The flight to New Delhi was uneventful. As we stepped out of the airport in NewDelhi, it was refreshing to see someone from the Travel Agency receive us. However, I was surprised by the driver's reluctance to be with us after we reached the hotel at about 11:00 AM. He said that his instructions were to drop us off at the hotel and, only after a couple of phone calls to the Travel Agency, I was able to get the driver to drive us around in the afternoon to several places. Before the afternoon outing, we ate lunch at the hotel; my son was not impressed by the lunch for which, he remarked, we had to pay Rs. 1189.00 (for 3 people); after that, we decided that we would generally eat outside of where we would stay. (That decision proved to be a good approach during the rest of the tour, particularly since that forced us to explore native food preparations). We also had a good taste of Indian TV available in a hotel: The television programming in India provides the viewer with the best of both Indian & western television. Folks like me can easily spend time in front of TV and not get bored.
At about 3:00 PM, we embarked on seeing several places:
The weather during all this time was extremely hot and humid, typical New Delhi summer afternoon. "If you touched someone, that person's skin would stick to you", to quote my son. After this mini-excursion, we got the driver to drop us off at some point in Connaught Circus at about 8:00 PM so that we could eat dinner in a restaurant, leaving me wondering what kind of local transport service we had paid for. We walked back to the hotel after dinner. (Aha, now you know that we stayed quite near the Connaught Circus).
