Delhi

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The railway network in India is absolutely fantastic, except that you need to be really organised and book in advance if you want to travel on specific dates. On this occasion I hadn´t been and by the time I´d discounted the trains that arrived or departed in the middle of the night I was left with one option for my short´(6 hours is short in India) trip from Jhansi to Delhi: the Kanyakumari Express. Perhaps the fact it ran weekly should have sounded alarm bells but I was still rather train naive at this point. I´d met an expat Irish lady who ran a cafe near my hotel and rather bemused that she´d not heard of my train before she went off and looked it up. Laughing she called me over to look at a map of India and asked where I thought the train started its journey... hmmm, Mumbai?? I said. No, she said. Further south. Bangalore I said?? That´s over half way down the country. No she said, the clue was in the name - Kanyakumari - the southern most point in India. By the time it reached me in Jhansi the train would be on the 3rd day of its journey and the chances of it being late were quite high. No worries I said, the last train I got was about 2 hours late. That made her really laugh! 2 hours late constitutes ´on-time´ in India - here late is more like 12 hours.

So I was quite chuffed when I arrived at the station to find that this week the Kanyakumari Express was only running about 3 hours late! Which left plenty of time to compare the Ladies Waiting Room vs the First and Second Class waiting rooms, which were all different from the Unreserved Waiting Room. Strung along the main platform they were interspersed with the Station Masters office, which was different from the Deputy Station Masters office, which was different again from the Platform Managers office, which was next to the Vegetarian restaurant, which was separate from the non-vegetarian restaurant.... And the main platform itself, well that was packed full of passengers, some on the few seats available, others stretched out on the floor, some expectant and refreshed, others resigned and snoozing because their train was already 9 hours late.

Delhi was probably my least favourite Indian city, but it was here that I met up with Renee who´d come out to join me for two weeks - whilst I´m quite happy travelling alone it made a really nice change to have some company for a while!!! With Renee just off the plane and slightly jetlagged we headed straight out to explore Old Delhi, once we´d found a rickshaw driver who was prepared to give us a sensible price (that took about 4 attempts)!! First stop was the Jama Masjid, also known as the Friday Mosque, the route there taking us passed the Sunday Book market - a few streets where the pavements were packed with market stalls selling anything from IT and accounting text books, to novels (all second hand of course) interspersed with stalls randomly selling winter coats! The approach to the mosque itself was similarly lined with stalls selling everything from children's clothes to kitchen utensils and samosa´s and bustling with people out to shop.

A flight of stairs took us up to a grand entrance gate where we removed our shoes and paid the foreigners entrance fee (I think it was supposed to be a camera fee but needless to say Indians with cameras on their mobiles weren´t charged). The only mosques I´d been to before were in Brunei - admittedly much newer but very grand, with large marble central enclosed prayer halls. The mosque here was very different - the largest in India it was built by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan and completed in 1656AD. Its walls were deep red sandstone with only occasional inlay marble detail. Corridors around the edge had arches that opened onto a large central uncovered square countyard. The courtyard itself was crowded with people sitting, walking, chatting or praying. From the walls there were views down onto the crowded streets of Old Delhi where cars, rickshaws and pedestrians all vyed for space in the narrow streets.

On the advice of another traveller I´d met we skipped the Red Fort in Old Delhi in favour of a visit to the Jalabiwhalah - jalabi´s are like thin irregular doughnuts but without the sugar coating. The ones from this particular stall were ´posh´ being cooked in clarified butter - sooo tasty but sooo bad - I don´t understand how people manage to loose weight travelling in India - the sweets here are soooo delicious!

Our second day in Delhi involved another early start for poor Renee - to visit the flower market. All of the sellers and most of the buyers were men, the flowers both fake and real laid out in large bunches on the ground for all to peruse. All of the rose stalls were grouped together, as were all of the lilly sellers, as were the... The funniest sight was seeing a huge bunch of flowers bobbing towards you through the crowd, usually with the person underneath barely able to see. Or perhaps it was watching three men carefully strap endless bunches of flowers onto the back of a motorcycle - quite where there driver was supposed to sit I don´t know!

Later that morning, having walked what seemed like half of Delhi, we made it to Emperor Humayun´s tomb which was built in 1565 on the orders of his widow. The tomb itself is built of red sandstone and marble and was a precursor to the Taj Mahal. It sits amoungst lush green gardens which were designed in the Char Bagh style where the garden gets divided into 4 parts by watercourses.

We´d had grand plans to visit other sites in Delhi but we stumbled across an expat area and instead got carried away spoiling ourselves with nice coffee, bookshops, foreign clothes shops and taking photos of the MacDonalds ´Home Delivery´ sign!

Next up - Agra, the Taj Mahal and more.

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Comments

[Jane]

awsome
An awsome place.. very lovely place most of all the Taj Mahal, really hoping that someday ill come to visit that place, with my love one :) thanks for this blogs.. it made remind the people that there still such wonderful place existing.