Today we're writing from Alwar, a small city between Jaipur and Delhi. In Jaipur we had a really hard start: when we arrived late in the day we wanted to have a quick look at the old city which was supposed to be very nice according to our guidebook. However we somehow managed to get lost and had some really nasty experiences: our bad luck all started when a mental old guy on his hand-operated bike drove into Michael from behind. Other people said sorry on his behalf and explained that he's crazy... Then we were surrounded by hoards of children all screaming and shouting 'Hello hello hello hello' in order to annoy us. When walking through some street still trying to find the old city (people didn't speak English there) a bucket of dirty water - well I hope it was just water - were coming down onto Michael. Someone just threw it out of the window! So we gave up for that day...

The next two days we had more luck. We visited City Palace and Amber Fort and met Han, a nice Indian guy that helped us getting around. After visiting a local factory and a shopping mall with him we went to a traditional local cinema and watched 'RaOne', a mixture of Bollywood and Spiderman. The movie itself wasn't really our taste but it was just great to experience the crowd in the cinema - they were getting totally crazy. The atmosphere was like at a football derby!

Today we are writing from Alwar, a small city between Jaipur and Delhi. It appears that we are the only western tourists here, we haven't seen any other yet. You can also feel that the locals here aren't yet spoiled by tourist business, so this is a much more authentic experience. There's also some minor sights to see here including a museum at the City Palace that hasn't been changed since it was opened in 1940. After lunch we'll catch a bus to Sariska, a National Park nearby.

Thursday night we're going to catch our flight from Delhi to Auckland, so this might be our last post from India.