Exciting sightseeing tour around New Delhi

Our first day of touring Delhi was filled with a dazzling spectrum of sights and sounds from impressive historic buildings to the perpetual honking of city traffic to the hauntingly hypnotic tones of snake charmers playing music to make cobras dance.

We started at the Red Fort, a Unesco World Heritage site in the heart of Delhi. Made from red sandstone, it dates back to 1638.

Basking in the glorious warm morning sunshine, we stood and watched huge pariah kites as they swooped over the high walls of the fort, causing flocks of starlings to take to the air.

From the Red Fort, our group took bicycle rickshaws and travelled by convoy into Old Delhi where we were peddled into narrow backstreets filled with fruit and vegetable stands and lined by a honeycomb of shops and businesses.

Abandoning the rickshaws, we climbed the thick stone steps, took off our shoes and walked into the Jama Masjid, the largest mosque in India, noted for its three black and white marble domes.

Once through the gate, we found a large courtyard, apparently big enough to seat tens of thousands of worshippers.

We had decided not to spend any of this first day visiting gardens. We plan to do that tomorrow. We thought it was good to concentrate on monuments and buildings of spiritual or architectural importance.

From the mosque, we went to the Raj Ghat, a memorial on the banks of the river Yamuna that where Mahatma Gandhi was cremated.

This monument turned out to be an extremely peaceful site with simple black slab of marble left open to the sky.

On one side, there is an “eternal flame” that is kept burning as a symbol of peace and on the other are the last two words Gandhi said when he was assassinated in 1948: ‘O God’.

The wind was blowing a little and it added to the atmosphere. We also found flower beds filled with dahlias in full bloom.

From here, we took a short ride to the garden tomb of Humayun, built by his wife in 1564.

We climbed the steps and walked inside the mini-Taj as it is sometimes called and were very impressed by views through windows with stone lattice screens.

After lunch, we went to the Qutb Minar, a huge red stone tower, built in the 12 century. This was also very impressive and we enjoyed our time wandering the site.

In the evening, we went to Connaught Place, one of the key shopping areas in Delhi, and enjoyed a banquet of Indian food at one of the local restaurants, which was decked out specially for Valentine’s Day.

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