I'll start at with the arrival in India. We were picked up by a friend from the airport and we quickly experienced the terrifying Indian roads. Most roads are 3-4 lanes wide but normally have 4-7 lanes of traffic on them as there are so many cars, rickshaws and bikes on the roads, and the road markings are very rarely taken notice of. At one point we hit bad traffic so we turned around and started to drive the wrong way down the motorway, this is not unusual in India, but it was terrifying the first time we did it. Another key feature of Indian roads is the very common noise of the car horn. Everybody uses it all the time for no apparent reason.
We have visited all the main sites in Delhi, which wasn't cheap. Locals paid 10rupees(about 14pence) to enter each site, foreigners paid 250rupees(about 3.50pounds) not much but when we are on a budget of 10pound per day its a lot. Anyway we got to see the India Gate (better than the two restaurants in Bolton!), Humayuns tomb, red fort, Qutub Minar, and the Lotus temple, which was my favourite of the day, mostly because it was free.
We have now left Delhi by taking a 15 hour train journey to Varanasi, one of the oldest cities in the world and is on the river Ganges. We arrived to this very nice hotel, I'd guess a 3-4* hotel, not the typical backpackers place but it came as part of a package we booked.
India is a very nice place, but would be a lot easier if i didn't have white skin, because as soon as we walk onto any street, a number of rickshaw and taxi drivers hassle us to take us somewhere at extortionate prices. At first I was polite saying no thank you and explaining why I didn't need a lift 100yards down the road. Now its a firm no and then ignore them until they leave us alone.
We have a hectic two weeks now and will be covering about 1700 miles by train as we now visit the Taj Mahal in Agra, Jaipur, Udaipur, Mumbai and end up in Goa for a relaxing week on the beach.
That's it for now. All future posts will be shorter, as this has taken another chunk out of my budget in paying to use the Internet.
