Days Thirty Eight and Nine: Delhi

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Delhi was intense. Very intense.

We got in on the first night to be surrounded by noise, dirt and people. Before we'd even got off the bus people were feeling crowded and spooked. India can be pretty spooky: beggars hold their babies and/or injured limbs upto the bus windows to beg whenever you stop, men urinate in the street without raising any (local) eyebrows, stray animals wander around eating rubbish.

We got the the hotels (confusingly most of the hotels in our street had names that where variations on Sunstar and we were spread over two of them), dumped our bags and milled around getting into groups to go out for dinner. The recomended place was expensive by cheapo traveller standards and didn't serve alcohol to people under twenty five (the legal drinking age in India, which is not to say the actual drinking age in most places) so we headed off to find somewhere else. We lost half the group when they got hungry and failed to see the point of looking for a restaraunt by the side of a busy road. It was their loss, because we found somewhere really nice. Okay, maybe nice is an overstatement: I looked at it and my first thought was 'Oh my god, I'm going to throw up half my body weight tomorrow'; there was one menu and there were flies floating in my chai. But my second thought was that Mick, the guy who chose it, had travelled before and knew what he was doing, the menu had english translations and was divided into veg and non-veg and the tea was very nice after some judicious fly removal (and close enough to boiling not to halve my bodyweight). We liked it so much we brought a whole group of people there the next day.

The second day was when the hassle started. A group of us were trying to get a rickshaw to go to a particular dressmakers in a big clothes area. The drivers claimed the whole area was closed for a festival and it took half an hour to persuade them we wanted to go their instead of their shop, not counting the time wasted when thry took us there anyway and were told by Kim that they could take us to her shop for the price we agreed or we'd get another rickshaw and not pay them anything. They did, after a lot more time wasting, and suprise suprise, there was no festival in sight.

After some shopping we headed off to the Lotus Temple, a huge lotus shaped building built by the Bahai faith. Bahai is a relatively new religion (a few hundred years) that believes in a lot of nice core principles and some weird stuff about a prophet. By the time we left one of our party had been temporarily proselytised, which gives a good idea of how much Delhi makes you long for quiet, space and green (the temple has very large, green grounds).

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