18 Apr 2023
I had booked this tour prior to arrival in India as I thought that it would ease us in to our independent journey around India. Our guide was Nisar. He had been our guide for a street food tour the previous evening and our hearts sank when we discovered that he would again be our guide. A lot of his information was either irrelevant (the names of architects and how much they were paid) or incorrect (Gateway of India built for Queen Victoria - WRONG - she never visited India, it was built for George V) (Flora Fountain named after a member of the British royal family - WRONG - a Roman goddess) (the Indian Mint is a 'secret' building that nobody knows about - WRONG - it is shown on Google Maps). We spent a lot of time wandering around with no clear idea of where we were going and returned to the same place a few times. He took us to some shops when we mentioned a few things we had thinking about buying. We thought we did a good job of haggling the price down. However, our subsequent travels revealed that we had still substantially overpaid. The only positive was that Nisar took me to a kiosk where I got an Indian sim card. But overall it was a long, tedious day where we learnt little that we couldn't have found ourselves. Nisar claims to be doing guiding to support a large number of orphaned children. If that is true then he needs to seriously improve his knowledge and his organisation of the tour.