Delhi

What a time the past day and a half has been. Mind boggling in every way. Impossible to express. Like an Indiana Jones adventure, but 100% real.

 

Our flight to Delhi yesterday was uneventful. Arrival was complicated by our hotel transport not showing up at the airport. A taxi was used instead. Delhi is an immense city. As big as Los Angeles, maybe more. Like LA, but like LA timewarped back 200 or more years.

 

We arrived just before meeting up with our tour group. We were stunned by being told we needed to pay $400 more than we had agreed and planned. They said our travel agent was notified 2 months ago. I told them I was not going to pay it. Period. It was not in the amount we contracted to pay for the tour and their last minute ajustments for unforseen costs are not our problem. Today it was finally agreed with the tour company that we could continue without paying now and we could settle the issue with our travel agency in Portland when we return.

 

The hotel put us into a tiny miserble room with a telephone booth bathroom. I found the door lock damaged from previous break ins. The manager argued with me about it until I pulled out a credit card and jimmied it open in seconds. We got a better room with a working lock.

 

This morning we rode a crowded city bus. Packed with sweaty and fragrant human mass. Every surface varnished with dirt shined by human oils. What we do for "adventure travel!" A stop at India's largest mosque. Built in the 1600's. A living antique, but not terribly interesting. From there we walked into a couple hour's of urban time travel. Back, way back. Streets packed wall to wall with surging bodies busy doing the tasks life in India. Vegetable sellers. Nuts. Perfumes. Hardware. Brought in and out on huge wooden carts, on human backs or balanced on heads. Buildings that were most grand 200 years ago, now decrepit, but still very much in use. Shacks built of debris on rooftops. The vast scope of the experiece a most fantastic vivid dreamscape, a science fiction apocolypse, and so real. A ride on rickshaw. This is not a tourist's ride.This is the way of life here, still. The cycle coolie straining with every turn of the pedals to pull us along. Never complaining. A final walk with a turn into a modern building, past guards and full body scanners, a look through every package for... a bomb? "No photos!" Another world yet again! 21st century. Delhi's Metro subway system is below the city 100 meters, down many cascades escalators to the tunnels below. A train fresh and clean of all traces of Indian grime swishes in with a beep. This is the India that graduates 250,000 IT trainees a year (or so I am told). Packed. Push to all pack in for a short ride.

 

Shopping commences in Conought (?) Circle. This is Delhi's modern downtown. Still gritty, but newer and less crowded. Growling stomachs drive us toward lunch. A search past the tourist eats (McDonalds!!!) and a brimming full Indian restaurant beacons with all brown faces. $5 each buys the most fantastic Indian meal - thali. A feast of colors and spice, rich and strong, sweet, salty, sour, hot. Served with rice and chappati (think tortilla) and eaten with hands. Appetites appeased we seek a music shop from the Lonely Planet guide. My India obsession is to buy a set of tabla, the traditional Indian hand drums commonly heard playing with sitar and harmonium. One shop has moved far away. One shop is near and it is found. A very professional shop. No tourist pressure or haggling. It is best to buy before we leave, at the last minute, and carry them home as luggage. Tempting.

 

Tomorry we take the train to Agra, the city near the Taj Mahal. The most beautiful building in the world, perhaps.

 

Good night from India.

--
Michael & Susan Kuhn
Trip email: indiaadventure2007@gmail.com
Trip blog: www.indiaadventure2007.blogspot.com