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We spent about two and a half weeks in India in January 2005 and loved every day of it. The main purpose of this trip was the wedding of our friends Dhruv and Sonam in Bombay, but we also wanted to see as many other places as possible. Our itinerary included Delhi, Agra, Jaipur, Goa and Bombay. We have Dhruv and Iva’s friend Aadeesh, as well as their families, to thank for their help with our trip planning and for their hospitality. It made our travels easier and way more fun!

We first headed for Delhi, although thick fog prevented us from landing and we spent our first night in India in Bombay (where Lufthansa put us up at the luxurious Oberoi). We arrived in Delhi with one day of delay, and headed for Agra directly the next day. We spent two days in Agra and 3 days in Jaipur before returning to Delhi for a couple of days. Next we went to Goa for a 3-day tropical vacation, and then finally to Bombay for the 5-day wedding. We also had another half-day in Delhi on our way home. There is a separate page for each place we visited, but there were a few general things we kept noticing over and over everywhere we went, so we wanted to point them out here.

Colors. Everything in India is very colorful. From women’s saris and salwars, to walls, marigolds, advertisements and even trucks. Seriously, drivers paint their commercial trucks with brightly colored floral designs and add tassels to the side rearview mirrors.

Traffic. Unbelievable! Cars share the road with all of the following in large numbers: motorcycles, cows, rickshaws, bikes, pedestrians, ox and camel carriages, goats, dogs, kids, street sellers’ carts and the occasional elephant. Many of the carts, carriages and bicycle attachments are piled unsafely high with bags of rice, towers of used tires, mountains of melons or papayas … you name it. All of this is moving in a high-density Brown’s motion, with no apparent underlying order. Honking is treated as a way of alerting others that you are closer than a foot or two from their rear – that is most of the time. We realized this was why Aadeesh laughed at us when we asked him before departing the US if we should rent a car in India – most foreigners don’t brave Indian streets. They, like us, opt to hire cars with a driver.

Lattices and inlays. Every palace and temple has these. Lattices used to be for the ladies to look out on the commoners without being observed themselves. Many walls are inlaid with glass, mirror pieces and precious stones arranged in the shape of flowers or vases.

Guides. Everyone wants to be your guide. The guy in this photo was sweeping the grounds around a rundown tomb in Delhi when he noticed us and saw an opportunity to make a little better money. He took his broom on the tour with us. The other thing to watch out for with guides and drivers is that they usually try to take you to shops and restaurants where they get kickbacks from the owners for generating traffic. We learned to plan in advance where we wanted to eat or shop and practiced this with varying degrees of success.

Poverty. Despite all the bright colors, it is hard to overlook the bleaker side of India – the extreme poverty of many of its inhabitants. It is not uncommon to see children playing in trash along busy roads, and even in the heart of Delhi and Bombay we saw families living on the sidewalk, cooking their meals, with kids relieving themselves just a few feet away from the food. Many of the poor are urban poor and they live less than a mile from some of the more posh part of the cities.

Luxury. At the other extreme come some of the finest hotels, foods and service in the world. Not that we’re experts on luxury hotels, but we got to sample a couple during the wedding, our initial Lufthansa landing detour (we landed in Bombay due to fog in Delhi and were put up at the luxury chain Oberoi for the night), and a few other odd times when we went in dinner or tea. (See description of the Agra Oberoi to get the picture.)