Delhi is the capital of India, former capital of the Mughal Empire, and a developing country megacity with a metropolitan population somewhere in the range of 20 million. With broiling hot weather much of the year, recent reports of sexual violence against women, some of the world's worst pollution readings, and a reputation for in-your-face harassment of tourists by touts and sales people, Delhi has a pretty bad name among travelers. I have to say I wasn't expecting much - armies of beggars, constant bother by sellers, traffic that doesn't move, choking pollution, overwhelmed public transportation with people riding on top of trains and hanging out of buses - visions of news footage of India from the 1950s and 1960s.

Overall, though, I was quite pleasantly surprised by Delhi . I my day and a half there, one of which was a Sunday, I experienced little in the way of traffic jams or bothersome air pollution, few beggars or signs of extreme destitution, rode on a modern subway system and modern expressways and saw a modern fleet of buses which were often not fully occupied, observed much more of a modern middle class 9many of whose members were speaking English with each other) than I saw so far in India, and never felt the threat of crime. And in late December it was even chilly and a bit clammy and misty in Delhi.

Being so large Delhi is many cities in one, ranging from the tourist ghetto of Pahargabj to the narrow lanes of Old Delhi to the planned British-built capital of India of new Delhi to the even newer Delhi of suburban skyscraper tech cities that ring the metropolis. Thus, in a day and a half I only managed to scratch the surface of what Delhi has to offer and hope to go back some day using it as a starting point for more northerly parts of India I didn't get to on this trip .

In my short time in Delhi I hit some of the city's major attractions and missed some others. The Red Fort is closed on Monday, so one of my fellow travelers and I rushed out in a tuk-tuk to see it as soon as we arrived in town on Sunday afternoon. The Red Fort covers an enormous area adjacent to the souks of Old Delhi and contains numerous monumental buildings and museums within its walls. With no travel on the day ahead and the end of one leg of the Dragoman trip, many of us were bent on making our first night in Delhi a party night....one that continued into the wee hours of the morning in our hotel's empty lounge.

With my plans for an early rise to wander the city on my own foiled (it was 11:00 by the time I got out of the hotel), I decided the best strategy was to join some of my tour friends in shared taxis to visit as many of the attractions as possible, many of which are spread over a vast area around Metro Delhi. These included the Lakshmi Narayan Temple, a Hindu temple dedicated by Gandhi in the 1930s and open to members of all castes; a quic stop at Vijay Chowk, the square between the Parliament and Secretariat Buildings and India Gate in the middle of New Delhi, essentially India's equivalent of the National Mall in Washington, DC; the Qutb Minar Complex on the southern outskirts of Delhi, ancient Muslim ruins and tombs and a huge minaret dating from the twelfth century; the Bahai "Lotus" Temple; Hamayun's Tomb, a virtual mini Taj Mahal, the perfectly proportioned 16th century mausoleum of Emperor Hamayun; and Raj Ghat, the memorial to Mahatma Gandhi at the site of his cremation ceremony after his assassination .

Our driver's then told us the day was over as sunset approached, but I felt like I had hardly scratched the surface of Delhi, having made it to none of the city's museums and also not to the crowded peddlers' souks of Old Delhi. Well, there'll be another time. I finished the day with some shopping in Connaught Place, a vast British-era retail and entertainment complex encircling a park and encircled by a busy ring street, which in some ways felt like a true center of Delhi. Some would say Connaught Place with it's Bollywood movie theaters, fast food joints, and upscale malls isn't the real India they seek, but it's a real part of a changing India that is no longer entirely desperately poor. I found a nice outdoor food festival on one of the boulevards radiating from Connaught, one much more like food themed festivals in developed countries than a traditional Asian night market, and decided to pick and choose dinner from the stalls in the very modern middle class environment.