The madness that is called India

We arrived in Delhi at 2am local time, and after waiting a very long time for our luggage found that the hotel pickup was nowhere to be seen. So we got a minivan taxi driven by a man who thought that red traffic lights were a challenge, rather than an instruction to stop. Our hotel was okay, with wildly overattentive staff who would come into our room at all times of day and night offering us tea, food, tours, laundry etc. if we didn't keep it actually locked.

We decided to go to a nice quiet museum on the first day, to ease in gently. But first we were hungry, and got off the metro at connaught place, which had several nice sounding restaurants listed in the guidebook. Unfortunately the very first thing we saw was mcdonalds, and the next thing we knew, we were on the outside of a veggieburger and a paneer wrap. In the evening we went to the Red Fort in Delhi's old town. There was a sound and light show explaining the history of the fort, which was speculacularly lame but actually quite informative. Then our taxi driver Vinod took us to a restaurant where we had Dal makhani and muttar paneer, a meal we have managed to eat on every continent so far.


We booked Vinod to drive us into Rajasthan so the next day we drove to Mandawa, which is in an area called Shekhaweti famous for the frescoed buildings. The village was full of old buildings with paintings all over them in various states of disrepair. The pictures were of gods and maharajas and trains and people on bikes and whatever else they could think of. The next day we went on to Bikaner, via the rat temple. The story is that someone turned all the storytellers' souls into rats as revenge for something or other, and the rats live in this temple and people come and actually pray to them. It was quite quite disgusting, rats running round all over the place AND they make you take your shoes off.

We spent last night on a camel safari in the desert quite close to the Pakistan border. We rode camels out into the dunes, then the drivers cooked us a meal and we slept out under the stars. It was fabulous. We watched the sun rise, then rode back to civilisation. Now we are in Jaisalmer, which is famous for its huge fort, one of the 100 most endangered monuments in the world. It is very hot and very dusty here, but I like it.