DELHI, India — Noisy, polluted and chaotic, India's ancient capital can leave a bad impression on the first-time visitor.

Taxis, cows, motorcycles, buses and bikes jostle like bumper cars in endless traffic jams. If the pollution doesn't give you a headache, the noise from the honking horns will. Walking very far is impossible in pedestrian-unfriendly streets without sidewalks. Scattered around far-flung neighborhoods, ancient monuments sit side by side with shanties and modern high-rises.

"Delhi prepares you for the rest of India," says Delhi native Avnish Puri, 50. Puri, who once worked for the luxury Taj chain of hotels, delights in showing newcomers a different side of his hometown.

Divided into Old Delhi, founded 350 years ago by Muslim emperor Shah Jahan, and the British-built capital New Delhi, the city boasts historical monuments, mosques and temples; parks and gardens; labyrinthine streets; and wide boulevards.

There's so much that the first-time visitor wonders where to start or, given the lack of good public transportation, even how to get around.

SMALL BITES ARE BEST

Puri's advice for getting your arms around a city of 16 million: Savor it in small bites rather than big chunks.

He leads "Hidden Delhi" tours aimed at showing visitors behind the scenes. For a lucky few, there's also the chance to try out living in a residential neighborhood, a kind of Third World gated community in New Delhi called New Rajinder Nagar, where he and his wife, Ushi, 37, run their six-room Master Paying Guesthouse in the house that belonged to his grandfather.

Snag one of their basic rooms — think dark wood furniture, linoleum floors and low-to-the-ground twin beds with shared bathrooms — and suddenly Delhi seems more like a village than a disconnected metropolis.

Just a few miles from colonial-style Connaught Place, New Delhi's British-built commercial and tourist hub, New Rajinder Nagar has three entrances off busy Shankar Road, only one open to cars at night. The buildings are low-rise stucco and brick in faded browns and whites. Stray cows wander the streets or park themselves in the road to the frustration of drivers. Mothers dressed in colorful silk saris walk their kids to school, and a barber sets up shop each morning on the sidewalk, offering rush-hour shaves to busy commuters.

"Tomorrow, you can wear yourself out negotiating with the ricksha and taxi drivers," Puri told my husband and I as we sat with him at his kitchen table after breakfast on our first morning in India.

Today, he said, we should make it easy on ourselves and hire an air-conditioned car and driver for the day. He laid out a plan for tackling a mix of historical sites and shopping. Anticipating that we'd be hot, hungry and tired by late afternoon, he suggested we finish with the bargain-priced $10 afternoon tea at the Imperial Hotel, a colonial and Art Deco luxury hotel built in 1931 when the British ruled.

AN OASIS OF TRANQUILITY

Within an hour, we were off in our taxi ($16 for the day) and a list of stops Puri had written down. Our first was Humayun's Tomb, a 450-year-old marble-domed monument in New Delhi that was a precursor to the Taj Mahal. Walking through the peaceful gardens and grounds, I was struck at how easy it is to escape the traffic noise and congestion and get a feel for what medieval Delhi used to be like.

In modern Delhi, the streets belong to everyone from businessmen to beggars. A few feet away from the Imperial's marbled entrance on Janpath Road, snake charmers and peanut vendors own the sidewalks at the Tibetan Market.

Two men coaxing live cobras to rear their heads out of their baskets begged us to pay them to take their picture.

"Shoeshine, lady?" a boy asked while I was watching the cobras. "Five rupees ... OK, two rupees ... Maybe next time? ... Maybe next year?"

A man tried to sell me a leather whip; another offered what looked like a pair of size-40 boxer shorts.

I turned them down, including a fortune teller and a woman selling vibrating hair brushes. I had heard that Delhi's touts and beggars were aggressive, but surprisingly, most accepted a polite "no," and moved on to someone else.

The next morning we joined Puri and another of his guests for one his "Hidden Delhi" tours. Up at 6 a.m., we met for tea, then got in his car for a five-hour tour that began with visits to a wholesale flower market and an outdoor public laundry, and ended with us sitting in a circle practicing deep breathing on the floor of a Hindu temple.

THE RICKSHAW OPTION

This was also our chance to experience Old Delhi, where bicycle rickshaws are the way to get around streets too narrow for cars.

Puri parked his car and found two rickshaws for the four of us. Our driver pedaled, standing up most of the time, past faded havelis (mansions) and spice and gold shops lining Chandni Chowk, the once-grand thoroughfare that leads from Jahan's massive Red Fort on the Yamuna River to the Jami Masjid, India's largest mosque.

Indians love sweets, and one of their favorites is jalebi, crisp coils of fried dough coated with honey. We stopped at a cafe and sampled our first Indian breakfast.

A boy brought tin plates and cups of spiced tea. We ate a few jalebi along with puffed, deep-fried breads, called poori, which we filled with spicy curries and a sweetened wheat paste.

Delhi seemed less like a faceless big city and more like a hidden corner of the exotic India that I came halfway around the world to see.