Back to Delhi

We have returned to Delhi today, travelling by plane from Southern Goa in order to reduce time, which would cut short our time in Nepal. The upside of this is that it only took us 2 and a bit hours to travel what would otherwise have seen us on train and bus for about 3 days! The downside being we're both now unbelievably tired as a result f having to get up at 3am this morning in order to cach the flight.
We arrived in Delhi and felt pretty confident as seasoned "Delhi Wallahs", striding into the train station with all the intent of a local. However, this is where our easy day ended, and Indian Beuracracy (Sp?) made a laughing stock of our intended plans.
Basically, we wanted to get a train from New Delhi station at 1:30 to Agra. Pretty simple we thought. Not a chance! The guy we spoke to in the foreign tourist ticket office appeared completely incapable, although obviously we believed him when he said that we could not book a ticket for travel today in this office. Instead we had to mix with the Indian massses in a scene reminiscent of a rugby match. So we lugged our packs downstairs and started to "queue" with everyone else in the exact location w were told to do so. After 20 minutes of scrummaging with the locals (In which Shonah exclled, managing to strategically block would be queue jumpers with her bag and, at times, with the use of elbows!) However, upon talking to the ticket guy, we were told that we could not buy tickets here either! At this point the heat was overwhelming and the sheer number of people made being in the station an awful experience. But we duly followed the ticket man's instructions and went to ANOTHER queue, even longer than the last and even hotter!! We "queued" here for another 20 minutes, amid the flurry of sweaty elbows, heads and ladies sat on the floor. We got served andmanaged to get a second class unreserved ticket - I would imagine this to be similar to the kind of transport they use in England to take animals to slaughter. Stil, at leas we had a ticket!! Just as we were about to leave the station, we met a french couple we had been talking to previously, before the whole ticket debacle, and she told us she had managed to book a seat via the aforementioned foreign tourist ticket office. We were not happy!! Marching up the stairs with conforntatiion on the mind, we entered the office only to discover a peacful, cool environment with air conditionng on. All thoughts of any confrontation diminished, we dumped our bags and sat down andexplained our situation to another ticket man. No problem he said, and proceeded to book a ticket for us in seconds! We paid our money and sat, relieved, sweaty, hungry and thirsty in the office. We'd done it! Haha.

Anyway, we get the train at 5:45 headed to agra, for a sunrise viewing of the Taj Mahal. Should be good! We're banking on getting some sleep on the train though, as neither of us can keep our eyes open!!

Anyway, hope all is well at home! Will update at some point with news and pictures of the Taj Mahal!

Mum Tulip - Did you get the mothers day mesage on the answer phone? Hope you had good day!

Love to all,
Rich and Sho