Day 1: Delhi — IndefinitelyOOO

Wow, this place can make you work. It's always worth it, though. Day 1 was brilliant.

Landed after 8 hours without really sleeping on the flight (watched Baby Driver; bit overrrated. Note to self: perhaps branch out into movie blogging - that's what the internet is missing) then nothing is straightforward.

Getting money out. Only Indian people can bring rupees into the country apparently so we have to deal with criminal airport exchange rates.
Getting SIM cards. Beauracracy and cost. This is a common theme of India. I still don't understand our tariffs and we're probably burning cash every time we open Google Maps, which is often.
Heat, noise, filth. Won't go into detail about this here as it's hardly new news but seriously, it has to be experienced to be believed. Traffic and driving. Just wow.

Delhi in summary; more than 25 million people living in each other's pockets. Better writers than I can describe it but the place boggles the mind.

It's not that any of this is particularly challenging individually, it's just that without any familiar points of reference you have no idea if you're doing things the right way and whether your instincts are correct. It'll come with time, I know but for now we're working hard to manage our naiivity and make sensible decisions. This is something that will get us in trouble shortly but I'll come to that in a bit.

Get to the hotel, The Prime Balaji Deluxe, picked for its proximity to the train station as we have a 6.00 am train the next morning. It's neither prime nor deluxe but that's as expected. We're not precious. Then, there's only one thing on the itinerary. We're in town for less than 24 hours and there's an international cricket match on.

For weeks before leaving I tried and failed to source tickets to the India vs New Zealand 1st T20. How hard should that be? Very hard, it turns out. One route requires an Indian mobile number. Another requires an Indian bank account. The rest seemed too dodgy to trust sending money to. In desperation, I turned to the Ploughmans CC message board, my former club ("C'arn The Plough!") and in a couple of days, our good, old friend Ashish ("Puffy", right arm fast, strike bowler, metronomic fourth stump line, legend) had done a job for me. Ash messaged to let me know that he'd got hold of a couple of tickets as a gift for my 40th birthday. Amazing. All I had to do was collect them from Rajat, an old classmate of his, all the way across town.

Leaving Helen to get her head down, I braced myself for a trip across the most alien place I've ever been. Turns out, I shouldn't have worried. After a twenty minute walk to the Metro station, stepping over unmentionable street horrors and choking on the smoke from burning trash, crossing the packed, Grand Prix startline roads arms up as if in surrender and eyes out on stalks, I descended into the bowels of the Delhi Metro. Which is brilliant. Modern, efficient, an absolute breeze. I could have been in Toronto or Copenhagen. Take that, bullshit Western preconceptions. After an hour of easy travel, I met Rajat in HUDA City, a shiny business district on the outskirts of the city. When you see The news profile Delhi as energetic, ambitious and forward-looking, its places like this I think they mean. Pick up the tickets, back to the hotel, quick turnaround and we're off to the cricket.

The hoary old cliche is that cricket is like religion in India. Yup, that's true. For context, India are a great short-format team but have never beaten NZ, arguably the best in the world. Adding extra spice, tonight's game was the farewell match of veteran left-armed Ashish Nehra, a native son of Delhi. This match is taken seriously..

The heart-in-mouth tuk tuk journey to the ground in early evening was quite the terrifying experience. There's no accompanying video as all our hands were occupied just trying to keep inside the rattling death trap while our driver leaned on the horn and rode the clutch through the busiest, most lethal traffic I've ever seen. Our journey ended abruptly a couple of miles from the stadium as some roads were closed and we were directed to duck through a fence and find our way through unlit streets following the sound of the crowd's cheers as their heroes were announced. Joining the thronging thousands, hooting and hollering, we crushed our way into the ground and through security. I knew the rules and hadn't brought water, recording devices or any of the other million things on the banned list but hadn't expected to be told my bag wasn't allowed either, even empty. "What do I do with it?" I asked and a short-tempered soldier indicated the rubbish-strewn pavement. Ok, then. Won't see that again.

Swept inside, clinging onto Helen, we and about a thousand others were turned away from our seats in the lower tier as it was too full. Trying to stay afloat in the human tide, we raced up three tiers of crumbling concrete stairway to the top level to find a couple of furious policemen shutting the gates against the screaming fans. Spotting an opening, Helen ducked under an arm and span past them and I followed, only to run into a soldier who laughed at our impudence and waved us on.

I'll leave my thoughts on T20 as a format for another day but in brief, India won handsomely under the floodlights and the crowd roared themselves hoarse throughout. We were on our feet for most if it, singing along with the infectious chants in the frenzied atmosphere; every mis-hit six and streaky four jubilantly celebrated as if we were watching a batting masterclass (we weren't.) The biggest cheers of the night were reserved for Hardik's incredible diving catch in the deep, coming moments after my wise pronouncements on how India are usually sloppy in the field. Typical.

Watching India in India was a real thrill and I'm hugely grateful to Ash for making it happen. We certainly finished our first, exhausting day on a high.

Which was fortunate as Day 2 would begin far less happily.

