India: Delhi Sites

When we have been asked, "How was India?" We are not quite sure how to answer. It was....intense. An adventure. A unique experience. It is hard to find adequate words to describe India.

Since words really do fail at accurately describing what we experienced in India, we will be letting pictures do most of the talking in the next few posts.We will give you just a basic idea of what our time included and our general timeline.

After arriving in New Delhi at 4AM (and getting no sleep at all on our two flights), we checked into our hotel and met with the hotel manager to ask our questions. We quickly figured out that traveling in India for only one week would be very difficult to do on our own. Because the country is so spread out, and we are so obviously tourists, attempting to go throughout the city with tuk-tuks and taxis would result in endless battles with drivers, lots of getting taken advantage of, and inevitable frustration. To maximize our time and our money, we learned that it made the most sense to hire a driver for the week. Our driver would take us everywhere we wanted to go and wait for us. We never had to search for a taxi, deal with the language barrier, or wonder if we were going to make it to our destination. Included in hiring the guide was daily driving to all the main sites, being taken to tourist-friendly restaurants, a personal guide for the Taj Mahal, the Fatehpur Sikri, and the city of Jaipur.

In this post, we will feature the pictures from the sites around New Delhi, and in following posts from Agra and Jaipur.

Here is a glimpse of our experience in Delhi!

Leaving Barcelona on a Sunny Saturday morning.

We arrived at our hotel in the dark, but once it was light, got a glimpse of our street, a common place for backpacking tourists to stay.

To fight the jetlag, we immediately started touring Delhi, starting with the Red Fort.

The Akshardham Temple was one of the most intricate and beautiful temples we saw all week. The level of detail in the temple and the surrounding gardens was so detailed that it was hard to believe it was all hand-carved, but indeed, it was!

Jetlag was getting the best of us, and we were all falling asleep in the car driving from site to site. This is the Lotus Temple, but the line was way too long for us to want to stand in to go inside. Our driver could tell we were all exhausted, so he offered to just get out and take a picture of it for us. We all happily agreed. :)

We barely stayed awake long enough to eat our first real Indian meal at 4pm, and then all collapsed into bed.

                                                                       -- Day 2--

We began our second day in Delhi with our driver and his wife, visiting the Laxminarayan Temple.

Sadly, we were not allowed cameras on the inside of this temple either.

Isa Khan Niazi's tomb

Humayun's Tomb

The Qutb Minar.

Ruins of the Quwwat-ul-Islam Mosque

We had a quick stroll through the Lodi Gardens, admiring a few structures like this one.

Our first street-side chai experience at the market. Doesn't get any more authentic than this!

Our first market experience. We didn't make any purchases in this one, but our driver began to coach us through how to approach the vendors to get the best deals.

This little guy is called a tuk-tuk. Had we been more brave, we would have been taking this mode of transportation everywhere. However, we enjoyed admiring them zooming through the streets, usually carrying what seemed to us like far too many people.

After two very packed days in very crowded Delhi, we set out for Agra. There was so much more to come!