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Published: February 19th 2016
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Temple
The first temple we visited in Delhi Our first stop.
We arrived at New Dehli Airport in the late evening, having never been to Asia before, obviously this was a huge change to our lifestyle, it was a completely different world! There was rubbish everywhere, smog from the polution, vehicles all over the place and that was just the first impressions. We left the airport after a painful wait going through immigration and met a man who we booked to pick us up from the airport and take us to our hostel. Everything seemed to go quite smoothly which is quite lucky as i didnt have a clue what was going on!
As we walked through the airport to get to our taxi, we stopped at an ATM to collect some money, we drew out 10,000 Indian Rupee which is approx. £100 and carried on walking through the maddness with our driver. Still in shock we finally got to the car in the airports carpark which was a small van type taxi, something i expected to be honest. When we got in the car to head to our hostel everything i expected was soon removed from my expectations. Believe me, nothing will prepare you for your
Grand Bazaar
This was the street our hostel was connected to. This is the morning after our first night. first ever stop in India! The car had no working seat belts and there seemed to be no road laws what so ever, this already was too much for me. After about 15 minutes we finally came off the main highway and entered the town and after many near misses from huge lorries, packs of dogs and cows my seat was soaking wet. I think i smoked about 5 cigarettes to try and control the stress. When we got into the town, the craziness on the road was still there but i think we managed to build abit of trust in the drivers. Its really strange, they all drive like mad men but its very rare you ever see an incident on the road!
Finally we reached our hostel, i
Our driver helped us out with our bags and took us down a grey, dark, dingy alley way that i can only describe as smelling like a public toilet. We arrived at "New Kings Hostel" (i think) and instantly realized that going for the cheapest place you could find is not normally the best idea. We was welcomed to "your room isnt ready, you will have to stay
Our View
This was the delightful view from our first hostel in this spare room", to be honest, with it being late and after the flight and all the driving all we wanted was to sleep in a bed. It wasnt the confiest bed in the world but it did the job. Unfortunately i dont have any pictures of the room but you'll have to take my word for it.
The morning after we was informed our room was ready and was pleasently surprised, the bed was nice, it was fairly quiet and had a nice view (see picture)
After we dripped pur bags off in our room we got swiftly taken to some tour office, complemebtry of our hotel, we was under the impression they was taking us to towm, still, without a clue what was happening we agreed to take this "free taxi" . when we arrived at the tour office, the man there explained that we need to see the real india and delhi wasnt the place to see, he insisted we take our private tour guide around rajistan abd quoted us a rediculous price of £1000 each! Ha. Not a chance was we paying that. We explained that we needed to save money and planned to take public transport but he didnt take that as our excuse, after about an hours conversation and being told all trains and buses are fully booked (being fresh to india and quite nieve, we believed him, unfortunately) we managed to knock him down to roughly £250 each which included a 23 days tour of rajistan with our private driver "Yogesh" and hotels where not included, seemed like quite a good deal to us and we was happy. Now that was over with, we thought we was going to actually go to the town now and get something to eat... We was wrong.
The sales man we dealt with informed us that because we went for such a cheap option our driver isnt the best at speaking english and he comes from a poor family, he tried to explain that the office was helping him out to feed his family blah blah blah. Trust me, it sounds genuine when theyre saying this stuff but its complete nosence.
Our driver yogesh came to collect us and introduced himself. Yes, his english wasnt that great at the time. We tried to explain to him that we was very hungry and wanted to go to the town to try some indian food, nope.
He took us to see our first temple (picture).
Laxminarayan Temple, it looked really nice from the out side, definately didnt serve food here. We first walked around the gardens and our tour guide yogesh insisted on taking lots of photos of us, pretty cool of him... He was interacting with us alot which kind of helped us build abit of a relationship, and didnt just seem like we was following him around. As we was there they seemed to be cleaning the place up abit as the priminister would be attending, it always confused me with india, they take such good care of their temples etc but they never seem to tidy the streets as good...? Anyway, temple was nice, itm took us about 20-30 minutes to look around, when we got to the praying spot a security guard was there "protecting" everyones shoes... He insisted we handed over our phones and laptops and put them in a safe, we complied and took the key... Baring in mind this was our first full day in india and i assumed this was the standard protocall. Let me just let you know, after this time i must have visited over 100 tenples and not one has had a security guard watching peoples phones. Anyway, back to the point, we handed over our electronics and went inside to have a look... Yeah it was pretty nice i must admit... I'd never seen interior like it before, the statues of the idols of their gods etc. They all looked amazing. As we went back to collect our shoes and electronics the guard kept asking for money, we was under the impression this temple was free? He kept saying "money, money, tip" wait, a tip for what? He wasnt even in the room where he was supposed to be guarding the shoes. We declined to give this man a tip and he got quite angressive, shouting in hindi, we didnt have a clue what he was talking about so we just simply walked off with our goods. What a dick.
We then went back to our hotel stayed one more night in delhi then headed on out of that hell hole. Jeez it was awful.
Next stop, Mandawa, Rajistan.
Things kinda got better there.
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