around the world in 180 days

Yes, again.

Yesterday, we left Shimla by a very slow train, and, after changing to a much nicer train in Kalka and nearly 12 hours later, we traveled to Delhi. Being somewhat in the swing of this traveling thing, we knew that we wouldn’t want to wander around Delhi at 10 pm (when our train arrived) and so we had the foresight to call ahead. Unfortuantly for us, the hotel we made reservations at didn’t have to foresight to actually save us a damn room. It took us another hour to find a suitable place in the area we were in, and we ended up paying quite a bit more. Oh well.

Before we left Shimla, though, I had a night of dashing to the toilet. It was a sketchy train ride and I ate almost nothing all day. Anna’s had some lingering stomach trouble as well, so we decided to visit a clinic and find out what is going on while we’re in Delhi. It’s a good thing, too, because sometime during the night, Anna took a turn for the worse. We’re both in rough shape.

This morning found us at General Williams Masonic Polyclinic, about three blocks from our hostel, where we were the only non-Indians in the whole building.  Like the rest of India, the place was a madhouse, with people everywhere, long lines and an exhausting amount of activity. We saw a homeopathic doctor who gave us matching vials of tiny white pills, which she’d drizzled with some kind of, well, homeopathic medicine, I guess.

She also authorized us to get blood, urine and stool analysis done, which is what we wanted. We’re going back tonight to pick up the results, but hopefully they’ll clear things up for us and we’ll be able to get rid of this nonesense before we start hiking the Annapurna.

The best part of the clinic experience was the price: Rs 50 for both of us to see the doctor, and Rs 190 for both of us to have all our tests done. That works out to about eight bucks, US. We didn’t even claim it on insurance. Wasn’t worth the effort.

Yeah. Other than that, we haven’t been up to much. We didn’t do much of anything in Shimla except watch a lot of TV. We’re both about ready to be out of India. It’s too hectic, there’s too many people and it’s hard to know who you can trust. Coupled with being sick almost the whole time, it makes India very exhausting.

Tags: Delhi, India, Travel

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 28th, 2007 at 3:30 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.