilet stop by the side of the road where we all traipsed back into the car with mud on our shoes. Hang on. What's that smell? Oh no. Yes. We are still not sure what variety of excrement we had gathered but the smell was not pretty. Our long stop by the roadside attracted the highway police, probably due to Chez's conspicuous placement on the roof of the vehicle - looking for shoes. Now I'm sure they wanted to find some way of getting us to bribe them out of some made-up offence, but they mustn't have been thinking clearly in the cold and they went on the their way.

Incidentally we ended up not seeing much of Delhi at all. After a massive sleep-in from the large night before we emerged in Connaught Place around midday on a Sunday. The place looked like something out of post-war Germany. The street was piled with mounds of rubble and there were more than a handful of men with semi-automatic weapons hanging around. Later, the newspaper revealed that the rubble was the result of extensive renovations being undertaken for the Metro and was not sinister at all. As for the men with guns? Capital city. Okay.

On the plus side Cheree and I had an excellent dinner at Veda with our new friend Guy (who lives a stones-throw from Chez in Paddington of course), accidentally spending way too much money (of Guy's) on excellent South American Malbeck Red. A thank you dinner back in Sydney is in order.