Delhi Belly and Delhi By Cycle

I’ve been in Delhi for over 2 weeks now, which I think is the longest I’ve ever been outside of the UK before! After 10 days without getting sick here, I started to think I must be invincible, but then on Tuesday I got the horrid Delhi belly, which put me out of action for a couple of days. I did a lot of sleeping and read a lot of my Maeve Binchy novel to get through it. Unfortunately, I missed out on being at school on India’s Teachers’ Day. At our school, we picked one student from each class to be the teacher for the day. I chose the bright and very loud Parti, because I thought she’d do a good job of getting her class to listen and behave(!) and she’s good at explaining things to her fellow students. When I came back on Friday, her classmates said she was a very good teacher, which I was really pleased to hear.

Yesterday I got up at 5am with two fellow volunteers to go on an early morning bicycle tour of Old Delhi. It was brilliant! It was good to start early, before the roads got truly crazy – see below for what I mean.

View of the roads from Jama Masjid

I felt more at ease than I expected on the road, and I got really into the spirit of making an unnecessary amount of noise when driving/riding on the Delhi roads. I rang my bell whenever I overtook a rickshaw or pedestrian and I wasn’t unnerved by the constant honking from tuk tuks around me!

We cycled past Old Delhi’s most beautiful sites, like the Jama Masjid (biggest mosque in India) and the Red Fort (built by Shah Jahan – who also built the Taj Mahal). We cycled through the spice market, which smells incredibly intense – it’s a wonderful smell at first but then the chilli hits you (I could see chilli seeds all over the ground) and it has you sneezing. We finished the tour with a Mughal breakfast at the highly regarded Karim’s restaurant, which has received fantastic reviews from the BBC, Time Out and The Lonely Planet to name a few. The restaurant was packed out at 9.30am with people there to eat their incredibly spicy goat curry. It was very tasty but I had to drink a lot of mango juice to stop my mouth from combusting.

Cycling pros outside the Red Fort

Cycling is definitely an amazing way to experience Delhi and I hope to do it again soon.