My day started at 9 am with the private driver picking me up at the hotel, and the first stop was the Red Fort, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and was built in the seventeenth century by Shah Jahan, the same builder as the Taj Mahal.
Next I toured Old Delhi by “helicopter”, which is what they call a bicycle with a trailer here. They’re used to pedalling around here and, even with my excess weight thanks to the party season, he was lucky I was alone, because I saw some pulling 2 and 3 people.
The truth is that, despite the chaos in the traffic, I still haven’t seen any accidents. They say that to drive around here you need 3 things: good brakes, a good horn and a lot of luck.
At the end of the ride, I saw the Jama Masjid Mosque, which is the biggest in India, built with red stone, and the courtyard is so wide that it can easily fit more than 10,000 people.
Next the driver took me to the Akshardham Temple for 260 rupees, one of the highlights of the trip so far and one of the most beautiful monuments I’ve ever visited in all my travels. I spent about 3 hours there, learning about this religion, its founder and the history of the temple, which was presented in a tour with 3D animations and robot statues.
Then I watched a film in an auditorium about the life of the young Neelkanth Varni, who gave rise to the religion, and took a short boat ride that went past different scenes about the 10,000 years of India’s history. In this place you leave all your personal belongings in lockers and the only photo I have was taken by the local photographers for 160 rupees.
On the way to the museum I stopped to see Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi, one of the 5 Mughal emperors. The 5 are buried in different cities, one of them is in the Taj Mahal.
To finish the day of sightseeing and say goodbye to the driver, I went to the National Museum in New Delhi for 500 rupees. In it I could see statues, coins and various other artefacts about the history of India.
In the evening I went to dinner at the well-known Daryaganj restaurant for 1300 rupees, which is famous for its butter chicken, which I really liked, and I finished with a Phirni for dessert.