Delhi, India
We’re embarking on another 3 week tour, with Imaginative traveler. This one is called Amritsar, Dharamsala and the Desert Cities of Rajasthan .
We’re looking forward to a (relatively) hassle-free 3 weeks, with someone else taking care of getting us up and around. Since we’ll be on the road a lot throughout this tour, with a lot of sights to take in, don’t expect many updates between now and the 22nd.
Before joining up with the tour, we took a couple of days to explore the city a bit on our own. Delhi was much nicer than I had expected. We started in a relatively quiet, and refreshingly airconditioned, guesthouse in the Tibetan Colony (north of old Delhi), which is a quaint, gated community of homes, guesthouses, and shops, and is gratefully closed to traffic. Getting around town seemed terrifying, with the sheer number of cars, rickshaws, and cows, but after we discovered the recently opened metro system, Delhi became one of India’s greatest cities, in my eyes.
The one sight we took in here was the Red Fort, in old Delhi. The fort itself was nothing much to see (lots of plaques explaining what used to be there, or how beautiful a room used to look), but the large lawn and gardens made for a pleasant, peaceful retreat from the chaos of old Delhi. It would have been a great place for a picnic.
The most memorable experience I had in old Delhi, surprisingly, was visiting a camera shop. We needed to print some digital photos. The shopkeeper was very warm and welcoming, eager to tell us about the local celebrations going on, and the history of relevant Hindu Deities. When I asked him “where’s a good place around here for tea”, he quickly started brewing up his own tea, and insisted his was the best. He wouldn’t let us leave until we’d enjoyed a cup. Some people in India warned us that Delhi would be hecktic, and that the people would be cold. It just goes to show how much individual experiences can paint such different pictures. It depends on where you’re coming from (i.e. for comparison), what your expectation is, and who or what you stumble into on your journey.
Another memorable trip in Delhi was getting from the metro station, to our hotel, late one night. We hopped into an old-fashioned cycle-rickshaw, for the first time. For less than a dollar, the guy cranked away on his creaky bicycle, up a long gradual hill, through quiet streets, and onto the main thorough fare, where we then rode another km against traffic, to the gate of the Tibetan Colony. He then tried to continue pulling us through the maze of narrow alleys to our guest house, but we had to insist he simply stop there. We could walk the remaining 100m. After we paid him a fair bit more than the agreed upon fare – a tip of our appreciation – he actually tried to return the extra!
