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After two and a half weeks travelling we were pretty tired. During the tour we cover a LOT of miles and visited MANY projects and farmers. Our stay in Delhi was more about taking our time doing things, but still to arrange/book things in this country is not that easy! Maybe we’re spoiled over here with telephone and online booking, but sometimes having to finding things are not open/not working when you get there is annoying.

India is one of those places that when you are there you are a bit stressed out by the noise, the smell and the overwhelmingly crowd everywhere. But when you are back home you’re planning when to go back – in other words all the niggles disappears from you memory and you only remember the many positives. This is also reflected in the number of Westerns going back more than once and even living over there. We do not make exception to this and we’re already thinking about our next visit, maybe this time travelling the south and the east of the country.

India is a special country, visit it if you haven’t done it yet – you won’t be disappointed.

Fairtrade is the most powerful tool that consumers around the world have to change for the better trade practices. By buying Fairtrade product you really make a difference in the life of the producers – we witnessed it first hand. BUY FAIRTRADE

Organic is again a choice that you can make in order to achieve two goals. The first is to consume or wear products that haven’t been chemically fertilised hence healthier. Additionally the Organic standard takes care of our eco-system – by phasing out the use of aggressive pesticide and mass scale production it promotes the natural and sustainable development of the world’s flora and fauna. GO ORGANIC

PS: getting used to the normal routine was a nightmare. It took us about a week to recover from jet lag (very bad) and temperature difference (about 20.C !).

PPS: as every spring I am very upbeat at the moment with a lot of activities planned … stay tuned!

We are about to reach the final destination of our two-week journey, the capital of India Delhi. This final trip by coach was an experience in its own; to cover 150km (100miles) it took us 5 hours! No surprise that people travel by train!

Arriving in Delhi was incredible, the level of traffic even with very wide streets extremely high – crossing the road here is impossible, even local have to wait for the “green man”. Is good to see a number of green spaces and monuments everywhere. This to say that without the slightliest doubt this is the place to go if you can only visit one Indian city.

After two long weeks spent as part of a group of tourists, it was time to leave the nest. Even if we have some reserve about our guide ability to carry out his job, as a whole we enjoyed the experience very much. The group worked as a team together, always participanting as actively as possible to the visits.

So after the “gala” dinner in a western style live music restaurant, we said Bye to our travel mates. It was time for us to bridge our massive bags into our new accommodation. The latter is something that I came across in IndiaMike, the internet forum that I viewed to gather information about India. This was a very nice idea, the Guest House is brand new and located in a nice and quite residential area of the city. The K One One has all the amenities and is just 10min away (by autorichshaw) from the city centre. The owner Parul is very kind and her boys (the guys working in the house) are incredibly efficient.

Visiting the city is a pretty straighforward business – guide book, sun cream and some water and you can see all the marvelous sights of this historical city.
Below a selection of some shots – for the complete gallery click HERE [under Honeymoon > Golden Triangle]

For an alternative experience we warmly recommend a tour with Reality tours and travel, this organisation covers a variety of routes to show you the “real” Delhi. We did the tour covering the Dharavi Slum that was focused on Street Children. The 2.5h walk was extremely interesting with the guide deeply involved in the issue (he used to be a street child). It is refreshing to see how people help each other in a “natural” way, we’ve seen the darkest corners of the Slum but also the various ways in which street children are helped. The latter includes everything from a daily showering session, to watching TV and painting. Everything is very well prepared so you don’t feel that being there is too intrusive and also the money paid toward the tour and any donations are used for the same services that you see. Don’t miss out on this if you’re in town!

Now let’s talks about Agra, this is a place like no other. It is unique in a strange way, normally big monuments are built into an already established centre (city/town). Here things worked the other way around, in fact less than 50 years from its foundation the works started to build what it will later be one of the seven wonders of the world – The Taj Mahal.

This incredible building monopolised the main industry of the city from early day – tourism. This results in a very vast city with a number of well kept (but busy) roads arranged in a grid. All sort of services for tourists are available and hotels and B&B are appearing everywhere. My impression of this place is that it lacks character – The Taj Mahal and the Agra Fort are absolutely amazing, but anything else is a bit of a let down.

Fortunately in the outskirts of the city we had our last Fairtrade visit – TARA stone carving. This was very interesting and a bit different from the previous textile visits. Carving stones is a fascinating art, is amazing how is possible to achieve with a little patience.

Some of you are maybe wondering why it took me one month to conclude the Honeymoon report. Well the reason is simple, I wrote everything up until the last post directly in India. But from now on I am writing from home since we’ve been back from some weeks now. This is due to a mix of things; the last part of the trip was much more pure tourism, in other words a lot of sightseeing with a very tight schedule. Additionally by joining the “Golden Triangle”, we are officially joined the tourist track and this is a little less diverse from the early part of our journey. This is not to say that Jaipur, Agra and Delhi are ugly – quite the opposite – but writing about those places is less of a groundbreaking experience.

Below few shots of Jaipur, an interesting city that retains a lot of its magic. Tourism allowed it to develop but much of it is still authentic.