Day 1 – The trip begins

The post-departure airport scrum welcomes us to India and having wrestled through the crowds it's not long before we have left the taxi touts behind and we are on our way into Delhi.

Delhi is everything I imagined – crazy traffic, honking horns and cars driving the wrong way down one-way roads.

There’s also the countless beggars lining the streets. It’s sobering when stopping at traffic lights and women and children are knocking desperately on your window for money from their rubbish-strewn roadside homes. A jarring reminder of how lucky we are in the West and how different life is for a someone working in a PR agency in London compared with an average Indian living and working in Delhi. It’s moments like these, uncomfortable as they may be, that really put life in perspective. The lesson’s been learnt, and it’s a lesson that I have been taught countless times. It’s just difficult to know what the answer is.

A stop in at a travel agency, a hotel booking gone wrong and we eventually find ourselves in an alternative hotel down a busy side street. The hotel is fine enough – they’ve managed to install a flat screen TV but forgotten to paint the walls and the cold water trickles out of the shower. It’s difficult to complain, however, seeing the poverty from the bedroom window.

We crashed at the hotel for a couple of hours and then headed back off to the same travel agency, walking out thirty minutes later having booked a six-day private driver around some parts of Rajasthan I have of and many I haven’t.

A quick trip to India gate (an Indian version of the Arc de Triumph) and then for a vegetarian curry in an isolated restaurant square somewhere in sprawling New Delhi with not a sniff of beer in sight (the start of a detox perhaps?). Veggie curries and water / masala tea from now on.

By nine we were dead, it was cold and we needed to sleep. The days are pleasant, like a summer’s day in England but as the sun goes down the temperature plummets and we were grateful for our December London winter wear.

Tomorrow we leave Delhi and head south to Agra – home of the Taj Mahal.

PS Writing this at 5:30 in the morning with Islamic call-to-prayer drifting over the city.

PPS Interesting to wake up on the plane as we flew over a cloudless Afghani morning – the mountains, deserts and opium fields reminiscent of many a News at 10 report.