From East Asia to the Indian Subcontinent

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This is the first in a belated blog series about my month-long trip to India in March, 2013 . . .

After a slightly hectic last day in Daegu, I took the train to Seoul, and then took the airport train to Incheon. I stayed overnight in the airport jimjilbang (Korean sauna), then headed for my flight to Kuala Lumpur. The only time during my whole leaving experience that I got a bit teary was when I handed over my Korean alien registration card at the airport. I guess it was my sign that I wouldn’t be returning, at least for a while.

I had a layover in Kuala Lumpur, and landed in Delhi, excited for my month of travel in India, and to see my younger sister, who I was meeting at the airport. My flight got in only about a half-hour after hers, so we had looked at the airport map online and decided on a place to meet, plus 2 backup plans. After I got through immigration and baggage claim, I went out into the main hall, and could not find any of our predetermined meeting places. There also were no maps or tourist information stands, which was unusual. I thought if I walked up and down the length of the airport a few times, I would spot my sister, or find the meeting places. After wandering around with all my stuff for about 15 minutes, I stopped and asked the one of the few people who seemed like they might know what’s going on, a guy working at an airport spa. He guessed that the meeting spots were upstairs, in the departures lobby, and he said there were no maps of the airport. Sooooo . . . because neither of us had cell phones which worked in India, there wasn’t really a way to contact each other other than by internet, and the wifi also wasn’t working/didn’t exist.

I looked outside, where there were a lot of Indian guys waiting to pick up travelers, and I didn’t really want to deal with them without finding my sister first. I should mention that I was also looking for the hotel pick-up person, who was either to meet us inside or outside a certain gate number. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find either person after roaming back and forth a while longer. But suddenly I looked outside, into the sea of Indian men, and saw my sister. I was really relieved to find her, because I’d been worried about her (she’d never traveled on an airplane before and this was her first time traveling outside the US and Canada). Anyway, she was also really relieved and burst into tears. She’d been more stressed than me + jet-lagged and exhausted from carrying her bag. Additionally, once she’d exited the airport door, the multiple guards standing outside wouldn’t let her back inside the airport, which made it more difficult for us to find each other.

We then wandered a while to continue looking for our pick-up driver, who was nowhere to be found. There was an enclosed desk with an office outside with a woman working there, so we asked her if there was a payphone anywhere. “No,” she simply answered. Well, geez, that’s helpful. An airport for the capital of a country with over a billion people, and no telephones available. What??? So at that point we decided to have one of us go back inside the airport to see if the driver was waiting in there. This is possible in that you must buy a ticket to “visit”, and you’re not allowed to take luggage inside with you. So, in other words, this would not be an option for a solo traveler. It was just ridiculous. I went and bought my ticket from the snooty woman and went to enter the airport.

You may up to this point imagine that Jodi and I were all alone in this saga, but in fact there were many Indian men trying to “help” us. They mostly had badges or tags that said “Airport Staff” or something similar, but they were no such thing. They basically wanted to get us to hire them to drive us or take us to hotels, and they were very persistent. Jodi, in her earlier bid to get them to leave us alone, had told them we were waiting for a driver, so they also began coming up to us and telling us it that they were the driver. I guess word spread enough that somehow the (real) driver, who happened to be inside, found out where we were and we got our ride, before I actually went back inside the airport.

That arrival was all a bit stressful, but once in the car, I was thrilled to be in India. Already I could feel the warm breeze and realized the diversity of sights in India—different vegetation than I was used to, writing in languages I didn’t recognize, cows and dogs on the sides of the road, combined with the exhilaration/fear of death that comes from being a passenger in a vehicle on an Indian road. I was energized and stoked for our trip. Now that we were united and had our driver, we were basically set.

We made it to our hotel with no hitches, and zonked out. Tomorrow we’d be going to Agra, and we needed all the rest we could get—there’s a steep learning curve.

We had already booked most of the first third of our train tickets online, because trains can get booked fully ahead of time. Our train from Delhi was set for the late afternoon. We used the morning to eat breakfast, find a luggage storage place for my carry-on luggage I planned to leave in Delhi and pick up in a month, and have a stroll around that area of Delhi. Then we loaded up in our backpacks and walked to the station for our train. Our train ended up being delayed about 2 ½ hours leaving from Delhi. That allowed us to learn to go to the Tourist Information Office in the train station, and they were able to tell us how long the train would be delayed, which was helpful.

