After leaving our guesthouse at McLeod Ganj- (and realising too late that we had accidentally paid for an extra nights stay which was annoying but only cost £5 so can't really complain!) we clambered aboard our "deluxe" bus to Chandigargh. We soon found out that it was most definitely not deluxe- Gwenno was stuck to the seat by some chewing gum someone had kindly left and there was a very distinct smear of vomit on the window. Despite this we had no choice but to battle through and hold our noses for the 8 hour journey in the searing heat of the day. When we arrived back in Chandigargh at 10pm we were confident about where we needed to go and asked a tuk tuk driver for a price. While he was thinking of a hugely inflated price up for the westerners another guy to his side shouted "100 rupees", we knew that this was already inflated but our guy wasn't happy as he probably wanted to start a bit higher and he bashed the guy right in his jugular. We thought that this was slightly over the top and more drivers from the group started to poke him and threw his turban on the floor. At this point we walked away, not wanting to get a ride with any of them and picked up a tuk tuk from the main road. By the time we got to the hotel it was late and we were thankful that we had pre-booked a room so we could sleep!
We had given ourselves a full day to finish seeing Chandigargh and the next morning when we stepped outside we were hit with a wall of heat- after spending so long in the refreshingly cool Himalayas we had forgotten how hot it was getting in the lowlands. First off went to the Le Corbusier museum which was quite interesting but didn't have as much info as we had expected. It was housed in the old architects office and it was amazing to think that Corb and his team had designed the city from the rooms that we were wandering around.
We then took a bicycle rickshaw to the University district to see some more of the famous Corb buildings. We thought that this mode of transport might be a less noisy alternative to the motorised tuk tuk but we soon felt quite guilty that a skinny Indian man was cycling us across the city in the blistering heat of the midday sun! Ben considered offering to pedal for a while but we didn't want to offend the guy so ended up giving him a decent tip instead. When we got to the campus the next challenge was finding the buildings and India being India meant that this wasn't going to be easy. It took 3 hours to find the two buildings we were looking for and this was after going into the university library, asking about 10 security guards and an popping into a local eye hospital for advise. By the time we had seen the buildings we were worn out and returned to the hostel for a much needed shower and relax - catching up on a strange detective series we got slightly addicted to in Australia and NZ. As it was out last night in Chandigargh we decided to go for a meal to one of the poshest restaurants run by an Indian celebrity chef. We well and truly filled our boots with amazing lamb chops, goat curry and cocktails. All this amazing food came to less that £30 and we were well impressed!
The next morning we did a little bit of shopping in the centre whilst waiting around for our flight, the pound/rupee exchange rate meant everything was a bargain and denim was seriously cheap - the favourite part of our shopping trip being in a Levi's where a shop assistant said to Ben 'those jeans are good and stretch in the knee so that you can do the locomotion'. Ben wasn't particularly looking for a pair of jeans to dance to Kylie in but it's good to know that the jeans have it in them if required! We had noticed that the air was a little smoggy and hazy but didn't really think much of it as we went to collect our bags for the airport. As we arrived at the airport we were told that all flights were cancelled due to poor visibility and that we could either wait 2 days for a flight or get transferred onto the Delhi-Mumbai flight. We knew that if we waited around we would miss out on seeing Mumbai so we changed our flight and jumped in a taxi with some other people that had changed their flight. It was really frustrating to know that a 3 hour journey was going to turn into a much longer one but we are by now used to slow journeys and hanging around in airports so we settled in for the journey ahead.
Little did we know at this point that one of our companions was in fact a Bollywood music producer from Luton. He seemed like a nice enough guy but is apparently quite famous in India and our taxi drive couldn't stop singing at him (we assume he was after a Bollywood contract!) which was mainly quite entertaining as he was so bad but also a bit worrying when his eyes weren't on the road!
When we arrived in Dehli 5 hours later we asked whether we could get an earlier flight as the one we had been transferred to wasn't for another 4 hours. There was another flight in an hour but there was now a problem with our tickets- we had been transferred onto a flight to Jaipur. This took a long time to get sorted with the attendant clearly thinking we were lying about our original flight. We were eventually allocated seats and given tickets and proceeded to the departure lounge. Just as we were celebrating getting onto the earlier flight with our friends from the taxi, a flight attendant asked to see our tickets and took Ben's from him asking; "where is your ticket?". At this point Ben was not happy and told the attendant that he was not happy with the Kingfisher Flight service ( in slightly more colourful language) before his ticket was thrown back at our friend. He translated what had happened and it turns out that there was a Robinson that didn't turn up for the flight and there had been some confusion, when the attendant realised his mistake he threw the tickets rather than apologise. We then managed to board the plane and just when we thought it was all going to be ok there was a man sat in Ben's seat and lo and behold Ben was double booked! Luckily there was a spare seat elsewhere for Ben (not business class unfortunately) but the final straw came when the food was distributed and Ben lowered his tray to find that it was hanging off. This meant that the eating of the hot bland plane food was a race against time before it ended up on his lap! We landed in Mumbai just 4 hours later than originally planned with a quick trip to the International airport to pick up some left luggage and a taxi to the hostel ( which was stopped by the police for a nosey) and we were finally at our destination by 1am! Hurray - unfortunately we had an internal room with only a fan for cooling - we felt like a couple of roast pigs by the morning!!