Delhi blues (27th October 1999, Delhi)

A whole day to spend at Delhi. What were we going to do? Having slept through most of the morning with flu we hit the city early in the afternoon. We found an Internet browsing centre right next to our hotel and settled down there. After 15 minutes we hadn't made any progress whatsoever. I have been complaining about Internet connections for the best part of this tour, but this absolutely took the cake. After more time spent in non progress we decided to find a better browsing centre. We took an auto rickshaw and went to the heart of the city - Connaught Place.

At Connaught Place we found another browsing centre and sat there for the best part of two hours doing various little things on the Net. At the end of our session the person behind the counter suggested that we wind down by visiting a blues bar down the road. Having listened to so much of the blues (and having felt more than a fair share of them myself!) I always wanted to go to a blues bar. Well, this is still Delhi and blues bar or not, there was no live band.

The paneling outside the place had a couple of paragraphs that you wouldn't expect in anything associated with the blues. A mention of BB King and John Lee Hooker led me to believe that the place might actually have some promise. Sitting around for over half an hour and hearing nothing but Latin American dance music I got a little suspicious and walked over to have a word with the disc jockey. In a wannabe Caribbean drawl he tells me "No maan, I'm sorry maan, there's a Mexican festival going on and we only play da blues in da afternoon" That explained a lot of things! So we stuck around for a little while longer, nursed a few beers and headed out. Duane felt like an ice cream so we grabbed chocolate milkshakes and headed back to our hotel room. Having set multiple mobile phone and hotel alarms for very early in the morning we drifted off into deep sleep.