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Published: November 12th 2016
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My flight out of Kota Kinabalu was scheduled for 12.30pm and left at 1.30. It's two and a half hours between KK and KL so I arrived at 4pm, and then my next flight on to New Delhi in India was at 7pm. So far all my flights except the first (between Christchurch and Auckland) have been with Air Asia. Like the old saying goes, if man wasn't meant to fly there wouldn't be Air Asia air hostesses.
There were quite a few white girls in the departure lounge dressed in "Indian hippy" style. They look like they have walked into an Indian clothes shop and said "just dress me in everything you've got". It's almost like a weird form of racism. I mean, all the Indians are dressed in normal clothes and these white girls are layered in wraps and sarongs like kids at a dress-up party. I'm not sure if they think it makes them blend in (hint: it does the opposite) or if they think it makes them "one with the country" or some hippy nonsense.
For Delhi I did two things I don't normally like to do when travelling. The first was booking a hotel ahead
of time and the second, which was truly uncharacteristic of me, was arranging a pick-up from the airport to the hotel. I generally prefer just finding a place to stay when I arrive but my flight was landing at 10pm and I figured by the time I got into town to the backpacker district of Paharganj it would be closer to midnight, so I booked at a place called the Smyle Inn. Paharganj is chock-full of budget hotels, probably hundreds of them of varying quality or lack thereof, and trying to choose one sight-unseen off the internet is fraught with difficulties. Smyle Inn seemed like a good choice - not the cheapest I could have found but still a good deal, especially compared to some of the reviews of other places. And I was only going to be in Delhi for five nights (which actually means just four days) so better to have an acceptable base than to waste time looking around for a substitute.
There is a really easy and cheap way to get to Paharganj from the airport, and that is to take the Metro train which stops just nearby. However from all accounts trying to find my way for the first time from the Metro station to and then through the alleys of Paharganj was not something to be taken lightly at midnight. So I bit the bullet and said I'd take the pick-up (which was only about NZ$10 so not the end of the world). It was a good decision - even during the day I had trouble finding my way back to the Smyle Inn amongst the confusion of alleyways.
I have only been to India once before, back in early 2014 when I went to Assam (via Calcutta). Assam is pretty much the same as southeast Asia - it's not really India at all. Calcutta was basically a big rubbish dump with people living in it - I suspect that is more typical for India. New Delhi started out looking pretty normal on the ride from the airport, but once the taxi turned into Paharganj it suddenly dipped into slum territory, with ugly skinny dogs lurking in the shadows and melancholy cows shuffling through the garbage along the sides of the road. During the day it looked better, but probably only because you couldn't see more than a few feet past the hundreds of people and auto-rickshaws.
The weather forecast for the next few days in Delhi was 35 degrees and "smoke". Other forecasts said "life-endangering smog" - I'm not joking. Also I had just found out that the Delhi Zoo had been temporarily closed due to avian flu. Then there's India being the rabies capital of the world, what with their stray dog problem (though all of the many
many dogs I encountered in Delhi proved to be less threatening than sleepy bunny rabbits). And have I mentioned the monkey problem? Because they are protected and fed for religious reasons, rhesus macaques are out of control. Apparently there are 1000 bites per DAY reported across Indian cities (I say "apparently" because after a few days in Delhi I have seen no more than six or seven macaques). In 2007 the deputy mayor of New Delhi was killed when he went over a balcony trying to fight off a macaque attack at his house. They have been declared vermin in Himachal Pradesh and allowed to be culled because they are so dangerous. There's a tourist town there called Shimla which records 400 bites a month, and one local girl was actually killed by a mob of macaques when she tried to chase them off her farm. I think I'd rather be attacked by a dog than a macaque. A dog only has rabies, apart for the general ripping-you-to-pieces of course, but macaques carry rabies, hepatitis, Herpes B, tuberculosis and heaven knows what else, and they usually have a whole gang of mates behind them as back-up.
Why am I going to India again?
I'm not sure what to expect from this part of the trip, whether I'll leave India thinking "I loved that" or "I hated that, never going back". I think the latter is most likely, to be honest. I have a feeling I am a southeast Asia person and not a south Asia person. But we'll see how things go. (This was mostly written a couple of days ago - after three days in Delhi I'm feeling fine about it; I'll get back to you after a month...)
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