Cricket fanatic Darby Lee never quite understood the intense passion of Indian cricket supporters until it stared him directly in the face. The 64-year-old Warrnambool man had experienced many great thrills travelling the world watching the sport but nothing quite prepared him for almost 100,000 screaming fans at Ahmedabad as India hosted Australia in the ODI World Cup final on Sunday, November 19. The sights and the sounds reverberating around the near-capacity Narendra Modi Stadium were an experience like no other and a memory which will forever remain. He said attending the final, where Australia upset the host nation in a result which broke the hearts of billions was a captivating experience. From the moment he made the famous walk to the stadium, to superstar Virat Kohli making a half-century and finally to Travis Head's match winning and legacy defining century, it was like a dream. "The bus can only get you to within a kilometre of the ground, you've got to walk to each ground in India which is a bit unique, and I'm walking in with 17 fellow Australians on my tour," he told The Standard. "Some grounds have 50 or 60,000 Indian fans and there are trumpets, horns, and all the noise under the sun you can think of. "Inside the ground, what I found is when India is going well the crowd is just all over you. If you can imagine the crowd at a packed-out AFL game, it's twice, nearly three times as loud. "But there's absolutely no malice in them at all, they just have a passion for cricket like no other. "When we won the final and they did the presentations after the game, you had to walk back obviously to the bus and the Indian supporters were all coming up to us congratulating us. "It was just so good, there was no animosity from anyone. It was absolutely wonderful from start to finish." Lee made sure his presence was well-known throughout his two-week journey to watch Australia go on to win its sixth and arguably most famous world cup title, with his bright yellow shirt and beaming smile plastered across television screens on several occasions. He departed Australia after the first two matches not expecting the Aussie side to advance much further than the group placings but wanting only one thing to come back with. "The whole tour, it was genuinely out of this world. I've done two cricket tours with Australian Cricket Tours before, an Ashes tour in 2009 and another in 2013 and I did that with mates from Warrnambool but I decided this time around to do this one on my own," he said. "When I booked the tickets probably three months ago I didn't really care if Australia would make the final, all I wanted to do was see India in the final and experience the atmosphere of a stadium of supporters going for India in a final. "After the first two games I'm sitting here in Warrnambool thinking, 'Well, Australia won't be in it because they lost the first two', but luck would have it, when I got over there they didn't miss a beat. "I managed to watch the last four games in Pune, Mumbai, Kolkata and then Ahmedebad for the final. It was just bloody brilliant to be honest." It was Lee's third experience visiting India but first time solo and said there was something almost magical about the country. "I'd been to India about five years ago with my wife, we went for six weeks and had a private tour guide, so in a way it wasn't too much of a shell-shock for me on my own," he said. "In actual fact, my wife Kerry and I were there in 1979 and we were there for three nights in Bombay, it's known as Mumbai now obviously and we stayed in the Taj Mahal Motel which is where the bombings were (in 2008). "I did a tour of Mumbai the other day and we finished in the foyer of that very hotel and thought to myself, 'wow I was here 45 years ago'. "But the culture is just completely different, everything is just honestly really different to Australia. "As soon as you hop off the plane everything feels different, the heat, the smells, the humidity. It's not a bad thing, just different. An experience you kind of have to be there to understand. "Everything is just interesting in India." Lee said while he was captivated by every moment inside the Indian cricket stadiums, visiting the cities, learning about its various cultures from one side of the country to other were fascinating and insightful. "We had a tour of each city we stayed in for the cricket so the highlights were thick and fast," he said. "It's not just cricket in India. We went to the Black Hole of Calcutta, Mother Teresa's original home, to where Mahatma Gandhi spent the final two years of his life. "To think I managed to do it all in two weeks, it's pretty special." While Lee doesn't have any plans locked in for future tours at this stage he said he hoped to visit the Caribbean on a cricket tour one day and watch a West Indies Test and ODI series.