Dehli

Delhi

You have to be crazy to start a trip to India by flying into Delhi in the middle of the night. Except that that is the way most of the international flights work out. Delhi is described by many people in many ways, few of them positive, and all of them intense. But maybe because we expected it, it wasn't too bad. You just have to be mentally prepared.

Arrival at the airport is straightforward. Everything in India is slow, so it takes a long time for the bags to show up and a long time to get through the lines at immigration. But there really wasn't too much hassle.

Oh, there was one problem. Fran and I both got sick. We are guessing that it was bad food at the cafe at the border of Tanzania and Nairobi. Fran got sick first, while on the ground at the Abu Dabai stop over. Rod followed suit on the plane to Delhi. Then Fran repeated again when we landed at Delhi. But other than the stomach cramps and the challenge of finding a bag in time (which we always did), it wasn't really too bad. The only real problem was that this left us both pretty tired as we landed in Delhi at about 4 AM.

Once you leave the arrivals section of the airport, pandemonium breaks loose. Immediately you are swarmed by taxi drivers, each pushing and grabbing at your bags. If you hop in a cab with them, you are likely to overpay by several times and not get taken to the hotel of your choice. Instead, you have to know to push through the crowd to the Police Pre-paid Taxi booth. There you buy a fixed-price ticket with a cab number on it, and head off to find that car.

There are lots of scams in India. The first you’ll encounter is that the taxi drivers get paid commissions by some hotels to bring in guests. Consequently, they try hard to take you to their pick, not yours. First they question whether you really have reservations. Then they suggest that most hotels do not really hold the reservation, and suggest that you call. They conveniently know a friend at the travel agency on route and can stop to use the phone for free. They dial for you, and amazingly, the person on the other end says they are full. But no worries, the taxi driver knows just the spot and off you go. Other common scams are to say that the hotel burned down, or closed.

Knowing that scam, we refused his insisted suggestions to call ahead. The taxi driver drove to the phone stop anyway but we didn't get out. Then he said he hadn't heard of the Hari Rama (our hotel) and suggested another nice one. I told him that I had a map and could get us there. The hotel is on Main Bazaar which is probably one of the first five streets a taxi driver learns in Delhi, so I knew he could take us there. After driving around looking lost for while, he started asking directions of people on the street. We still refused his offers of taking us to another hotel, and took a very stern attitude. Since he doesn't actually get paid until I give him the pre-paid receipt, I made it clear that he wouldn't get the receipt until we found the Hari Rama. 

The real clincher might have been when Fran told him that she had been sick at the airport and if he didn't get us to our hotel quickly she would get sick again inside his cab. Eventually we did drive up and he saw the sign to our hotel. But he still didn't give up. He grabbed the bag and began to head into the hotel next door, insisting that it was the Hari Rama. I grabbed the bag also and tugged hard enough to pull him and the bag towards my hotel. He finally gave up and we pushed into the Hari Rama. And who would have guessed it? They had nice, low-priced rooms available after all!

Another day, we wanted to get train tickets to Dharmasala. Indian train stations are famous for con artists and thieves, but foreigners have the luxury of special ticket offices without the long lines. India Rail saves a quota of seats for foreigners, so there is even a good chance of getting tickets at the last minute. Of course they are more expensive than the seats most Indians could afford, but they are still cheap by western standards and worth paying for. We knew that if we arrived at the train station with our bags and no tickets, we would be mobbed by cons. So we went the night before to find the foreigner ticket office. It was straightforward, just up the stairs. The next day when we returned, sure enough we were mobbed with "helpful" people telling us the ticket office was every direction except upstairs. Each wanted to direct us to their own ticket office, many of which are scams selling worthless or lower class tickets. Knowing where we were headed, we just plowed through and got the tickets we needed.

As you walk the streets, the beggars are real heart-breakers. Many people simply live on the street, sleeping on the sidewalk. There are a few water faucets along the sidewalks for people to wash. You can see women gather a few twigs from the rare trees or bushes, start a small fire and cook rice, right on the sidewalk. Many of the people look like they haven’t even had that for a while.

