Begining

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The Beginning 26/12/07

Things begin when i touch down in Delhi. The airport is a crumbling shit-heap, with electrical wires hanging down from a bare ceiling like vines. I'm picked up by two of IDEX's (Indian Development and Exchange Programs) staff. One is Farouq, one of the project executives, or "guides", I'll be working with over the next few weeks.

First experience - Indian roads. Everybody who drives here is batshit crazy - drooling mad cannibals in wheeled carriages of doom. There are no rules of the road here, just a Wacky Races procession of cars, lorries, tuk-tuks, cows, goats, camels and pedestrians. Horns are used constantly, as a means of letting the other drivers that you are coming up hard behind them, and require them to move so you can pass. Overtaking is constant and essential, and little or no attention is paid to road markings, or considerations such as lanes.

I'm taken to my hotel in New Delhi. I put my bags down and prepare to crash out after a long trip, when there's a knock at the door and in walks another white man, apparently to share my room, and my bed. He's 19, from England, named Laurence. We swap introductions, and then briefly venture out, like new born babies, eyes blinking at the strange lights. My head is spinning, and I feel close to collapse, and we return to the room, pick a side of the bed, and try to sleep for a few strange hours.

Later, we go searching for other volunteers in the hotel. We get the room number of the only other to arrive, and go knocking. Alicia, a Kiwi living in Oz answers. We go out into the weirdness, wander around a bit, eat, then return and sleep. Next day we meet the other two members of our party, Sandra, from France, and Kristin, from Germany. We pile into a jeep, and set off on the six hour drive to Jaipur, the pink city, and our base for the next few days.

Stopping briefly for lunch, and then later for Alicia to relieve her stomach of its contents, we cruise through the heat and dust, passing little shanty towns that line the roadsides, often no more than a few planks of wood, or makeshift tents. Kids run about with little or no clothes, bending over by the roadside to empty their bowels into the gutter, where the cows and dogs stick their noses in it and lap it up along with the mounds of paper and plastic rubbish. It’s not picture postcard pretty, and the air is not so bracing.

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Comments

[Tinny]

Nice
Welcome to India -suddenly Blackbird Mews and McGinty's uncleaned week old plates don't seem so bad! Keep safe in the thrid world my travelling hombre and remember, if it moves, don't eat it.