India, five days later, has still got me stunned. The lack of personal space (both mental and physical) is like nowhere else I've experienced.

Restaurants, shops and cafes seem always busy, making lingering difficult; traffic squeezes unbelievably close together, whether moving or stationary; the streets seem full of people (rickshaw drivers, pedal rickshaw drivers, beggars, shop assistants, hashish / opium offerers, travel agents, suit agents, waiters, street food cookers, and other affiable, less easily identifiable offerers of aid) crying out

"Excuse me sir"!

Although I've been travelling for a while, to arrive in completely different area is always a fresh deluge; once again I am a novice. Perhaps after several years, it is possible to become a "hardened traveller", adapted to every possible location - but right now I feel whenever I arrive somewhere very new, I have to start my learning / hardening afresh. The plus side of this, and why I am in no rush to become a "hardened traveller", is that literally everything is fascinating again. I am like a baby, wanting to stare at and possibly chew at everything I can see and smell. Understanding, if it comes, will come later, now is just the rush of the unknown.

Indian food seems uniformly wonderful - I would eat all day if the heat would give me my appetite back. I've heard lots of complaints from other travellers about the food in India - too much salt, too spicy, not as good as Malaysian-Indian cooking - right now I can't explain any of them. And the vegetarian main components of flat bread, rice, lentils and vegetable curries taste considerably healthier than what I'm used to from England's Indian restaurants.

Each day, Gari and I have a breakfast of maybe a few chapatis and the black "makhini" dahl, then nothing until dinner time. The dry heat of Delhi is exhausting, and for the first few days we didn't drink even close to the amount of water we needed (probably influenced by stories of suspect/contaminated mineral water bottles), foolishly bringing on spells of sudden weariness. Today we are resting.

A unique aspect of being in India is how quickly one acquires employees.
There seems to be a large class of men in Delhi whose job is, it seems, to wait around and see if a rich person wants something done. In a hotel, carrying one's own bags or even switching on the room's air conditioning are all optional - a boy will be sent round to take care of it. Rickshaw drivers offer a free first journey, in the hope they will be hired as private drivers the next day. It is too hot for us to walk around Delhi's big distances, so at least some hiring is necessary - so far, let's just say some of our staff have performed better than others. It is a strange feeling to go for a stroll after dinner, knowing our ever-willing-to-serve rickshaw chauffeur is waiting by the car for our return. We paid him 450 ruppees (c. five pounds fifty) for about twelve hours driving and local information. Were I on a bigger budget, it would certainly be possible to hire a small team of bag carriers, errand runners and drivers.

I wonder if the urgency with which hotel "boys" and salesmen try to earn a some commission is partly due to the presence of such poverty in Delhi. We walked out one night from our hotel in the Karol Bagh area, the streets dark and bodies on the pavement. Indians (male) in little more than loin clothes, curled themselves on the road side and slept, sometimes one every few feet. By a construction site, ten workers slept in the open air, all close enough to touch chest to chest. We walked on past crumbled brick lots, a stream of ambiguous liquid under our feet. Several eyes in the darkness looked up and glinted - we couldn't see how many people were sleeping there, but decided we'd seen enough for the night. In the open we've seen men sleeping in impossible places - curled up on the flat top of a road side stone plinth, a surface far shorter than the sleeper's body. It is something beyond anything either of us have seen before on our travels.

At different times and places, but especially at night, the women of Delhi disappear. By day, the streets and shops are full of Indian women browsing and chatting - the air conditioned fancy eateries are full of pretty young things in western-style clothing - the same goes for the centre areas of Delhi Gate park in the evening. But as it gets dark, increasingly many streets in India's capital become men only. A street market of second hand clothes and bric a brac, stalls entirely staffed by men, shoppers entirely men. The little streets of Agra town at night, outside the main tourist area, the ratio was around 10 to 1, and the only women we saw were in mixed groups. I don't think we have met more than one woman in the tourist industry - hotels, travel agencies, shops are entirely male staffed. The one woman we have met was an apparently self employed Gujarati rug seller, working in the shade of the columns of Connaught Place.

It is very rare to see a male - female couple touching in Delhi; it is very common for men to walk holding hands. The latter is something that is still difficult to take onboard to our British eyes. There seem none of the homosexuality connitations that there would be at home - men walk sometimes just with one finger linked, or one sits with his friend's head dozing on his thigh.

After my first five days in India, I've seen several loud arguements, one fight (quickly broken up) and two traffic accidents. There is, however, one group that does scare the pugnacious men of Delhi into silence. One my train back from Agra, a sturdy tall transvestite entered the carriage, in a purple sari and long hair tied with a band. She strode towards the young man sitting opposite me and tapped him hard on the head twice, clapped her hands sharply in his face, and held out her hand for some money expectantly. He just looked away from her desperately, and she walked on, repeating her demands on each of the men of the carriage. In her wake, the young guys recovered some of their poise and started mimicking, but they had been unquestionably petrified at the time - remarkable for the seemingly ever dispute happy India.
I've since heard that these transvestites are eunuchs, who demand money, even disrupting weddings, on the threat of lifting up their saris and showing their mangled genitals. Gari and I saw a few more of them leaving India Gate park one night - one locked eyes with me, and harshly uttered something like "Cha cha cha!" (accompanied by a kind of biting gesture with her right hand) as we walked past. No saris were lifted however, on that occasion.

Gari and I went to Agra on Monday, to see the Taj Mahal. We had been advised to get there early - very good advice. At 7.30am Tuesday morning the gardens were deeply peaceful, the relatively small number of tourists (mainly Indian) walked quietly around the unearthly beauty of Shah Janan's tomb. To say more about the Taj is perhaps beyond my abilities - best to just say it is everything it is reputed to be.

Gari was keen to be photographed in the "Princess Diana pose".

Some more photos, the side of the complex, and between the sun.

By 9am the first of the tour groups were arriving; we took that as our cue to leave.

I love gazing on India; but I would like to be able to look away once in a while. At least here in Delhi, it feels impossible to slow down, impossible to chill out for an hour or so. Queues for train tickets or at a water filter inevitably become a shoving mass at the front - allow any space and and there is an Indian man who will slip / elbow in and nab it. Walking the lanes of the main bazaar area (where we are currently styaing), one fights for space on the road with lary rickshaws, unpredictable cows and a huge number of fellow pedestrians. And as tourists, we get approached with great regularity by salesmen, called to by taxi drivers and bothered by touts. India Gate park is a lovely place where each evening Delhite families come to relax - but it is harder for Gari and I to relax, as every few minutes someone comes over to sell us something - and saying no has little effect. Even the children selling balloons or begging have absolutely no fear of us - they stand near us asking again and again, or push their balloons/coconut slices/toys up to our faces. We still radiate the area of naifs, I suspect. I think the solution is to grow to view it all as a game, a joke that one has no choice but participate in. Getting angry seems to have little effect, at any rate.

The only place I have found to relax, on a suggestion from Gari, is the roof top cafe of our guesthouse in the early morning. At six thirty am, there were two others up, one reading, one sketching rooftops, the city was quiet. The horizontal light of the dawning sun was cool enough to sit in.

By 8.30am, the sun was too hot to write in, and the cafe area was full up enough of chatting groups that the appeal was fading. Getting up very early is I suspect going to be my escape from India.

Daniel, 10 August 2004, Delhi