Delhi, Love It or Leave It
Thursday, October 27th, 2005Here we are our 3rd day in Delhi. And all I can say is this place is completely insane!! Insane and wonderful all in the same time. We arrived on Tuesday morning, after an overnight flight from London. The flight was good and I managed to get a couple of hours of sleep, so as not to be a complete zombie when we arrived. We wanted to take the bus to the city (to avoid the touting taxi drivers), but after waiting 1 hour and 40 minutes (for a bus that’s supposed to come every 20 minutes) we gave up and opted for a pre-paid taxi. While waiting for the bus, we met an Indian man who now lives in Sweden. “Throw away your watches, he said, you are in India now, time is not important.” Oh, how it reminds me of the days in South America. Anyway, he also gave up on the bus and asked if we wanted to share a taxi to the center, he would arrange it. So, happy to have made a “real” friend, we accepted and jumped in the taxi. Fabien noticed that the tires were quite thin, and his observation skills proved prophetic when our tire exploded about 10 minutes from the airport. Beautiful… our taxi driver, used to this type of occurence, jumped out in the middle of raging traffic and quickly changed the tire. Then we continued towards New Delhi in what seemed more like a roller coaster than a taxi, with our mouths gaping as we watched the overflowing buses, the autorickshaws (small 3 wheeled vehicles), and rickshaws (3 wheeled bicycle which seat 2 or 3 people- the driver pedals them even across multiple lanes of traffic), women in their beautiful saris delicately perched on the back of a scooter, all whizzing by us. As we entered Pahrang, the area where we are staying, or more specifically, the Main Bazaar Road, the madness and excitement grew. There are people everywhere, selling everything you can imagine, incense is burning, cars are honking, occasionally you’ll see a cow or an elephant casually strolling down the road. The driver pulled up to a small alley, and pointed in the direction of our hotel. We clambered down the alley, jumping out of the way of scooters whizzing buy and men pushing carts of various goods and arrived at the hotel where I had made a reservation the day before… only to find out that the man had given our room away to someone else…not to worry, he tells us, we will find you a room. And he did, we are actually staying at a decent hotel just down the street, not too expensive (about $8 per night.) Happy to finally be in our room, Fab and I, unloaded our backpacks, only to find that the man that brought us to the room would not leave. “I am your room service”, he tells us as he hands us a menu and asks us to order. “Ummm, were not hungry, we just want to take a shower and relax.” He disagrees and insists that we order something or that we give him our dirty laundry. After about 10 minutes of arguing, he accepts that we don’t want anything and leaves. Then we look at the menu and decide that we are actually hungry, so we ordered soup and rice and a couple of drinks. That’s all it took, less than $2 later, we had room service. So, we quickly determined that our budget room was lacking hot water, but I’ve already gotten used to this, as it is about 90 degrees (30C) during the day.
After a bit of rest, some food and a cold shower, we decided to venture our way out and explore a bit of Delhi. Delhi is noisy, it’s dirty, it smells bad, there are people everywhere. The air pollution is terrible, I have been blowing black snot out of my noise for 3 days. At the same time, it is extremely colorful, the markets are alive with all kinds of exotic foods and fruits. You can’t help but laugh when you run for your life across the street and then see the cars stop for a cow. Yesterday, we visited the Red Fort and the Jama Masjid (the biggest mosque in India)- it’s nice to be inside of a tourist attraction because it’s quiet and no one is harassing you, but on the other hand, it’s a bit lame in comparison to watching the daily life.
Today, we spent most of our day researching the next stage of our trip. We had hoped to meet people here who could give us really up-to-date information about visiting Nepal, but the only people who we met who’ve been went a long time ago. (Before their were political problems.) We have decided to skip Nepal this time (I told Fabien that if the political situation improves, we can go for our honeymoon 🙂 We have decided to visit the Indian Himalalya. Tomorrow night we are leaving for Manali, a village in Himachal Pradesh in Northern India. We are planning to spend 2 weeks in the area, and then we’ll head towards Darjeeling where we can do treks in the Himalaya through November.
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