Delhi

We Made it! We survived the first 9 hour flight to London OK, had a quick 2 hour layover and then the fatigue hit us about an hour into our 2nd 9 hour flight to Delhi. We slept so poorly trying to sleep sitting up with no leg room on the fight to London that after much consideration/planning/laughing hysterically we somehow managed to spoon across the 2 seats all pretzel like and slept like babies...so we both actually felt pretty good today.

Our driver we arranged through our hotel met us at the Delhi airport(sight for sore eyes) and brought us to our wonderful oasis in the middle of New Delhi. The air here is smoggy..kinda thick, mildly humid and smells rather polluted(but not as bad as I was warned about). I have a mild smoker's cough after about 12 hours in it( Delhi air is supposed to be so polluted that breathing it in each day is the equivalent of smoking 20 cigarettes) The traffic isn't as bad as I was expecting...crazy for sure, but on a scale of 1 to Cairo it is only a 4...at least all the cars so far have had seat belts! The Hotel is beautiful...it is a small guesthouse run by a very nice and helpful lady named Shukla...we were greeted at 6am with a delicious breakfast and chai tea (Just what we needed) and we are eating dinner here tonight too.

We got into our room at 10am, showered and decided to hire a Private driver for the day (since it is only about $20) and we hit 5 tourist sites: The red fort, Himalaya's Tomb, The Gandhi memorial where he was shot, Quinta Minor, and a huge mosque. We went hard from 11am to 4:30pm! Lot's of cool stuff to see and do but after 5 hours we started to tire so just headed back to the hotel about an hour ago to await our 7pm dinner.

So far we are loving India...Delhi has been fun and noisy! It will be nice to hit some of the smaller towns and escape all the honking and smog though. Tomorrow we are going to do a bit of shopping in the morning followed by some R&R by the pool in the afternoon before we have to head off for the train station to take our night train to Varanasi.

I got some great video of our plane spooning and a terrifying attempt at crossing 8 lanes of traffic(complete with screaming) but the computer here can't seem to upload them so I will try again elsewhere.

Sorry to hear about your snow situation....the weather here today was 30C. Loving it!