India assaults you at every sense. There is silence of countryside, and endless variations of noises in the city, the pleading cajoling and demanding tones of the pedlars, touts, beggars, taxi drivers and con men (I was followed for perhaps 8-10 blocks by one very zealous auto-rickshaw (bajai) driver and finally espcaped only by going through a pedestrian-only area). There are the tastes and textures of the food, pungent, sweet, sour, sharp. The visual assault is perhaps most dramatic. The colors are fantastic, the drab of mid-winter hills before the rains, the infinite yellow of endless fields of mustard, and the reds, pinks, chartreuses, yellows, saffrons, blues of the clothing, the yellow of marigold garland, the rainbow of colors of fruits and vegetables in the markets.

We spent a week but it seemed like longer, in both the good and bad senses of that phrase. We spent half the time in Delhi, where Laurenne was attending a conference. We detoured to Mumbai for a few hours when fog closed the Delhi airport. Compared to Delhi, Jakarta, for all its problems, seems like Paris. It seems a much wealthier city, although Delhi does have advantages. It has less cars -- therefore less traffic. Its city administration must be less sclerotic than Jakarta's. Public transit, including taxis and the three-wheeled cabs that we call bajais and the Indians call auto-rickshaws, use natural gas. In Jakarta, they use diesel or regular gas. The two-stroke bajais and the poorly maintained diesel buses (where the diesel is often mixed with cheaper kerosene or adulterated in other ways) spew out clouds of choling smoke in Jakarta. And Delhi has sidewalks so you can walk. Delhi is quite far north, and in mid-January, it can get nippy. That made for more pleasant strolls during the day, but for the the touts who are on you like flies on honey the moment you leave the sanctity of the hotel grounds.

From Delhi, we took the train down to Agra for a day trip to see the Taj Mahal. It's as impressive as it is supposed to be for the one of the wonders of the world. We also visited two other sites, the Agra Fort, built in the 16th C by Akbar the Great, the grandfather of Shah Jahan, who built the Taj Mahal as a mausoleum for his second wife (we can only imagine how upset his other wives must have been -- "why can't we have mausoleums like that?").

With friends from Jakarta, we drove from Delhi to Jaipur, in the western province of Rajasthan, along the Pakistani border. The city is on the edge of the desert and is protected by ancient forts that dominate the high ground on the dusty slopes. The de rigeur fort tour includes a trip up the hill on elephant-back. Laurenne dropped her camera case from the back of the beast and we thought at first it would be difficult to retrieve it from that height. Not a problem. The driver commanded his elephant to pick up the case with his trunk and hand it to us, which the elephant delicately did. But for a bit of elephant poop, the case was none the worse for wear.