Day 1: DehliAfter on board Continental flight for 14+ hours, we arrived in the Delhi Indira Gandhi (DEL) Airport at 21:05 local time, 50 minutes after the planed 20:15 arrival time. The plane was, like many things in India as we were told, "fashionably late". We purchased a Sim Card from Airtel at the airport, our cell phone number for the two weeks after that was: +91-99-1016-7428. It was quite helpful having a cellphone around, as we mostly booked our hotels on the fly, and we found out that calling on the phone often gave us more flexibility and better bargaining power in getting "summer" or "multi-nights" discounts compare to emailing or asking in person. The Hotel Star Paradise is about 25km from the airport, centrally located, only 2 min walk from the New Delhi Train station (Tel: +91-11-5154-1390). The ride from the airport was interesting to say the least. Cars are mostly compact city type, with many compact vans, which reminded us of the "MianDi" in Beijing in the late 80s and early 90s. The cars are mostly Tata branded, India made, few are Honda City, and Toyota Corolla, and we even occasionally found Mercedes on the roads. The road seems to be well kept outside the city. Car horns are generally used as brakes, just as we read about...in fact, many cars and trucks have "sound horn" written on the back. What was interesting was that the intersections are mostly round-abouts, which easily creates the illusion that we were driving in circles :o) The city limit could be inferred by the "no car horn" sign on the sides of the road. The road condition improves notably, with higher curbs, and less litter. The major roads were all lined with trees, which Jike liked a lot. Comments of city and streets are by the photos we took. For the other days of the trip, we plan to put three highlights of the day, hotel recommendation and let our photos tell the rest of the story. Hotel evaluation: |