India pt 2 Delhi - Jodphur

All flights lead to Delhi - or at least the budget ones do,  we decided to skip going to Patna since we couldn't get a civilised response from the Boarding School we were going to visit, and we weren't encouraged that we might receive the same welcome we had in Kharagpur

Yoga mudras on the wall at Delhi International

we booked into a frankly awful airport hotel where I told a huge sikh man off for being noisy at midnight, but had fun in the meantime by "popping" into Delhi proper - the Metro Airport line was cheap, clean and fast

 

monkeys on the roof in the sunshine

 we were lucky / unlucky that it was a medium sized religious festival which meant many of the shops in the Connaught Place area were closed - but there was instead a food festival!

 We flew on the next day to Jodhpur and entered into completely unknown territory.  Lon and I travelled for around 4 months in India back in 1997, but flights in those days were pretty new and expensive - nowadays there are several budget airlines (think Easyjet) as well as Air India.  So we were heading further West than we had travelled before, to the blue city of Jodhpur.

Family motorbike

Our room at Bristows Haveli

view of the fort from the Haveli

carrots in Rajasthan are very long and very red

view of the blue city from the fort

 The Mehrangarh Fort was incredible to visit - and difficult to capture up close - it had the best audio tour I've encountered

one of our favourite restaurants  OTA

We decided to book a cookery class, and spent an enjoyable few hours with Rekha as our hostess and teacher, Dad and I both came away with a few new tricks up our sleeves, and Lon became aware of just what goes into the sauce on his favourite butter chicken - cream, ghee (clarified butter), butter and cashew milk

The feast that we helped to make included stuffed baby aubergines, vegetable biriyani, shahi paneer, veg curry, dhal fry, parathas, and ladoos for sweet