Delhi

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Last stop: Delhi. We had four nights and three days in the capital city, with one of those days to be spent in Agra (Taj Mahal).

We arrived in Dehli sort of bracing ourselves for craziness -- everything we had heard about Delhi was that it was more loud, more busy, more dirty, more scam artists, and so on. But we were pleasantly surprised to land in a modern city with wide, tree-lined streets, cars obeying traffic rules, no honking (fine-able offense), no talking on cel phone while driving (also fine-able), paved sidewalks, and not a cow in sight!

We spent a full day with a private tour guide seeing the many many sights Dehli has to offer: the Red Fort, the Friday Mosque (biggest mosque in India), the Qutb Minar (oldest mosque in India), an unbelieveable Disney-esque modern Hindu temple, the site of Ghandi's ashes and the site where he was shot, and several other impressive places.

We spent a day in Agra, the city that once was the capital city, and that hosts the Taj Mahal and the millions of tourists that it attracts. As we'd been assured it would, the Taj was incredible, amazing, awe-inspiring. It is positioned on a hill above a river so that there is nothing behind it except a backdrop of blue sky. The image is exactly symetrical and identical from whichever side you view it. When it was built, there was a 3 km ramp built for the elephants to march up, to take materials to construct the top of the dome. Unbelievable. An incredible resource investment.

From Delhi, we flew 15 hours, directly to Chicago. And so it ended.

My final word: It was worth it.

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