Arrival in New Dehli

Stepping stiff and weary off the plain at Dehli Airport, India shakes you out of your comatose state very quickly.

The airport is in the process of a total rebuild and so is pretty shambolic. There are several clocks on the wall which are labeled with the names of capital cities, but showing all the wrong times. However, on switching your mobile on, it quickly tunes in to the local network and automatically adjusts its time to the local hour. Passport control, collecting luggage and customs are all managed with the minimum of fuss. What awaits us is test no. 1 – the taxi to the hotel…..

Avoiding the numerous touts offering rides in to the city, it is relatively simple to get a taxi from the official taxi rank. Tell them where you want to go, pay the money and find the cab. Our cab is a rickety, old fashioned, grubby affair. We only have one suitcase each, which should fit easily in the boot. No, it doesn’t… When the boot is opened it reveals a big tank, which we assume is for fuel, taking up half the space inside. One case goes in, the other will just about squeeze on top of it – but the boot lid will not close. There is no rope to hold it down, so we just have to leave it as it is and hope for the best.

We hop on board. The long-haired rug-like cover on the back seat looks as if it has had the whole population of Dehli sit on it at one time or another, without ever having had any kind of clean. I shut the car door – the handle to close the window falls off. It immediately starts to rain. There is nothing that I can do to close the window, so sitting on a flea ridden seat, getting wet, we are now ready to hit the road to town.

As we start off on our journey, we bounce along over the ruts and potholes that are unavoidable on the road leaving the airport. There is a slight, but definite, uneasy feeling that we are sitting on a car bomb, as thoughts turn to that tank in the boot. But at least we don’t part company with the luggage!

The road to the centre of Dehli looks pretty new and seems really good. The driving, however, is atrocious! And I mean, completely, unbelievably, atrocious. There are 4 lanes, all clearly marked, but completely ignored by everyone on the road. If any space opens up for a second or two, it will be immediately occupied by one of the swerving, honking vehicles. Due to the sheer volume of traffic and the state of repair of most of the vehicles on the road, progress can only be made at a fairly sedate pace. This is just as well as there would be multiple fatalities if it was any other way. The countless vehicles are a mixture of battered taxis, like the one we are traveling in, dirty, dusty, packed buses, 3 wheel motorized rickshaws, bicycle rickshaws, motorbikes, mopeds, and smattering of newer cars, which are not destined to stay new looking for very long!

To my eternal joy – there was an elephant!!! It is the equivalent driving into London from Heathrow and passing an elephant in the slow lane of the M4! I wish I had had the camera ready…. The elephant was plodding along, seemingly unconcerned by all the chaos going on around. We had enough time to see it’s beautifully decorated face and trunk and we put-putted by in our ancient taxi, before it disappeared into the distance behind the mechanized hoard.

The closer we get to Dehli, the traffic gets slower and more cramped. There is a sense of a seething mass of humanity being squeezed into a tiny bottleneck, simultaneously passing, jostling, shouting, honking, arguing, scraping, braking……

At one point, while at a complete and utter standstill, there is a very vocal argument between the driver of a bus stopped alongside our taxi and some of his passengers. While the bus creeps forward, inch by inch, the voices get louder, decibel by decibel. Very soon there is no room to move and the bus is literally an inch away from our taxi. At this point, the bus driver’s patience seems to snap and he expresses his displeasure by standing full on the accelerator and revving the engine as hard as he can while going absolutely nowhere. He could shoot forward any second, obliterating anyone and everything in his path.

It is about now that our driver reveals that the price we have paid for the taxi will get us dropped off in the centre of Dehli, but if we want to be taken to our hotel, there is an extra fee to pay…. It is raining and chaotic, we are tired and dirty, so agree to the cash-in-hand supplement. It is not too long before we are dropped off outside the Raja Hotel – home for 2 nights.

I won’t dwell on the hotel – it worked out at approximately 9 pounds each per night. There was a relatively comfy bed and hot water, and we were so tired we weren’t too worried about anything else!

A little later on, we were back out into the streets of Dehli, this time on foot.

Pedestrian Dehli is not that different to traffic Dehli…. There is another massive crush of humanity, men, women, old, young, loads of kids - now add to this mangy dogs and cows wandering loose through the streets alongside the 2 legged population.

It is night time in an area called Paharganj. It is a fascinating stroll up and down the road. It is completely dark and there is no street lighting, but everything and everyone is lit up by the towering neon lights from the hotels, single light bulbs dangling over the roadside stalls, along with the fires under the food sellers pans of bubbling oil. There is the impression that you could buy virtually anything you could ever need, clothes, housewares etc, from the side of the road, but we settle for some bottles of water.

Not to be outdone, the sky now joins in as flashes of lightening are added to the other lighting effects. We can feel big, fat globules of rain starting to splash our faces. A storm is coming – time to get inside and prepare for tomorrow.