Hello from Delhi! It's an incredibly dirty, crowded, hot, noisy, polluted city, but the atmosphere is pretty special and it has some fantastic monuments so we had a great day. We arrived on schedule last night; the national strike in Belgium didn't affect our flight luckily. We saw everything we wanted to see today: the Jama Masjid (Mughal mosque, biggest in India), the tomb of the Mughal emperor Humayun (this tomb is the architectural predecessor of the Taj Mahal and looks a lot like it), the Mughal Fort, a Sikh temple with the tomb of one of the 10 gurus of Sikhism (we immediately liked Sikhism; nice place and nice people), a Bahai temple shaped like a lotus flower, the tomb of the Sufi saint Nizam-ud-din (in the middle of a sort of souq, we felt rather uneasy there), and in the dark we visited Qutb Minar, the oldest islamic monuments in India, built from the rubble of 27 Hindu temples in the 12th century, very special. I made lots of pics, and especially had fun doing night photography in Qutb Minar, I made some great ones there I think. The Indian visitors and soldiers who spectated my weird photography liked the pics in any case :)

In the early evening we heard a loud bang but didn't think anything about it. But when we went back to our hotel in Paharganj we found the street occupied by soldiers and saw several TV crews with satellite dishes reporting live news. We made some pictures of that and joked that the bang was perhaps our hotel having exploded. Walking towards it we found out that was not so far from the truth; a bomb had exploded two hours earlier at the Paharganj market place in the same street as our hotel, at 150m from it. About a dozen people were killed there (and more elsewhere in another explosion) but the atmosphere was pretty relaxed. A crowd was trying to watch the bomb site but was regularly being driven back by the soldiers with sticks. We couldn't pass so we just made some pics of the bomb site and then started on a big detour to get to our hotel from another direction. An interesting ending to a busy day!

Tomorrow morning we fly to Kathmandu, and the day after tomorrow we fly on to the Everest region to begin our two-week trek. So long!