Firstly, I just want to say a cheeky thanks to Caitlin and Sandy for looking after us in London. Despite the fact that we managed to get lost just looking for your flat (slightly worrying considering we've got to navigate ourselves around the world for a year), it was really appreciated. Also, as promised The Hat was featured in a number of photos - I looked like a total twerp at 5am outside the Taj Mahal for your viewing pleasure.

So, Delhi was crazy! The taxi journey from the airport gave us our first worrying insight into what we were in for - cows chilling out in the middle of the road; wild eyed women banging on the car windows every time we stopped in traffic; monkeys raking around the rubbish all across the road. Despite all the surrounding chaos, however, I still managed a sly nap for half the journey - Dad, my ability to fall asleep in cars should never fail to impress you! Even our taxi driver who repeatedly told us to watch out for being scammed, insisted on driving us to every hotel (conveniently owned by the company he worked for) which he argued was better than Hotel Blue, then asked for more cash for driving us to the hotels we had insisted we didn't want to go to! On our first ever night in Delhi we decided to throw ourselves into the Indian culture - we bought our water from McDonalds and pizza from Dominos. Oops!

The next day we headed to the Red Fort which was closed for Republic Day then decided to stroll down to see the festivities of Republic Day which had finished by the time we arrived. I still maintain that this was predominantly due to the fact that every person we asked directions from pointed us in an entirely different direction just for the banter. Good news is though, we managed to stumble across India's largest mosque which was pretty impressive. On our walk home we got accosted by a clan of monkeys which James insisted "looked too cute to have rabies" then took about 50 billion photos of them so they started throwing little stones at us, then he took some videos of monkeys pretty much just sitting still until one of them crapped on me.

A couple hours later, after some serious showering and unsuccessful attempts to conceal the stink of monkey pooh on my neck, we went to Lido's, a classy looking Indian restaurant. The waiter insisted we tried "Power Horse" which conveniently wasn't on the price menu but apparently one of India's most popular drinks. He was like a kid in a sweet shop when we agreed to have some and poured the cans into our glasses as if it were champagne. It looked and tasted like Red Bull but cost about three times the price of both our meals - we were royally ripped off.

The next morning we got up early and took our first Indian train journey down to Agra...

Joanne