The Golden Triangle Adventure - Delhi

The planning for this trip began back in April when our yoga teacher, the lovely Jo, announced she would be taking a group of her students to southern Goa for a 10 day yoga retreat. I got serious fomo & booked immediately. I then heard that Julie & Dana were adding on a Golden Triangle Tour, so I bravely asked if I could tag along. And here we are! We were slightly held up on our trip from Sydney as a once in 12,000 year volcano eruption occurred in Ethiopia, which resulted in volcanic ash being blown east across the Middle East to Delhi, our destination. So, as Cathay airlines did their due diligence, we were held up in Hong Kong airport for 12 hours with not much info and no comfortable sleeping spots available. We did our best with modern, yet extremely hard sleeping "slabs", definitely not designed for us. We did finally get away & I couldn't even stay awake for take off & managed to sleep for most of this sector. Got through rhe airport hoo ha & were met by our Delhi guide Sanjay & our lovely driver Yogish. We set off for our hotel & quickly discovered Delhi is nuts. Completely bonkers. The traffic - wow! Cars, tuk tuks, rickshaws & bikes all slide around each other, miraculously not hitting each other, accompanied by a cacophony of beeping horns, designed to alert other drivers you are coming through 🙄. Due to our late arrival, we couldn't get through everything on today's list, but we packed a bit in.
Bustling, busy streets of Old Delhi by foot and bicycle rickshaws.
A visit to the large red sandstone Jama Mashid Mosque, one of Asia's largest. There are lots of Muslims in Delhi - about 15% of the population, which is a big number.
Lunch at with a pleasant IPA brewed on site and some tasty Indian food. We were then taken to what looked like an old Art Deco..ish cinema, which was actually an emporium of carpets, jewellery, clothing, ceramics etc. It went on for ever over several story's. Quite fascinating & we managed to escape without a) doing too much damage to our spending money or b) taking any photos.
Next was more driving in peak hour traffic checking out monuments, and lots of government buildings which for some reason Sanjay thought we would be interested in.
Last stop was Gandhi Smitri, a memorial & museum dedicated to Mahatma Gandhi. Very interesting & poignant. He is still revered in India.
Gratefully dropped back to our hotel which is small & very adequate.Read more