Delhi

We're in Delhi. The hotel room is small, dark, cold and expensive...but clean(ish) which makes it one of the better places to stay in the Pahar Ganj area of Delhi. Despite several emails and a phone call to confirm, our hotel could find no record of our booking and would not believe we had one until we printed out their email responses. Still, the shouting's over and we're all friends now (as is the Indian way). The main bazaar in Pahar Ganj is reminiscent of Khao San road in Bangkok, albeit much filthier. Hassle is fairly constant from touts, shop keepers, drug dealers, rickshaw drivers and beggars, but we are fairly good at deflecting them by now. We actually quite like Delhi - Connaught Place in the centre of New Delhi is a lovely, spacious, modern, clean, grassy area to sit in the sunshine and watch the world go by. There's loads of great shops with bargains galore and equally good restaurants and bars nearby. Old Delhi is perhaps the area that earns the capital city its terrible reputation for overcrowding and squalor, with an obscene amount of people, rickshaws, taxis, motor bikes and cyclists it provides an extreme example of India.