Laksme is scheduled to pick us up at 9:00am for the drive back to Delhi.  He says it will take 6 hours.  We have a leisurely breakfast and take care of several things on the internet, since the connection is much stronger here than Agra.  Every time we turn around in this hotel, someone is waiting to ask if we’re ok.  Three different times last evening, someone knocked at the door, wondering if we needed anything?  It became almost too much.

The broom is a different model than we’re used to seeing.  Trident Hotel in Jaipur

Doorman at the hotel.  Doormen at several of our hotels have looked like this.

The drive to Delhi is mostly done on a decent road, six lanes at least.  The truck traffic is heavy, much more than anything we’ve experienced previously.  Laksme says it’s the main road for commerce to pass from Delhi to Mumbai.  Anything for Delhi that comes into the port at Mumbai has to be trucked.

 Many of the trucks are decorated.Check out the front of this truck.

There is an election today in the state of Rajasthan, of which Jaipur is the capital.  It’s for state leaders.  All the businesses and tourist venues are closed.  As we’re driving out of town, we see several places where people are voting.  It looks like the polling is done with pen & paper.

Laksme pulls over at one place where there are lots of monkeys on the roadside.  He says this is a “wildlife area”.  Many hindu people come here to feed the monkeys for some type of good luck.

Didn’t open the window to take pictures.  Thought we might pick up an unwelcome passenger.

We made a halfway stop at a cute little combo restaurant/gift shop.  I noticed several similar places within a few miles of this one.

As we get closer to town the traffic gets even heavier.  We spot the first tall buildings we’ve seen since we’ve been in India.  Our Delhi hotel has been near the airport, which is outside of the main part of Delhi.  We haven’t seen the Central Business District where there are bound to be many larger buildings.  We just haven’t been close enough to see.

 How many riders on this motorcycle?

Some added decorations.

We get checked into our hotel around 1:30pm, collecting the two extra bags we stored before we left Delhi on Sunday.  I’m glad we weren’t trying to haul them with us on our short hop flights Sunday & Monday.  It would have been real interesting dealing with them on the train from Jhansi to Agra. We created only one problem by leaving some bags behind. My extra underwear didn’t get into our traveling bags, requiring several sink laundry sessions.  With good blow dryers, I was in good shape.

Some of the Delhi hotel Christmas decor.

The rest of the day was spent looking ahead at our Thailand activites.  I’m constantly working to monitor our budget (for information more than anything else).  Tomorrow I’ll need to exchange our remaining Indian rupees back into US dollars.  I’m also trying to catch up the blog.

Judy is working on our bags, making sure we can meet the weight limits.  We were close to peak when we flew into Rome.  We’ve made several purchases as we’ve traveled, so we’re pushing it.  We can probably make the international limits on the Delhi/Bangkok flight.  Our two short hop domestic flights in Thailand from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, and later to Phuket have lower limits.  It’ll be interesting how we do.