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!

Winter Weekend in La Molina

Living in the beautiful, sunny city that we do has so many benefits. We love the mild seasons, and how the air gets a bit chillier in the winter months, but we can still rely on our daily dose of Vitamin D. However, every winter, Devin feels a bit sad that we don't have an "authentic" winter in Barcelona. Thankfully, we are only a quick drive away from the mountains, and can choose to go to the snow if we want to! For Devin's birthday in January, we celebrated with a surprise weekend in a mountain apartment in La Molina, Spain.

We spent the weekend with our good friends driving through the mountains, took a snowy walk through the woods, and went to the natural hot springs that are common in this area. We spent the evenings cooking and playing games by the fireplace. It was a refreshing weekend, and we are so grateful to live in a place with such diverse scenery so easily accessible.

We sampled different craft beers while cooking our Friday night pizza!

Asia, Stop 7: Chiang Mai

The last stop on our SE Asia trip was Chiang Mai. This city was unexpectedly fun due to the backpacker-friendly culture and the accessibility of so many ancient temples. Every street corner seems to have its odd little cafe or trendy youth hostel, and many restaurants have highly decorated gardens and interesting twists on typical Thai food. The expat community is very large, and it is quite common to hear English. Yet amidst the international mix, there there are all the signs of a very ancient and very religious culture. We participated in something called "Monkchat", in which we were able to converse with the local monks. They are trying to learn English, so they could practice their language skills, and we were able to ask them questions about Buddhism and their beliefs and experiences. We loved gaining understanding about the practice of Buddhism while observing it all around us!

We stumbled upon several open street markets. We were tempted to buy everything, but we had no room in our backpacks, so we had to practice some self control. We did, however, partake in street food! It was all insanely cheap and incredibly delicious.

We took a cooking class here, as we love Thai food, but don't often make it at home. We chose a class that let you choose which items from the menu you wanted to make, so we could make different things and have a wider variety of recipes to take home! To start the class, the chef drove us to one of the markets and took us shopping for fresh local ingredients, explaining to us what each item was... some of which we had never heard of nor had any idea of the flavor. The entire group was amazed at the potency and uniqueness of the various spices and vegetables we were collecting and sampling throughout the market.

Once back at his kitchen, we were all put to work peeling, chopping, smashing and grinding. We learned that "curry" isn't a particular spice, as is often thought; curry is any mixture of spices typically found in the Asian world.

We made several dishes including spring rolls, pad thai, penang curry, noodle soup, and of course, mango sticky rice. Devin made his extra spicy with the abundance of hot peppers laying about the table.

A highlight of our time in Northern Thailand was traveling outside the city into the hills where there was an elephant preserve. Many tourists like to ride elephants, but we learned that those operations typically do not treat the elephants very well, and it can seriously hurt them, especially the younger ones. Instead, we opted to go with a company that rescues elephants from the abusive tourism, and instead allows you to feed, bathe, and play with them. After learning to feed them bananas and sugar cane, we gave them a mud bathe, and walked down to the river to wash them. This actually turned into a full mud fight between all the participants, and made for a very memorable day! 

 Once we were in Northen Thailand, we realized that the region has a lot more to offer than we had time to cover in our three days there. We would love to go back to Chiang Mai and do more hiking and exploring of the surrounding mountainous areas, as well as enjoy more of what is a super trendy and quaint city. 

Technically, Chiang Mai wasn't our last stop, as we spent one day in Bangkok before flying back to Barcelona. Although Bangkok has it's famous temples and attractions, we really weren't too excited about navigating a huge city. We used our time in Bangkok to just rest, went to a movie in the theater,  and shopped at a 37-acre market. We don't feel like it actually counted as being in Bangkok, as we mostly hid from the madness of the city.

Our time in SE Asia was like a sampler platter, we have tasted a bit of different areas and scoped out the scene. It definitely wet our appetite for more, and now have a better idea of where and what to concentrate on the next time we go! We loved each place that we went and appreciated the differences between them all as well. This part of the world is beautiful in every way - incredible scenery, genuine people, delicious flavors, and fascinating culture. We can confidently say that we will be back!