Back in Delhi

Interesting arrival in Delhi.  A car had been sent to collect us from the airport and take us across the city to Greater Noida.  I'm not sure how far this is but because of the traffic, I was told it would take a couple of hours of driving.  I should have smelt a rat when the car refused to start at the airport and the driver had to get a colleague to bump-start it with him.  We set off on our journey with me wondering if we'd have to get out to push it if the engine stalled and travelled for an hour or so until the driver decided he'd better react to the red warning lights showing on the dashboard and pulled over on a busy 2-laned highway.  He peered into the engine and poured water into the coolant, producing clouds of steam.  The car still wasn't happy so he peered again and I retrieved my trusty headtorch from my bag (I never go anywhere without it here).  There was coolant pooled in cavities and crevices in the engine.  Not a good sign. He found some more water to pour into the reservoir and decided to make a go for it.  With a helping shove from behind by the 3 of us to get the engine restarted.

Off we went and half a mile or so down the road pulled over again, just by a busy junction with lanes merging into and out of the main road.  Much head-shaking went on and he had animated conversations with my companions and someone on the other end of the phone.  We stood at the side of this road with cars and lorries roaring past, the odd one of them travelling the wrong way down the road to take a short cut to an exit.  About an hour later another car finally turned up so we transferred our bags into it, climbed in feeling a bit weary and proceeded to reverse a couple of hundred metres to the last exit.  Imagine doing that on a UK motorway?  He took us round to a shop for us to buy some drinking water and biscuits as by now it was too late to get a meal at our residence although I could only consume water by that time as I was very tired.  He then proceeded to get lost.  We arrived in Greater Noida, just outside Delhi but he didn't know where to find our base, the YMCA.  I remembered seeing an email that said it that it was opposite the jaycee golf course.  Noone else remembered this so we carried on touring around the highways of Noida for sometime before they started phoning people for directions.  We finally found it at 12:30am.  Opposite the jaycee golf course.

The Indian guys then proceeded to have an animated conversation with the security guards at the gate which of course was chained and padlocked at that time of night and weren't expecting more arrivals.  I got out of the car to get some air and was immediately spotted by one of the guards who ushered me through the gate and inisisted that I sat down in the lone plastic chair perched in the middle of the road into the huge carpark.  I sat there in the middle of the road feeling a little isolated to say nothing of exhausted and I'm embarressed to say that all that was going through my head was that Village People song YMCA, picturing the accompanying dance.  Whatever I thought about to try to divert my attention away from this song it just came back and reared it's head again.  Hysteria was clearly beginning to set in.  A dog came to say hello and try to get some attention (or more likely some food) before giving up and flopping down in the middle of the road nearby.  We finally achieved access to the building where I had to sign in stating that I was the wife of Jon Williams.  Nothing personal against Jon but why?