Intro to India

Tuesday 2nd October

The past few months have been the busiest and most expensive months of our lives. We bought a house, spent three months completely refurbishing it (well, three rooms and my dad did most of it but still), oh and we decided to get married. It has been quite the journey getting me down the aisle but we got there in the end and on Saturday the 29th of September, we got married!

Obviously the best part of getting married is 1. the cake and 2. the honeymoon and so, we are off on a three week trip around the Golden Triangle and Rajasthan. It’s a trip that Rory has always wanted to do and as his lovely accommodating wife (who got her own way with pretty much everything in the house) I happily agreed.

And so, today we travelled from Belfast to London and on to Delhi where we took the subway to the beautiful Claridges Hotel. Located in a leafy area of New Delhi, the hotel is just minutes from the Ghandi museum. Today is his 149th birthday so the museum was closed to the public but we got a glimpse of his assassination site before moving on to the Lodhi Gardens.

Dehli’s loveliest escape was the site of two villages until 1936 when the wife of the British Resident had them cleared and a garden created to remind her of home. The park contains 15th century tombs and mosques and we really enjoyed the walk. I was genuinely surprised at how clean and tidy this part of the city is. I was also seriously impressed by the wildlife - even in this small city park we saw a vast number of birds, including peacocks, squirrels, monkeys and even a little lizard who was in the process of polishing off a cricket.

From here we went to Safdarjang’s Tomb. This mid-eighteenth century tomb is an example of Mughal architecture and I liked that it looks like a less fancy Taj Mahal. At this point my groovy hiking sandals were started to ruin my feet so we gave up, got a tuk tuk back to the hotel and lazed about for the rest of the day.

The hotel bought us up some roses, wine and chocolate cake and while the wine isn’t much use and we can’t bring the flowers with us when we leave tomorrow, we had a good go at the chocolate cake while watching HBO – something that we did when we visited Thailand all those years ago! We finished off the evening with our first Indian meal and I didn’t even get sick – one day down, just another three weeks to go!