India Ahoy!
We both arrived at New Delhi Airport with no idea what awaited us. We had heard stories of people outside the airport grabbing at your bags and taxi drivers trying to take you to the wrong hotel. What a relief it was when everything was orderly! We even had no trouble finding a taxi! Naturally we couldn't get off that easy and our super-reliable taxi driver got lost and then couldn't find our hotel. Well, one out of two ain't bad.
This sums up our first couple of days - we expected everything to be difficult, the poverty overwhelming and the heat oppressing. All of those things were there but no where near as bad as what we expected, so we have actually slid in quite comfortably. India is an incredible country! So many people, cultures and religions all squashed into the same sub-continent. This is a country that is storming ahead with its IT revolution yet shop keepers prefer to calculate sums in their heads. This is the country that has the nuclear bomb yet bank guards are armed with WW1 rifles and shop guards have sticks.
New Delhi is an incredible city yet an absolute dump. The streets are jammed with cars, rickshaws, people, dogs and cows (of course). There really is something special about being on a main street in the capital of a nation and having to be careful of stepping in cow shit. All in all though, it is a fantastic place to visit. The people are amazing. So friendly, so interesting. Watching hordes of them bustle around a temple or market place is a phenominal sight. Talking, yelling, arguing, rushing rushing rushing ... and then someone will stop to ask your thoughts on the Indian cricket team.
The other cultural highlight of New Delhi, as everyone knows, is Delhi Belly. Never ones to miss out on experiences I am proud to say that we are already enjoying the pleasure of regular toilet stops. And I do mean very very regular.
After Dehli we made our way down to Agra or Agraaa as the locals call it, this was to be our first train jurney in India and as with evreything we approached it with some trepidation, as we clambered onto the train using our backpack as a form of battering ram we finally found our seats but as expected they were occupied by an entire family, after a bit of pointing and shaking of heads we fianlly got to sit down. It was an amazing journey in which we got to have a chat with some loacals without them trying to sell us something, it was all over before we knew it and we were then standing on top of our hostel in Agra facing the Taj mahal what a sight it really is something that will never be forgotten, the hostel we were staying also had the best resteraunt on the roof which served the best curry that we had ever tasted (I'm sure we will repeat this statement over and over again but this shall always be our first).
So we are now back in Dehli about to embark on a fantastic 30hr train ride to West Bengal wish us luck and see ya soon