The beggars look very desperate. As in the US, you are encouraged not to support them, since that just brings more beggars into the cities. 70% of India’s population is rural, scratching a living out of a small plot, and the cities do not have the jobs or facilities to support them. Consequently some beggars go to extreme measures. We saw beggar mothers with drugged babies. On alternate days, different mothers would have the same drugged baby, or the same mother a different baby. We heard stories of mothers deforming their children, such as breaking legs and bending them backwards, to make them look more pitiful. Combined with real disease such leprosy, it is a heart wrenching sight to walk down the street.

To get more information, we headed off to the Indian Tourism office, just a mile or two up the road. There are many helpful Indians, but there are always con artists. We were continually joined by "helpful" Indians, some just curious natives, others sincerely wanting to help, and some cons. It is annoying to have to keep your guard up and suspect everyone’s motives. Each offers to direct you to the tourist office. Some we know are cons and just ignore them. We have a map and can get there on our own. Others seem like nice people so we talk and walk a while. Even then a few turn out to eventually want to guide us to the wrong place. Near the real government tourist office are a slew of other offices which also put up signs as if they are the government office. Instead, they are just travel agencies selling travel packages and tickets. We eventually find the government office, and it turns out to not have much of value anyway.

We want to wrap up our Africa travels by moving all of the digital photos off of the compact flash onto a CD-ROM. We stop into several internet cafes, but none can write to a CD-ROM. Unfortunately, we do not know where we can get the task done, so are at the mercy of recommendations. Each café sends us to another, none of which can help. We spend a full day just walking from place to place, with no success. We will have to do it later, somewhere else.

In walking around town, we run into many of the other scams. A favorite scam is perpetuated by shoe shiners. As you walk past, they discretely fling a little bit of cow dung onto your shoe. Then they run up to you, point to your fouled shoe and offer to clean it, for a fee of course! I got hit by one.

Walking through town is actually more pleasant than it used to be. Fran was aghast at the smell, but I was quite relieved. When I was here a couple of years ago the air pollution was so bad that you could hardly breathe. Zillions of little auto rickshaws plied the streets, all with two-stroke engines and puffs of blue smoke. The buses were stinky diesel. That has all changed. They are all natural gas now, and the air no longer smells of exhaust. The main odor now is human urine from the homeless. During the summer, the combination of smells of the open markets and people can still get pretty strong, but I was surprised how much better it is. It goes to show what effect each step can have. Someone had the foresight and money to convert all of the auto rickshaws. I can easily imagine a foreign grant that simply offered the conversion to each one for free; along with a free paint job (each converted one had a fresh coat of green paint, while the original ones were black). Given the cheap labor cost, the total bill to convert all of the auto rickshaws was probably somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. It was good to see some focused attention with solid results.

We would have left Delhi immediately, except that we want to get Fran’s shoulder looked at. She slipped on the Great Wall and injured her shoulder (previously injured in a skiing fall), and it has not healed properly. She hurt it again on the safari. If anything it has been getting worse, and she is not able to carry a backpack anymore. Fortunately, Indian doctors are very highly educated and skilled, so one of the first things we do in Delhi is to find the best medical clinic (recommended by the ex-patriots and long-term western residents). The doctor is quite good, seemingly just as skilled as western doctors, but with much better bedside manner. He actually listens to patients! This begins Fran’s experience with Indian and eventually Tibetan medicine and then western physical therapy and massage, which you can read about on another page.

While here we toured the India Gate, the park in front of the presidential palace, the Red Fort, the Jama Masjid (a huge Muslim mosque), and found a beautiful peaceful part with the Gandhi memorial. The memorial is perfect for him –it is a simple large slab of black marble with a flame, isolated in a grassy area by a berm and footpath. A steady stream of Indians pays their respects. Nearby, no one pays any attention to memorials to other leaders, including Indira Gandhi and her son.

All in all, Delhi is a nice place if you can avoid and ignore the scams and squalor. Otherwise, it is a torturous place that sends many tourists heading back for the airport early.