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Monday : sunny
We had quick donut and croissant breakfast, then checked out. Had the easiest barter with a cabbie, then we were standing in the airport lines before we knew it.
The airport was packed today, completely different to the last time we were here. At least the Nepali knew how to use lines unlike the chinese, and the damn French. They must think they're too important to use the lines, they love to push in. It will be interesting to see how they behave in their own country.
We boarded the plane and it was a good short flight, under two hours.
We had our own headrest tellies, I watched kung fu panda II, very funny. I got speaking to the Englishman seated next to me on our decent, he was on his way back home. He said it was only an 7 hour flight back to England from Delhi, that's so close! It took us 8 hours to fly directly to Saigon.
We landed in Delhi, and the airport was great. Brand new and very clean, then we got some local money and took a cab to our hotel. Even the roads are new, apparently Delhi had a bit if a going over for the 2010 Commonwealth games.
We checked into our hotel room, and it's very nice, we had a couple hours of doing nothing. Then we went down to organize our movements.
It was a massive afternoon of organizing, we started off at the hotel tour desk. Then the fella drove us to his actual office, he was having computer problems at the hotel. It took over an hour to drive there because of the traffic, we abandoned the first car walked the busy streets for awhile then got picked up by another car. There were a lot of children begging at the traffic lights, they would come up to the car window and knock wanting money. They probably would have a better chance if they cleaned car windows or something, like what bums do back home.
It took a lot of convincing but we did some number crunching, and it turned out that it would cost $50-$100 less to travel around by ourselves. Than to pay for a driver to drive us around Delhi tomorrow to see all the sights. Then to drive us to Jaipur, Ranthambore (it's where a Tiger sanctuary is) then to drive us to Agra (Taj Mahal). The package also included two overnight train tickets for Kim and I to Varanasi (Ganges) then onto New Jalpaiguri (Khangchenzonga) third highest mountain in the world! All accommodation and breakfasts are included too. So it will be good not to have to find hotels and to not have to chase up tickets for bumpy buses and trains for once, an for and extra $50 why not.
By the time we left the tour office it was dark and time for dinner. We went to a nice roof top candlelit restaurant and had a good first meal in India, we had butter chicken and naan.
Back at the room we just used the wifi and watched some movies. It's going to be a long night, my cough is quite bad ATM. Delhi's air pollution is pretty shocking, it's the same as China's, hopefully it clears up out of the city in a couple days time.
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