We were an hour or so late landing in Delhi but our hotel pickup guy called Ranju was there to meet us. He led us through a tunnel of mosquitoes to the car and as we drove out of the airport complex saw dozens upon dozens of people lying under little corrugated iron boards, babies crawling around in shit, dogs dragging themselves along with 2.5 legs, it was madness. The pollution is a wonder in itself and after 20ft or so the visibility starts to plummet. I was in the front and stole worried glances at Denise who had a look of horror on her face.
Having narrowly avoided a peacock flying through the windscreen we drove passed the Gandhi monument and towards New Delhi itself. I’ll have to take lots of pictures for memory’s sake as there is no way I can describe it. Thousands of half crumbled, semi-finished buildings, rickshaws, tuk-tuks, cars, bikes, people, dogs, wheelbarrows, fruit, beeping horns, beggars – all the descriptions I’ve had from people just don’t convey it across. While I was in the car I thought “This is OK, it’s not nice but I can handle it” but as we pulled up outside the hotel the realisation dawned on me that I was going to have to actually step outside and walk the three yards to the front door.
The hotel’s nice and after tipping someone for opening the door, 2 other people for bringing in luggage, another person for showing us the bathroom, 1 more for explaining the mechanisms of a light switch and a final last one for putting 2 bottles of 6 month outdated Coke into the mini-bar we locked up and grabbed about 3 hours sleep.
After waking up I was a bit apprehensive about outside and wanted to go for a short walk just to get rid of the nervousness. It was mental but we made it to the end of the street with only a few people not taking no for an answer. Still it felt like a big achievement in itself and we went back to the hotel for a bit of grub and a nice malaria pill.
Later that evening we made the mistake of walking the km or so to the railway station so we could get our Amritsar tickets but it was getting dark. Loads more hassle but while the good news was that we found the Tourist booking office the first bit of bad news was that they only took currency not cards and the even bigger (at the time) bad news was that our Visa cards didn’t work in either of the machines outside. As it turned out, we just could only use them in very few ATMs but they were further away – we got the hotel to book the tickets in the end and paid a 100 rupee charge.
After dinner I went for a smoke on the roof and saw a man taking a piss in an alleyway. Unfortunately, so did two dogs on the street who ran after him barking and starting biting him. He went nuts and took his shoes off with piss going everywhere. He waved his shoes at the dogs and screamed at them till they ran away. As they looked back at him he threw his shoes at them to get rid of them properly. Once they ran off, he calmly walked back, picked up his shoes, put them on and walked on down the alleyway. I was pissing myself.
Too much for the first day really and we went to bed at about midnight. Unfortunately our room is right next to the 20 foot tall neon Hotel Ajanta sign – so along with the barking, dog-sex, beeping, shouting, Indian dance music and screaming outside we had the room changing from subtle neon tones of red, green and yellow then back to red again. Around 3am we got a couple of hours kip until the mosque next door started the call to prayer which was pretty much as loud as having someone shouting it in your room. After a couple of hours of that, I finally passed out with exhaustion and we slept until 12.
Final note – some Indian men have a really strange thing for dying their hair with red boot polish, it’s quite unnerving.
