Day 21: Varanasi to Delhi

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Around 7.30 one of the hotel staff came to our room to ask if we want to order for breakfast. I was VERY furious. The nephew didn't give our order paper to his staff!! But luckily it took him a short time to prepare our breakfast and we finished our breakfast quite fast. At 8 I started to be anxious, I went down to ask for the laundry and the nephew told me it was on the way, I told him to let me know when it arrived, he said yes. And guess what, he didn’t tell me! At 8.20 we decided to come down and check out despite my laundry not ready yet. At the lobby, the nephew gave me my laundry. WTH!! I decided not to get angry because I couldn’t afford any mistakes, otherwise we would miss the flight.

When I gave the key, he gave me the total extra fees we need to pay for breakfast and laundry, and he showed me the detailed calculation too. As I checked the calculation, in less than one minute I realized something was wrong, he charged 12.5% tax to our room rate (which is a very unusual practice in India)! Lucky my math and my logic were working very well at that morning. I grew EXTREMELY furious. I told Elena and she did all the talking. She told them we never paid any taxes at all for room rates, and we weren’t told about the taxes when we checked in. Then the owner re-calculated and applied the tax to food only, which was acceptable to us, so we paid what we had to pay. When we left, I didn’t bother to say goodbye.

It was raining heavily that morning. We had planned to walk to the main road to look for rickshaw, we didn’t want to pre-book a rickshaw through the hotel because we think the price offered by the hotel was too expensive. At the main road, there was a flood at some distance from our hotel, and most rickshaw driver didn’t bother to go through the flood, they stopped at the other side of the flood, thus we couldn’t find any rickshaw near us. We couldn’t go to the other side of the flood to reach the rickshaw because the pavement was flooded too. So we decided to go back to our hotel and ask for their help to book a rickshaw for us. We asked for Rs 350 but the rickshaw driver wouldn’t go for less than Rs 400. So we agreed and waited for 10 minutes. It was the same rickshaw driver who gave us the tour the day before. This time he didn’t look friendly. But we felt relieved because we would be able to catch our flight.

I learnt one important lesson from this incident: no matter how deep you hate someone, you must always respect them and maintain good relationship because who knows if you would need their help someday. I couldn’t imagine what would happen if I had been rude to hotel people or the rickshaw driver; I think they wouldn’t care to help us go to airport with reasonable price.

I said reasonable because the journey to airport took 1 hour 10 minutes! The people who write in Wikitravel that said rickshaw to airport costs only Rs 125 must be from ancient time. Another lesson: don’t trust Wikitravel or Wikipedia completely! At the airport, the rickshaw driver asked for Rs 20 for parking, but we refused to give, and we argued a little bit. But then the driver gave up and gave his good wishes to our journey. What a sweet ending to the days in Varanasi.

Our flight was delayed for 20 minutes. During boarding, we couldn’t understand the Indian-accent English announcement so we kept checking the announcement tv. The tv showed that it was boarding time for Kingfisher (our airline was Spicejet) so we didn’t bother with the audio announcement. But then a stewardess yelled "Spicejet! Spicejet!" I was confused so I went to her to ask if Spicejet is boarding, she told me it was the final call for. OMG! What a stupid airport! And the lights at waiting room kept on blinking! We couldn’t believe we almost missed our flights!

Anyway we arrived safely at Delhi at 2. After taking our baggage, we took the post-paid cab that ran on meter. I believed we would pay cheaper for mete compared to pre-paid cab. But fate spoke differently. Our driver turned up to be a jerk! He brought us through a longer way, and the meter run very fast. For every 5 seconds, Rs 20 was added to the meter. The total price in the end was Rs 760 with additional Rs 80 for parking fee. What a crap! If only we had agreed to ask Tenzin to pick us up, we would only pay Rs 600 + Rs 80. Damn cheaters!

So we arrived at Majnu ka Tila, checked-in to monastery hotel, moved our bags from Tenzin’s office to our room, went for lunch at the monastery restaurant, hang out at G café to copy photos from each other’s camera, went back to hotel to shower, and then we found that there were so many little cockroaches in our room. I put cockroach traps and Elena sprayed insecticide to every possible corner, but the number was not getting any lesser, more cockroaches came out afterwards from under the bed. We got anxious and decided to change room. The hotel people gave us 3 keys to 3 other rooms and luckily we found 1 clean room without any cockroach. It was more expensive but we decided to take it. Finally we went to bed.

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