29 January – Delhi

This will be a short blog entry.  You folks have suffered through enough words for several trips.

We spent a night with many horns and motors and the neighbor’s TV.  Not the most restful night. We are definitely spoiled by the quiet of NE India.  It is all relative of course but landing in a city with 22 million people makes the distribution of chaos and noise shift way to the right it seems. The room is really quite nice and modern… it’s just the noise factor that is an issue.

We met our driver and new guide, Harry, at 09:30 for a sightseeing tour of Delhi.  I’ll try to put a positive spin on this by saying that we saw many famous landmarks in the city.  Harry has the speech down and needs to work on varying his tone a bit to add some quality to the presentation.  We were quickly briefed on the history of each location and then allowed time to roam and take photos.  When we moved, we moved.  At 3:30 he  asked if we’d like a light lunch.  I’m just glad that we took water along had a decent breakfast.  I could have been assertive I guess but it got to be kind of a challenge for me… when or would he ask about our needs?  I will say the tour was efficient and in a city the size of Delhi that probably is a necessity.  Traffic is insane.  Harry says it is “well organized” and asked if I’d seen any accidents.  “No” I said.  It works somehow but I still am amazed at the way the vehicles flow around and through each other.

We had been well advised by Shyamal and our previous guides that we would find this part of our tour very different.  We are no longer traveling under the auspices of Help Tourism so all bets are off.  Clearly, if Harry is the model, we will never see another Bhaskar or Shisher or Abruro.  We are committed and will enjoy the journey but we wish that guides like Harry could see how it can be done by shadowing one of our previous hosts.  We became close friends with our hosts in NE India but this is business.  Zoom Zoom Zoom.

Tomorrow finds a 5 hour road trip to Agra.  Harry stays here and we inherit someone else in Agra.  We have the same driver to Jaipur and he is good and friendly with enough English to make it work. We are anxious to see the Taj Mahal.  I hope to be standing on the north side of the river and looking across water at sunset to photograph the Taj.  Time will tell.  Please stay tuned.

Be well all