Day 17 – Dehli – T & G Travels

Day 17 - Dehli

Sunday 16th August, 2026 - Dehli

Today was officially the first day of our new G Adventures tour of India, Nepal and Bhutan. We had contacted our CEO of the tour, Jai and arranged to meet him at reception at 9.00 am. We wanted his help to organise a taxi for us for the day to see some of the monuments around Delhi. Hotel Jeyan Inn is a very basic hotel and with little room in our room. We had no breakfasts organised here, so when we met with Jai, we said we were going for a coffee and he said he was going out for breakfast, so we went together and found a great cafe no far from the hotel. We both had a lovely coffee and a toasted croissant with jam and butter. Jai arranged for a taxi driver to pick us up at 10:00am and he was able to suggest which attractions we should see that wouldn't clash with the tour organised for the group tomorrow.

We negotiated for 2,000 LKR for the day, and met our driver Rajesh in a brand new taxi (20 days old) with plastic covering still on the seats! Raj was great, getting us to our nominated sites, telling us about others as we were driving past, he organised online tickets for us for the two monuments that required tickets, and explained how to enter each one without lining up with all the other locals. Rajesh would drop us off, indicate where he would collect us after a quick call from us to inform him we were finished and as many cars were similar, we looked out for the number plate and jumped in quickly.

Being a hot and humid day, it was good to get back into the airconditioned car after each visit.

We ended up seeing 1. Agra Ki Baoli,

2. Lotus Temple,

3. Qutb Minar,

4. Humayuns' Tomb

and 5. India Gate.

We were stopped many times by locals who asked if they could have their photos taken with us -- go figure, we are celebrities !!

Great monuments, great history here in India and the photos will back that up. Delhi is a city of contrasts, there are some very beautiful, clean sections, but also very dirty and squalid parts. There are a great number of homeless people and it is a huge city of 25 million. We are constantly approached by beggars, many little children. Tonight we had our first tour group meeting at 6pm in the hotel, and following that went our for dinner at Hooters which had a wide range of food types to choose from, Tania had Thai green chicken curry, Graeme had Chicken Biryani. We learnt you can order boneless pieces of meat and pay a little extra making the dish more enjoyable. Very nice tasty dinner. Seems a nice group of 13 we are travelling with.