Blogs from New Delhi, National Capital Territory, India, Asia - page 10

Our driver picks us up at 6:45am to usher us out of the hell that is Delhi and off to greener pastures. I didn’t realize it at the time but I was signed up for an 11 hour car ride. Surviving off of about 6 hours of sleep in the past 48 hours I was exhausted and my head rolled from side to side as I tried to sleep in the front seat. Sleep was impossible, even when I started to drift off to sleep I was thrust back into consciousness when the driver (who I called Ted in my head) laid on the horn. In India, the horn is almost constantly going! I have noticed this in the previous taxi/tuk-tuk rides but I wasn’t trying to sleep in those vehicles and this was going to ... read more

I'm not sure how long I've been here, a few days perhaps. My traveling schedule disrupted my sleep schedule and I'm very backwards. My room doesn't have windows to the outdoors (but yes, it has windows to the INDOORS) so to see any natural light I have to venture from the safety of my pea pod room to the back alleys of New Delhi--because that is where my hotel is. It is off an alley, but most of New Delhi is that way so mom, don't be alarmed. My arrival was less than stellar, I blame the 25+ hours of flying and airport meandering mixed with some incompetency by the hotel driver who supposedly had a sign with my name on it. After standing around for 45 minutes, outside where it was 90 degrees no less! ... read more

Well then, in the coming blogs, Amelia and I will be visiting a few hospitals run by The Leprosy Mission, so I think it's only fair that we get a few things straight before you encounter that. We don't call them “lepers” any more, the correct term is person affected by/suffering from leprosy. This is not just for the sake of being PC, as I shall explain later. The disease is caused by Mycobacterium leprae, a member of the same family which causes Tuberculosis. The bacteria live environmentally in soil and it is NOT CONTAGIOUS. It can be spread from person to person, but only by blood to blood contact, so we will not be coming home with leprosy. Also, it has the longest doubling time of any human pathogen ie, it reproduces very slowly, so ... read more

Well then, I am writing you from a cruising altitude of 37001 ft at 514mph somewhere over Moldova, (historically the most entertaining of all the Eurovision nations). The journey into the unknown and thusfar, in my life at least, unexplored far reaches of the world. Even now as I sit on this Boeing 777 British Airways BA153, only vaguely do I realise that this epic voyage has begun. Watching the range of in flight movies on offer to me, which at the moment of writing is Lincoln, it seems a very strange and distant concept that in about 5 hours I will be in India! Up to this point, things have been going well. After the manic preparations of the last 3 days, paying the price for not doing enough before. Ho hum. We started out ... read more

Our decision to return to Delhi was predicated by a need to visit The Taj Mahal. I am not lying when I say I had no desire to make this trip. Visiting The Golden Temple in Amritsar was my gig, and I left it just a couple of days before feeling completely overwhelmed and satisfied with the experience. However, Stan insisted that a visit to India must include this iconic wonder of the world, so we set off for another day trip to the city of Agra and The Taj Mahal. The plan was to pick up a 10:00 a.m. train, arrive by 1:00 p.m., have a full afternoon to visit, then take a train back in the evening. Well, things didn't work out quite like that, as our train was three hours late, but our ... read more