We have finally arrived in India after years of planning and reading. We have expected seething masses of people at every turn and complete chaos everywhere. We were surprised when we landed and every actually went smoothly! All of our bags made it beautifully from our short flight from Kathmandu. We went straight to the pre-paid taxi stand I read about and purchased a 250 rupee cab to Pahar Ganj. We got in our pre-paid cab and anticipated him trying to divert us from our hotel of choice for his recommendation. We successfully got to our hotel and got the room we wanted at the rate we had hoped for, much to our driver’s dissatisfaction. No extra commission for him that day for bringing a referral, oh well!
Pahar Ganj in itself is a surprising area to be the tourist hub. The paved roads are eroding back to dirt paths from the constant stream of people, cars, bicycle rickshaws, motorcycle rickshaws and cows. Flies are also surprising, India has over a billion people and probably 100 billion flies. Some areas are so thick with flies that your vision is obscured and worse yet is that they stick to your eyes. The flies must be attracted to all of the cow pies that the sacred animals leave on the streets. Knowing that this is a main tourist strip, I am surprised that they don’t at least try to sweep the streets more if they will have the cows roaming like they do.
This was the way I pictured more rural towns to be, not a busy district in the middle of New Delhi right off one of the main train stations! To be fair, certainly not all of New Delhi is like this. When we were first driving in from the airport we were on brand new 3 lane roads, saw lots of greenery and everything seemed fairly efficient. It is a stark contrast to the area where we are staying. Despite the muck, dilapidation and the chaos, Pahar Ganj was great for us since the rooms are affordable, there are lots of great little eateries around and tons of shopping.
After settling into our room, we set off walking to try to go to the central area. Every time we stopped to try to look at anything somebody would stop and talk to us to try to direct us to the Tourist Bureau and/or Connaught Place. Also along the walk there was a stream of boys who one after another touched my arm and I shouted “STOP”. If we were in Syria I would have shouted “Haram” or forbidden but then again people in Syria wouldn’t have done this.
There were a lot of similarities to Manila for me, so it wasn’t a huge shock . There were a lot of street kids comparable to the amount we would encounter in a Filipino city. The infrastructure and transportation are also extremely alike; the cows are a new twist though.
After all the walking in search of the center where we expected all of the ATMs and restaurants to be, we finally relented and got a taxi. We were tired of all of the people trying to help direct us, the boys bothering me, and the new street children friends that I made that just wouldn’t go away (I was getting hungry and tend to lose my patience when I want food).
We had our first and only all beef-less McDonald’s. Curiosity got the better of us, who could resist a curried McChicken burger?? We spent the rest of the day happily jumping from one State Shopping Emporium to the next. Tomorrow we will make our first attempt at arranging our Indian Rail tickets, which every one makes a big fuss over. Hopefully we will have luck and get all of the tickets we need.
