Delhi: to Tout or not to Tout

We arrived at 3am in Delhi on Saturday morning. After our ride had a flat tire on the side of the highway at 4am we finally made it to our hotel at 4:30am and crashed. Getting our train travel booked was a priority though so we were up again just a few hours later to tackle New Delhi Train Station.

OMG that place is confusing! The first person we ran into was one of the imfamous "touts" who physically stopped us from finding the legitimate tourist information office and tried to direct us to some dodgy "official" train booking office. We were expecting something like this to happen but he was far more aggressive than anticipated. Quickly fleeing the scene we proceeded to wander around the train station following signs that all seemed to contradict each other. We finally found the real tourist information office only to find that we then needed the famed Trains At A Glance timetable book. After we found the book selling office and made our way back to the tourist information office things proceeded suprisingly smoothly.

Several other backpackers from all over the world gave us some helpful tips on things to do and places to see as we started filling out the many forms required to book tickets. We have a busy schedule to say the least! By the looks of things we're going to spend about half our time on trains - 3,500km in 21 days. But every trip we wanted to make was available and booked within three hours of arriving at the station. The most remarkable thing though is the price. We attempted to book our tickets through a travel agent in Australia who quoted us $3,500 (including plane flights for legs that supposedly didn't have train links). Booking in Delhi cost $186.

The woman who booked our trips was really nice and very helpful and seemed to appreciate that we had taken the time to do our own research and fill out the forms correctly. She even gave us a good tip for our first meal in Delhi at Bangla Sweet House.

Dehli is as overwhelming as everyone says it is so it's living up to its reputation (for heat as well). The good news though is that you can usually tell who is genuinely helpful and who is trying to scam you blind.

After two days in Delhi my shoes are shiny clean thanks to Raj and Ricky, who hang out near our hotel at Ram Nagar. We've become friends with a great auto-rickshaw driver/tour guide, Mohammed, who spent a few hours on Sunday taking us on a whirlwind tour of every major tourist attraction (if only to photograph from the outside). We're meeting up with him again this morning, although I think we're just going to have him drop us off at a cinema so we can catch a Bollywood movie (most museums and attractions are closed on Mondays).

The food has been great, although we've been pretty cautious about where we eat in an effort to avoid the infamous "Delhi Belly."

Scorecard after 2 days:
Delhi Belly - 0
Touts - 3 close calls and a million and one immediate brush-offs
Meals - 4 (we're still getting the hang of finding clean places to eat)
Auto-rickshaws - 3
Cricket conversations - 30+ (Ricky Ponting is the most popular Aussie cricketer over here; not surprising considering he's on top of the world rankings)
In-room fires - 1 (our A/C blew up yesterday afternoon)
Shoe shines - 2

Tomorrow: Jaipur.

DM