After 24 hours with no sleep, we finally got to bed in Delhi. We are staying at the Imperial Hotel, which is an old English-style hotel. Beautiful place with 7 acres of garden.

We hit the ground running the next morning with a full day private tour of old and New Delhi. Our guide, "Him", took us to Jama Masjid, which is the largest mosque in Delhi, then Gandhi's cremation site, the red fort, India Gate and Humayun's tomb.

Our favourite part of the day was walking through the markets in Old Delhi. The traffic is as insane as you would expect, with tuk-tuks, buses, trucks, cars, motorbikes and pedestrians all dodging the cows and dogs all over the roads.

Him took us to a spice market which was once the most prominent in the world, and through narrow streets with braid and fabric vendors in tiny shops.

We stopped for lunch at a restaurant where we enjoyed Kingfisher beer and Chicken Tikka Masala. Lidia had dal, still a little apprehensive of eating meat. I'm eating everyting that isn't nailed down.

We finished the day at a step-well, which is a 20 metre hole in the ground where the locals sit on the steps leading down to what used to be a well where the locals would bathe and get their water. It is now a hang-out for young people and not usually on the tourist track, which means that we were the only westerners there.

After getting back to our hotel, we got ourselves ready to go out for a dinner party. Irene and Alan had put us in touch with their friend, Bill who has known Alan for 37 years. Bill had arranged a driver to pick us up at 8:00 and after jumping in the car, we quickly realised that the driver couldn't speak English and we didn't know Bill's real name. Yep, real seasoned travellers we are. We were basically in a car with a strange, non-English speaking Indian whose employers name we didn't know and we had no idea where he was taking us. Bill had mentioned the golf club, but half an hour after passing the golf club we realised it wasn't our final destination.

We started wondering if we were actually being kidnapped for ransom, with visions of being sold into the sex trade, and after an hour on the road, we entered a gated community. The driver had to stop and ask for directions twice and we were really wondering what we had gotten ourselves into.

Eventually we stopped in front of a huge apartment and were ushered into the living room where we were greeted by a bunch of people and servants. We were very relieved when one of the men told the others that we were friends of Alan's. When I heard the word "Alan" I knew we were in the right place.

It turns out that, rather than dinner at the golf club, we were the honored guests of Bill and his friends. The host and owner of the house, Sadeev was incredibly hospitable and we had a fantastic night. I was plied with whisky for the whole evening, the whisky to soda ratio steadily increasing until they were serving me straight whisky, and was told of Alan's legendary drinking exploits, my efforts apparently paling in comparison.

Dinner was ordererd in and we had a fantastic meal, which was served around 11:00pm. At this stage, Bill was rather sozzled and became more and more affectionate as the evening progressed. I have never received more kisses and hugs from a man in my life, and both Lidia and I were shown plenty of loving. At one stage Bill was hugging me from behind while I sat at the table and proceeded to enter into a domestic with his wife, Ranee over some misunderstanding about a golf trip. An awkward moment ensued where Bill told Ranee to shut her clap-trap while hanging around my neck and I had no idea where to look.

Awkward moment over, I stood up to move into the lounge and knocked my chair over, breaking the top off it. Sadeev had just been showing us his 600 year old Chinese vases and I had a terrible thought that the chair I broke was probably once sat in by Genghis Khan and was priceless, but Sadeev was very gracious and I stumbled my whisky-soaked body into the lounge to have a goblet of cognac thrust into my hand.

Needless to say, by the time we left I was completely stonkered and we arrived back at the hotel at 1:00am. We had to be up at 6:15 for our 5 hour trip to Ludhiana, so needless to say we were wrecked the next morning.