The last leg

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Apologies all for the delay in getting the last blogs done. Didn't have time in India, and now I'm back home it's a bit too depressing to relive the journey! Anyway, it's not too painful, as most of it was written in my 5rp notebook bought in Cochin, and it's better than waiting a few weeks and realising that I've forgotten everything that happened.

Anyway, most of this is verbatim from my extremely culture-shocked first night in Delhi. I was sitting in a restaurant called the "United Coffee House", eating a mixed tandoori platter, looking at a room that was a weird cross between a stately home, faux-Murghal, and a Mecca ballroom, listening to an Indian man playing a Japanese keyboard and singing quality MOR tunes. (You haven't lived till you've eaten curry to a cabaret medley of "Tiny Dancer"/"How Deep is Your Love?"/whatever the song is that goes "I've been waiting for a girl like you to come into my life". And that's said only partly tongue in cheek. Because he might have been cheesy, but he was actually rather good.)

So anyway, I was in Delhi. The last leg of the adventure. (Although the notebook shows strong hints of saying bollocks to fiscal responsibility and extending for a couple of weeks. And sat in Leyton, I quite wish I'd done just that.) And the culture shock wasn't restricted to the restaurant. Weirdly, the highlight of the Darjeeling trip might actually have been the departure. Eschewing the budget escape route (share jeep - cycle rickshaw - 28 hour train journey) I used the power of Western currency to get lazy. Private car all the way to the airport, two hour flight, airport pickup straight to the hotel.

The cab to the airport was a great investment. In three hours I travelled through three countries. The England-in-October chill, rain and clouds of Darjeeling melting into a Spanish summer as we moved down the hill, and ending up back in the blistering hot plains of West Bengal. All set to a truely vertiginous drive through narrow, spiraling roads with sheer drops at each corner.

And, of course, tea. But, again, a dramatic difference as the journey went on. From the upper slopes of Darjeeling, where the plantations grew on slopes so steep that I have no idea of how anyone actually picks the tea, to the foothills where fields the size of cricket pitches spread as far as you can see. The amazing thing is how neet the plantations were. Picked so evenly that the tops of the tea plants looked like a crocquet lawn suspended three feet above the ground. And then every five minutes there was a factory shop where you could buy the tea that had been picked just a week or so before.

The flight was, well, a flight, and given Delhi's reputation for touts, the hotel's airport pickup was a good plan. Cheap too, which I learned later was more out of self-interest than a desire to give its customers a good deal - the owner was telling me that the touts were so bad (or good, depending on your viewpoint) that as few as one in ten guests were arriving from the BA flights that arrive in the middle of the night. I knew all about the "calling a mate who pretends to be on the hotel reception and says that the hotel is full" trick. Wasn't aware that they'll sometimes actually have someone waiting outside the hotel to tell you in person.

Anyway, my first impressions of Delhi were fairly mixed. Far less obvious poverty, but also much less hustle and bustle - charm - than Mumbai or Kolkata. More charm than Bangalore, of course, but as we've established, so does Hull. My first night was spent around Connaught Place - the hub of New Delhi, and part of the Luytens-designed new capital. So a weird mix of English architecture and style, and Indian traffic and street hawkers.

And this mix, I think, is how you end up with an Indian restaurant where you can catch live Westlife covers while you eat your tandoori platter...

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