Saturday night, March 12th, we arrived in Delhi, India. In several ways, it was going back in time for us. First off, because we had to set our watches back 1.5 hours. (Why the half hour?). Also, though, because Delhi reminded us all of Cairo; big, crowded, dirty, noisy, and chaotic.
While walking the streets yesterday, I strangely found myself starting to laugh. I felt I was in a caricature of an overcrowded, chaotic city. It was too much to be real, but, sadly, it was. The noise was incessant. Cars and cycles honking, people yelling to get your attention, engines roaring. On top of that were the people tugging at your sleeve, asking for money, holding their hand out in front of you. And it was coming from all directions. The sidewalks are not only too narrow for everyone to be able to walk on, they are also taken over by street vendors, causing people to have to walk on the streets. But the streets are too narrow to handle all of the traffic as it is. Delhi is a fast-growing city of about 17 million people, but the streets can handle only a fraction of that population. Drivers weave in and out, trying to gain any advantage they can, with the right-of-way going to whomever is the biggest. There are, to be sure, lines painted on the streets, apparently to designate lanes, but they have no meaning to drivers. Cars, trucks, tuk tuks, motorcycles, bicycles, bicycle rickshaws, pedestrians, donkeys, and people pulling and pushing carts are all sharing the roads. Even on a Sunday, the traffic crawled along. That, however, is good, as it makes all collisions low-speed ones.
And then there is the dirt that is everywhere, including in our hotel room. People do seem to make an effort to do some sweeping, but the task is too overwhelming. Even the air is dirty, causing a haze and burning the nostrils, enough so that when you blow your nose, the mucous is black with dirt.
In front of Humayan's tomb
Lotus Temple
By noon of the first day, Emma was already asking if this would be the last big chaotic city like this, while Margit was thinking about heading straight to the airport to find a flight to Nepal, our next stop. However, we all realized that India has so much to offer yet, and it was on the “must visit” list of three of us (Margit being the exception), and only three countries had made that list for that many of us before we left. We did make the decision, though, to shorten our itinerary a bit and to stick to small cities. The fact that temps were going to be up to 108 by the end of the week reinforced our decision. So after one day in Delhi, which we spent seeing the Red Fort (not as impressive as I expected), as well as Humayan’s Tomb (more impressive than I expected) and the Lotus Temple (no expectations; it is a beautiful Bahia temple built in 1986), we head to Agra, to see the Taj Mahal. It was one of the highlights of the Global Semester that I took as a college student 33 years ago, and I fully expect it to be the same again. It should be a special day.
-Mitch
3/14/2011
long4adventure