We had booked a driver to pick us up from Agra Cantt Station, but without a cell phone, we’d been unable to let him know that our train was delayed. So, when we arrived at the station at night, it was similar to 24 hours beforehand, at the Delhi Airport. Luckily, we found out that there was a pay phone at the station (pay phones are called “STD” in India, which is very helpful to know). We used a pay phone to call the hotel, to have the person pick us up. It was strange because the owner of the STD called for us, and first spoke in a different language (presumably to make sure it was the right number), before handing the phone to us. It was hard not to be suspicious, so when Jodi talked to the guy, we weren’t really sure if he had called the correct number, so I told Jodi to ask the guy some questions about us (he should have had our names), but luckily he knew the answers and told us to wait while he called the driver. This is part of the learning curve—always expect that someone could be scamming you in India—dealing with it gets very old very fast. He called us back to say the driver would come in 20 minutes.

Well, we waited and waited outside the station, again fending off some of the most annoying people I’ve met in my life. One notable guy came over at least 20 times. We really tried to be polite and say “no thanks”, but he would come back with another suggestion. Eventually I just got so annoyed that I screamed at him, “Leave us alone! We’re not interested!” It worked perfectly. A good friend gave me the advice beforehand that if someone really won’t leave you alone, that you should make a scene by yelling at him/her, and it was the most useful advice I received. We went back in and called again, and he said he should be on his way. Luckily, just 5 minutes (a total of an hour from when we’d arrived) later, the driver showed up.

This was our first tuk-tuk ride ever. A tuk-tuk is a three-wheeled vehicle that has a roof but no doors. The driver sits in the front and uses a motorcycle-style handlebar, and the passengers generally sit in the seat behind him/her (although I saw no female tuk-tuk drivers the entire time I was in India). As I wrote in my journal, “Tuk-tuks are insane and each time when I exit unscathed I’m relieved”. This is because of the variety of people/vehicles/animals that use roads in India and because drivers are always in a hurry to squeeze through traffic, and also probably because I have little faith when people I don’t know drive.

We had kind of a bad impression of both Delhi and Agra because they were the places where we first got “used to” India. And it takes some getting used to. There are quite a lot of touts in Delhi (especially the train stations) and Agra, and as newbies, we didn’t really know how to deal with them. Now, I had encountered some touts and some overly-curious non-touts in The Gambia, but they were a piece of cake compared to India. It’s not only that in India they have a variety of conversation-starters, but the fact that if you get away from one, another will inevitably be along shortly. I tried a variety of tactics so as to waste my breath as little as possible, but my eventual tactic was to just shake my head no and not even speak, which tended to work well. I am a relatively patient person, who’s traveled a decent amount and generally respects other cultures and people, but man, they really got to me.

Not everything was bad about India. Wait and you will learn more about India, young grasshopper.



Tips for Travel in India and at the Delhi airport:

-tourist information office/railway enquiry office. Helpful to stop there once you arrive in a new city—they’ll have maps and be able to tell you the best ways to get to your hotel/prices to pay. But check to make sure no one can hear outside the door if you say the name of a specific hotel, or they’ll try to scam you once you walk out of the office.

-STD=pay phone

-print or have saved the list of train stops so that you have an idea of when you’ll arrive at your destination

-use Wifi productively when you have it—you never know when it’s going to drop, so try to get as much info as possible about your hotel, important phone numbers, etc. when you have the chance

-Delhi airport: no maps or information at arrivals, as far as I could tell. When you exit the airport, you won’t be able to get back in. For departures: you must have ticket printed and ID available to show before you enter the airport. There are guards outside who will only possibly grudgingly let you in if you don’t have printed proof that you have a ticket.

-We generally paid about 10rs / kilometer in a tuk-tuk. We know this is high, but were unable to get them to go much lower. Try to know how many ks it will be before you start bargaining.

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Photos

Our Original Map of Possible Places to Go
By the end of the first week, we'd decided to cut at least half of our destinations off in order to spend more time in each place

Lariam
My anti-malarial from Korea

Typical Street Scene in Delhi and Agra
But there are also often cars, trucks, cows, dogs, bicyclists, pedestrians as well