A flavour of the Orient
Rai & Stephie in Asia

After a quick pitstop in Kuala Lumpur to fix the lovely guitar and fix my long beard and share beers, cigars and good sushi with some old friends we headed all excited to Delhi for the next leg of the adventure: 3 to 4 months in the Himalayas (India, Bhutan, Nepal) as well as the delta of Bangladesh...

Delhi a city of 15 million or more people is actually a really fascinating place once you start discovering some of the nooks and crannies. Its brilliantly congested with rickshaws, street sellers, cows and confused backpackers. One of our main goals for the next 48 hrs was finding a train ticket towards the Himalayas. Standing between us and a train ticket were the famous TOUTS of New Delhi Railway station. We had been repeatedly warned of the problem by the guide books, mr julen ...The mission would be to find the Booking Office for Foreign Tourists apparently located on the 1st floor of the railway station....alll confident we arrived at the station and within a matter of minutes I got approached by a friendly looking official with a nice professional ID card who insisted that the office had closed down and we had to go to nearby Connaught Place. Despite Stephie repeatedly insisting on having a closer look at the station I got "swept away" by the official and before I knew I was on a rickshaw with a very disapproving Stephie next to me. And i felt like one big idiot when we arrived at our destination and realised we had been directed to a fake office. In fact there are more than 40 identical tourist information offices and only one is real hahaaaaaa. 30 minutes later looking red faced we were back at the station and sure enough Stephie found the booking office within seconds......Inside the queue looked like a big curly snake but at least we had sofas to sit on and the touts were gone gone gone....

With two trains tickets on the Shatabdi Express to Kalka for next day we headed to Old Delhi for some good fun exploring. The highlight was seeing the Jama Masjid mosque, the biggest one in India. The mosque was specially lit for Ramadan with families forming circles in the courtyard to have Iftaar at the end of the days fasting. Once the evening prayers were given the food stalls outside the mosque suddenly filled up with people...quite a claustrophic experience !

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