Day 2, in which we're stupid enough to get scammed and (just) smart enough to fix it.

We're doing most of this trip by train. We love the pace of travel and the people you meet. India's railway network is a monster, sometimes referenced as the biggest employer in the world. Millions of people rely on the huge rail network and it's vital to the running of the country. It's also complicated, creaky and - as with everything here - very bureacratic. Rail passes, reservations, PNR numbers, local quotas, foreign quotas - there's a lot to manage. We've done the research. We're prepared.

Up at 5.00am to leave plenty of time to catch the Shatabdi Express, our 6.00am train into Rajasthan. Walk to New Delhi station, weighed down like pack animals with all our gear (of course we've packed too much) and are held at security while an official checking tickets tells us the train is cancelled but in 40 minutes there's another from Old Delhi station. We should try to catch that but need to go to head office to have our rail passes and reservations amended. So far, so inconvenient but still pretty plausible - every account we've read of Indian train travel features delays, cancellations and hanging around in offices replanning. We're directed to a taxi rank, licensed government cars not unlicensed tuktuks. You can probably guess what's going on here but in our defence, it's early, dark, we're tired, can't get phone signal and time is against us if we want to get to Pushkar. It's a major religious festival and tribal fair and we already know that the trains are packed - reservations sell out 100 days before travel.

Even so, this doesn't feel right and Helen goes to get more information from a completely different ticket checker who tells her the same thing. Disappointed but partially satisfied we head to the office where a very helpful travel manager brings up the rail website and shows us that every train is fully booked for the next week. Again, we know this is true so have to be open to other options. Other travellers arrive and confirm train cancellations. We settle on a car and driver to get us the eight hours to Pushkar at the cost a couple of hundred pounds. It's annoying but what choice do we have? We have a hotel booked and want to go to the festival. Payment is in cash, we don't have enough, we go to a cash point, forms are drawn up, we haggle over the cost and we're away.

Sat in the back of the car, we try to convince ourselves we've done well to rescue a bad situation and our journey is back on track but still it doesn't feel right.

A couple of miles down the road my data kicks in and I do some Googling. First result: "New Delhi station scam."

Mugs.

I'm fuming. Helen's fuming. I start to get... assertive.

"Turn. This. Car. Around."

A short time later we're back in the office which, now it's getting lighter, I see is more a travel agent than anything official. I spot the helpful manager, our eyes meet and the crafty bugger ducks into the public toilet opposite. I send one of his boys in to get him, and march into his private office to wait. I'm not particularly proud of what happened next but there was some glaring, some threats, some knuckles-on-desk looming and after a brief but tense encounter we've got all our cash back and are high-tailing it out of there.

True story: I should have twigged something was up when I said I was from London and was met with "Lovely jubbly!" Delhi Boy Trotter may have stitched us up but we emerged unscathed and smarter for the experience.

Directed by some genuinely helpful locals, we ended up at the official government tourist office and, although our train was long gone, arranged a car and driver at a perfectly reasonable price and with lovely Mantup behind the wheel ("I can drink a litre of whisky in the evening but never before driving. Only beer") we arrived at the stunning, airy Inn Of Seventh Heaven in the holy town of Pushkar by mid-afternoon. Our reward for an eventful day.

helens lovely face.jpg — *"The dos and do nots of Delhi"*

Day one – Delhi. Here is a city that takes no prisoners. If the aim was to venture a few steps into the unknown and abandon ‘the norm’ then I can safely say Delhi delivered.

Our ‘driver’ to Pushkar (where I now sit on the rooftop of our hotel, writing this first update on day 4) said to us ‘nothing is easy in India, anytime, for anyone’ and I would be inclined to agree based on our first 24 hours in Delhi.

To be fair to us and indeed India’s capital – housing 25 million permanently and then another 10m who come to work here – we knew we wouldn’t exactly be easing ourselves in gently, beginning as we did ‘up north’. But I suspect our mind-blowingly mixed experience in New Delhi, which four days on I now reflect upon ‘almost’ fondly… might well be the tale of quite a lot of our trip here. Because now I couldn’t think of a better page one of our journey.

Half a dozen hair raising tuk tuk rides (not necessarily to our chosen destination), my first rat sighting, the discovery of an excellent new snack and, thrillingly, an epic trip to New Delhi’s cricket stadium to see the 20/20 courtesy of our very generous friend Ash (himself from Shilong and indeed Jacko’s cricket club, Ploughman’s CC); which saw the home side hammer NZ for the first time ever (I’m reliably informed). And where I witnessed the best catch I have ever seen live – and you know I watch a lot of cricket ; -)

Hardik catches Guptill, to the crowd's delight

Day two – well day two was more mixed – with our first scheduled train journey on the famed Shatabdi Express morphing into a nonetheless eventful seven hour ‘taxi’ ride to our destination – Pushkar and the annual Camel Fair. As you know I am no stranger to a taxi but even this was a bit of a stretch for me… But I’ll let Jacko wax lyrical about that particular detour as at this point those early AM, New Delhi annoyances are a distant memory. And I am happy to keep them that way.