I spent a whole morning booking tickets for the train to Delhi, which a 4-star hotel should have done for us, but the best they could do was advise us to go to a travel agent which I was unable to find. They gave us the address of another agent which was equally impossible to find until someone took me to a flight of steps through a sinister looking hole in a wall and, climbing several flights of said steps, I found myself in a dingy room with tattered pictures of the Taj Mahal on the walls. Still, the man did the business and booked tickets for us. We had booked to go to the Wagah spectacle on the border with Pakistan in the afternoon, and we were taken in the hotel car over the 20 miles to Wagah. The driver waited for us while we were directed by half the Indian army to seats with the best view of the ceremony. It consisted of a troupe of female soldiers performing a routine throwing artificial guns in the air and marching about, and then the climax of the spectacle where soldiers with elaborate plumed head-dresses making them look like cockatoos goose-stepped (with their feet reaching the tops of their heads) up to the gate with similarly-attired Pakistan soldiers doing the same on the other side. After 5 minutes of shouting abuse at each other through the gate, they lowered their respective flags from enormous flagpoles while the crowd screamed “Hindustan Zindabad” (“Long live India”), drowning out the much smaller Pakistani crowd who were screaming something similar. Then we went home.
