A very brief visit to India in 2015 to include:

• Delhi
• Varanasi
• Khajuraho
• Agra
• Fatehpur Sikhri; and,
• Jaipur

And too many photos to stick on one page so you’ll have to look at the sub-pages as I post them through Nov 2015 for those places….

…. though the mad traffic is worth posting all on it’s own.

Some relatives shudder at the idea of driving in London, which  seems very odd to me. I guess that I’ve adapted.

Mostly roads are very straightforward. occasionally three lanes disappear down to two with no warning and drivers can be very aggressive, certainly not slow to push out onto a crowded junction. There are also the infamous NLondon mothers in their 4by4 drives ignoring everyone else and just pushing their way through.

I was warned that driving in Israel would be traumatic but actually it felt much more starightforward (Jerusalem aside) than making my way through Golders Green, London on a Friday afternoon.

But nothing could quite prepare me for the traffic in Delhi which is just hellishly conjested. The drivers beep their horns just to let you know where they are. To a Londoner it sounds aggressive. It would be aggressive over here. If someone beeps their horn at me, it’s to say that I’m behaving badly, I’m out of order but in Delhi it’s much more of an exploratory kind of communication, a rather sharp “Hello! Here I am”.

And that’s essentially how other drivers in Delhi react to the constant horn blowing. In fact I never saw a single incident of road rage. No one got visibly cross on the roads (or off them actually – a pretty strong cultural imperative).

So even though the roundabouts inevitably ground to a halt, there was always someone willing to get out of their car and direct you around the outside corner of their car. It might involve bumping up on the pavement, and inevitably involved dodging the 6 or 7 scooters that would wiggle their way through any gap that you maanged to find or make for yourself.

There was a rhythm to the traffic that we eventually started to feel though I wouldn’t ever, ever want to have a go myself.