Well, curry of course.

Indian curry is just like the curry from Indian restaurants at home. Except that it’s cooked in the local water, so you can sometimes get a bonus surprise with your dinner. And it isn’t a happy meal toy.

I mostly stayed in reasonable hotels, so they weren’t too bad.

And a good thing too….

The visitor leaving New Delhi airport must dodge traffic, touts and cows. The cows are quite docile and harmless. The same thing can not be said of the touts.

Of course, many Indian people are poor and view travelers as extremely rich. Luckily, quite a few systems in India exist to reverse this situation.
For example, we would arrive at a hotel wearing backpacks. The porters would insist on removing them and carrying them the five metres to our room before asking for money.

After a while, the insistence of the locals to do small tasks for you and ask for large rewards becomes rather annoying.
Fortunately for the budget conscious, India does contain a number of things you can acquire for free. A full list includes Hepatitis B, typhoid, yellow fever….

The architecture in India is amazing. In particular, the Taj Mahal is every bit as special as you’d suspect. Watch out for the local guides though, who will offer to show you to the best photo spots. They will try to charge you money for walking on the grass. So successful has this ploy been that some of the guides now carry a small patch of grass to throw in front of unsuspecting visitors.

Trucks and cars in India are fantastically decorated in bright colours. I guess this gives their drivers something to look at when their steam powered engines break down.