The good (Varanasi) the bad (Delhi) and the downright awful (Delhi Hotel)

Two stops in India - Varanasi and Delhi.

We arrived in Varanasi completely unaware that we were arriving on the holiest festival of the year in the holiest place in the world! Our taxi driver come tour guide come general fixer (Ramji) insisted on giving us 5 minutes to check in at our hotel so he could take us straight down to the Ganges for the festival of Divali. This is where one of the gods had asked the monkey king to rescue his wife who had been kidnapped. On her return, the people celebrated with a festival of lights, and then after that the gods came to Varanasi to celebrate with their own festival of lights. Varanasi is the only place that really can celebrate the gods festival. There were literally millions of people there - 6 million had bathed in that part of the Ganges that morning. The whole place was lit up for several miles along the river bank and it looked amazing. We got a boat ride along the Ganges from where you could see all along the festival site.

A privellige to see.

After a flying visit to Varanasi we headed to Delhi. Why oh Why oh why???

We had been nervous about getting ill in India so we booked into a 4star government hotel with lots of facilities so that we could just chill out in the hotel, swim, eat all our meals there etc, and wait for our connecting flight to Japan. Turns out most of the facilities were closed for renovation, the whole place was on emergency power, almost every member of staff seemed to have some scam or other going and we didn`t avoid getting food poisoning either. We did however manage to foil the cashiers apparant attempt to steal 300 rupees  from our travellers cheque exchange. A couple of days of fighting over the bathroom later we were relieved to get our flight to Tokyo.