Delhi. dot, dot, dot

So, after two sleepless 9 hour flights we arrived in Delhi yesterday at 11pm local time. We paid for a pre-paid cab to take us to one of the main streets for backpacker hotels and guest houses but along the way our taxi stopped at a "government" tourist info spot. We reluctantly got out of the cab and went inside where the two men working there assured us that they would phone up hotels and find us a place to stay. They were very friendly at first but we quickly realized that something was not right when they told us that all of the budget hotels in Delhi were booked and that we would have to spend 2-300 euros on a hotel or book a tour with them and leave Delhi that night. We were not sure what to do...they claimed to be a government office so we initially trusted that maybe the hotels were full--they even called up 10 hotels from our lonely planet for us and they were all full...after reading more in our book and noticing some strange happenings we realized that these were most likely the infamous Delhi hotel touts--they bring you in whether you have a reservation or not and then phone hotels(they actually dial up their friends) and convince tourists that there are no hotels available before booking you into an expensive hotel and taking their cut...by this time it was 2:30AM and we were not sure what our options were...wee were thinking of maybe staying in this cool air conditioned office till morning when the trains were running...then another taxi with two french tourists stopped and when we tried to tell them of the potential scam, the men working there quickly turned verbally aggressive and told us we were no longer welcome in the office and that we had to leave to make room for more customers...we left and decided to just continue on to the main street with the budget hotels and the first place we stopped at had rooms which we gladly paid for and finally went to bed sometime after 3am...

Delhi is a crazy city and this kind of scam is not uncommon...even if we had booked ahead, like the french tourists that we met there, we would have fallen to the same fate--the workers simply phone your hotel and tell you it has been double booked...and with most international flights arriving late at night it is easy to fall victim--racing through the streets that are lined with homeless people sleeping on the sidewalks, horns honking, street dogs barking and running out on to the streets...it can be an overwhelming city to come to, especially at night...

Anyways, we are putting this experience behind us, we are going to get our first glimpse of Delhi in the daylight and then hopefully head out to Amritsar today or tomorrow.

That's it for now...

Taylor and Brie