I Made It! Oct 2007

Just a quick note to let you know I arrived safely and have thrown myself straight into the Indian experience. I spent my first couple of days in Delhi, and met up with a friend of a friend who lives here and took me around the city at night. On my first night I went to a Muslim shrine, listened to some amazing music there, ate the best roadside kebab I've ever had, got driven around by a driver and ended up at a salsa night with some of Delhi's upwardly mobile young fashionistas, after which I followed them back to this bloke's flat where we danced around to tupac and jodeci. I got back to my hotel at 5am and had to wake the poor owner up to get in. I left Delhi a couple of days later and went to Agra where the Taj Mahal is. It's a spwarling dusty town with nothing much to offer aside from the amazing monuments and some excitable monkeys who were running around next to the Taj. Spent a few nights there but was glad to get out and back to Delhi to collect my backpack from my hotel.I've just come from sitting on the side of this wonderful lake, chatting to a local Indian maths teacher about life and women etc. I'm in a place called Nainital not far from the Nepalese border. It's a relatively quiet, peaceful and clean place where Indian's come on holiday. Used to be a retreat for all of the British toffs in the time of the Raj. I spent about 36 hours travelling to get here so a bit of peace and quiet is just what I need. I can't really explain how overwhelming this place is, but you can do things two ways from what I've seen; either get ripped off and be a typical tourist or dive headlong into the shit with the millions of people that surround you all the time. I chose the latter and it's been exhausting at times but also immensely pleasurable. I spent the whole night on a bus where I was the only foreigner and everyone just sleeps on eachother. We stopped at a roadside caf and had one of the best meals I've had here so far, but I had no idea where I was supposed to get off because the bus stopped at loads of places in the dark. Eventually I got turfed off the bus by the driver and put in a rickshaw with a few other disgruntled passengers. The driver had decided he was going a different direction from where we had paid for so I had to get off and take a rickshaw, then 2 taxis to get to my hotel. That was after a 4 hour train journey from Agra to Delhi in 2nd class, where a fight broke out and people were crammed into every available space. So...I'm staying in this quiet little spot for a few days to get my strength back ;)It's all about getting fuly involved. I've met so many wonderful people and they've all been Indian, but from different backgrounds, religions and cities. I'm trying to learn a little Hindi, which is going down well. I find that most of the tourists here leave a little to be desired, so I'm happy just floating around on my own for now...