What you don't pay for in money, you pay for in time

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The underbelly of travelling cheaply is that compromises have to be made in oder to lower the cost. When we booked Wongdhen House we chose it for its value, being fairly cheap yet fairly good condition. To save money we booked it for two nights only - the 7th and 8th. Because check in time is noon, and our flight arrived into Delhi at 4.30am this morning (the 7th) we agreed to wait until noon for a driver to pick us up.

Cue eight hours of waiting. There is only so long I can spend disinterestedly reading Reddit before it becomes a chore. Ultimately it was eight hours of nothingness: it wasn't even boring. It just felt like a stretch of absent-presence. Marc Auge describes airport waiting rooms as non-places designed to be almost outside time and space; I think I understand what he means now.

By 11.30am we began looking out for our drivery but an hour and 15 minutes later and he was still a no show. Unsure of what to do, and with the help of several different kind strangers, we eventually decided to take a registered cab. It was a 40km drive across Delhi. It was 40 minutes of fear, anxiety, and exhiliration scrunched into a hurtling metal shell. At first I feared for my life as the driver, Sanjay, weaved in and out of busy motorway traffic but I soon began to fear more for the safety of others as bicycles, entire families on small mopeds, and people walking the middle of the highway came within inches of being struck by everything else on road. The people here are unafraid. As E said, this is a chaos that everybody understands and lives and so it isn't really chaos at all.

The cab pulled up across the road from a large Sikh temple and after spending half an hour finding the New Tibetan Colony, coming face to face with some of India's poor, and being the only white people in a very local part of town, we made it to Wongdhen. Whilst waiting in the airport I had mentioned to E that I would like to get away from the areas that are either overtaken by capitalism or commodified by it because of its "lack" of capitalism (i.e. turned into a tourist attraction), to visit places that are able to fully be themselves, and it feels like this area of Delhi fringes on that.

We could have paid more and weld have got here without the anxiety, the fear, and the time spent motionless but then we also would have got here without the excitement, the laughter, or the time spent being exuberantly lost. What you don't get by paying money, you get by paying in time.



https://secure.flickr.com/photos/129365625@N07/

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