Our Delhi sojourn was soon coming to an end. We had survived the 45°C plus heat and now on our 3rd day of the trip. We were acclimatising a little and had realised by this that stage that two litre of water intake was just not enough for the day! Our bags were packed as we waited at the reception to check out. When the guy at the reception asked where we were headed next — we chimed JAIPUR with excitement! He looked at us both and said it’d be about 3 to 4 degrees hotter than Delhi!! Of course in that excitement what was a mere 4degrees! We braved the biggest smile and said YES bring it on! Our Travel Inn guide who had checked us in at the Delhi hotel was there to see us off and we rolled off on our Innova with Rakesh-ji(the driver) behind the wheel. He was such an excellent driver.
It took almost an hour and half just to get out of Delhi. Probably because we headed out at 9am and on a Monday morning. We took a road that goes via Gurgoan and pretty wide and in great condition, except with little sense of sticking to their own lanes. About forty minutes later we came to a grinding halt. There were 18 lanes on one side of the road all leaving out of Delhi. I did count them there was not much else to do. In the meantime someone came and dropped off a copy of the local magazine (like our MX in Sydney) through the car window on to our driver. He passed it on to us. The first write up was about dealing with ‘Homophobia in Schools and with your peers’ I sank back into my seat reading a bit of that goss thinking to myself whatever happened to the so called sexually repressed orthodox society! My! Things HAVE changed in the 12 years I haven’t been around! Rest of the magazine was interesting too but just one of those flick and go kinds. You wouldn’t miss a beat if you didn’t read it. I remember D having a quick glance at it but he was more keen to see what was going on outside, taking it all in. We were truly leaving Delhi. We had seen the throng of the old pulsating Delhi, the energy and the maze of colours and the narrow lanes where you get poked and prodded to buy handicraft, you think of the sights and smells and the sights of an incredibly old city and yet in just half hour away here we are sitting in a bumper to bumper traffic jam of mostly four-wheel drives, a lot of air-conditioned cars, heading towards the toll booth where one side of the motorway can handle 18 lanes in a go! Did I say India is a land of contrasts? Huge contrasts!
I craned my neck up to see if I could count the number of incoming lanes on the other side of the Motorway. Alas in vain. It was a massive w-i-d-e road. Nothing I’ve seen anywhere else, not yet anyway! We crawled — bumper to bumper till we got to the toll booth. Just before we made it to the tool both we noticed a huge signboard telling us who exactly qualifies an exemption. The list was long and dare I say — hilarious!! 
We had a giggle and then D said: “Well the President and Prime Minister of India are Exempt too. Well I sure would hope so ” Do they really need to put that on a giant billboard?
We were racing through scorching hot earth. If the warm colours in the photo is anything to go by. The air-conditioning in the car was running at full throttle and we were still a bit sweaty. The landscape was parched and partly burnt, we were going through small patches of heat tornadoes. The burnt yellow dry soil and sand from the fields would form a mini-tornado and gyrate going over the piles of hay-stack on the fields and toss everything around… these were little localised heat waves. Great to watch from the comfort of zooming air-conditioned car. There was a constant haze of hot air and if you looked up ahead in the distance you could see the shimmering vehicle registrations numbers rising in a curve as we sat in anticipation thinking what was to come next. It felt a bit like we were travelling through a tunnel of fire and everything around us was a bit burnt and brown. Beautiful yet very unique and somewhat unnerving. Passing though miles of empty space at times with not a soul in sight and yet with 5 solid bars of signal on our iPhones. Vodafone seemed to look after India well.
