I arrived in Delhi at the grand hour of 2:30am three days ago. The flight was okay, as flights go. China Air is a recommendation. I thought the aircraft and the service was as good as any and better than some. But flying is as much a state of mind as it is anything else and on this trip my state of mind wasn’t that good.
I really can’t tell you why I didn’t feel good, but for the whole flight and for the first day in Delhi I had a headache and mentally felt down.
Day two in Delhi saw me surface with a smile on my ugly mug and I went sightseeing.
Delhi is an interesting city. It’s huge, very polluted in every way imaginable and crowded beyond explanation. But the people are just people and so I felt safe. Yes, you get hassled incessantly by rickshaw drivers, beggars, people, kids and the Indian culture of officious bureaucracy. Yet I find if I smile and wait and don’t show my frustrations, the beggars don’t hassle so much, people smile back and the ingrained, unhelpful bureaucrat that seems to sit inside many Indians becomes kind and somewhat helpful.
I took an auto rickshaw and had a great morning touring a few sights. The Red Fort, a huge Mosque I can’t remember the name of and a few Hindu temples. We also drove around old Delhi and experienced the old markets.
I stayed in the Tibetan Refugee Centre of Delhi which was lovely. Sort of Ganzi light, no nomads but plenty of monks and tibetan culture. The hotel cost me $30 for 3 night (yep! ten bucks a night) and food cost less than $2 a meal. I had a western loo and a shower that didn’t work so I bathed at the sink each morning in luke warm water – luxury.
This morning I had fun getting to the airport for my flight to Varanasi. The dive was by far the fastest and hairiest ride I’ve encountered in India. Boy did this guy drive fast. He was also colour blind and had a canny knack of being able to squeeze his car into the smallest spaces while picking his nose and spitting out of the window. He also dropped me at the wrong terminal. Which I didn’t realise until he’d left.
Indian airports are not places to come to if you are feeling at all impatient. Everything takes a lot of time, is considered most carefully and stamped three times. It’s fun if you can chill-out and it’s mind-blowingly hard if you can’t. After my initial trip here with Harvey in 2003, I’m now firmly in the chill-out corner.
Right now I am on an India Air plane to Varanasi. I’m typing this into my phone on a fold out keyboard. I seem to have come out the other side of my worries and am looking forward to the next month. I’m trying not to judge any of this or the people, even when they spit on the floor in front of me. Even when they piss and shit everywhere, even when the place stinks to high heaven and you can’t see the ground even once during an hour’s flight because of the pollution.
The world continues to turn and this country with all its issues does have a wacky specialness about it.