We fly from Bangalore to Delhi and pre-pay a taxi 190rp ($4) to go to the airport hotel “Lohia”. We pass a sign saying “Clean and Green Delhi” and an electronic sign tracking the Carbon Monoxide levels. The driver doesn’t speak English and the taxi is firing on one cylinder but after a lot of pointing and hand-waving (since we can see the hotel) we get there. It’s on the frontage road just below the airport access freeway and so the one-way street is busy and noisy. Some large trucks and a man pulling a cart load of water melons with his bicycle are making their way down the road-all in the wrong direction and therefore against the wall to wall direction of the traffic. Every vehicle blows its horn continuously. Three unattended cows cross the busy intersection: Dad, Mum and (I think) daughter cow. Traffic gives way to them but the only thing that the Daddy cow could be aiming for is the Internet café across the street. It’s probably the pile of garbage that they are making for, it’s a common sight on any Indian road or freeway.
I remind the hotel’s owner that we are after a non-smoking room (we have pre-booked this one at about US$76/night) and I am told that will not be a problem but he then tosses a deodorant spray to one of his assistants who runs ahead to the room. The room is windowless and very dreary, the plumbing works (although it’s old and everything leaks) and the place is clean but, as normal in any Indian Hotel, only half the lights work. My bedside light is missing its shade, there is no light bulb anyway and there are wires hanging out the top of the fixture.
(Most of the hotels do now use the new low-energy bulbs). The hotel corridors badly need a clean and a coat of fresh paint and I simply cannot understand this. It should be possible to maintain the hotel with supposedly cheap Indian labor rates and I am going to add this to my quest to understand India as much as I can.
Luckily I don’t spot the rat until the morning. The bathroom exhaust fan is so poorly fitted that there are several fist-sized gaps between it and the surrounding wall and that allows me to see into the ceiling crawl space-and the rat. George Orwell never had it this bad.
I can get an acceptable airport hotel bedroom in the San Francisco Bay Area for $76/night. Lower end probably but painted, clean, electricals work and to code, plumbing newish and working. Definitely no rats. I am amazed that I cannot get that in Delhi. Ramesh had already cautioned me that, to get American/Western accommodation quality, I will need to pay at the upper end of American room rates but I refused to believe him.
Christine and I have Saturday afternoon and evening free and we set out to explore old Delhi, some of the markets and to have a decent Indian dinner. The hotel gets us a taxi and we head off to the recommended Chandni Chowk Bazaar and a determination to chart our own course and to get to know this place. Lonely Planet: “Old Delhi’s bazaars are a head spinning assault on the senses: an aromatic muddle of flowers, urine, incense, chai, fumes and frying food, and a mindbending array of things to see”.
The taxi driver had pretended to speak English but he actually doesn’t and so, when, after thirty minutes, we become hopelessly clogged in Delhi’s traffic we struggle to understand the fact that it will take us another hour to get even close to where we need to go and also that vehicles aren’t allowed in the area we are aiming for-it will be rickshaws only. We instead chose to get dropped at “Cannaught Place” in New Delhi, an area of broad avenues laid out by the British Raj and now a busy shopping area and it’s packed with people shopping and the street vendors selling books, food etc. Now I need a bathroom but there are none. We head to one of the public bathroom fixtures placed sensibly at many intersections but it’s locked. We head down into one of the new Metro’s stations (the 2010 Commonwealth Games were recently held in Delhi and the place did a lot of good preparation and clean up for that) to look for a bathroom but are told that there isn’t one. Back at street level I see a McDonalds and, sure enough, there is a bathroom there - a line of five men but I will soon be relieved. Most dark street corners have a man peeing against a wall.
The original colonnaded buildings still look fine but the streets are packed with people and the sidewalks in a jumble of broken concrete decay with open, and unmarked, manholes with bottomless drops into the dark and large electrical cables snaking everywhere. But everyone is happy and, in what we are learning is a typical Indian style, intent on getting their business done. The place is full of noise, bustle and color and a million things to gape at. We struggle to find an interesting and fun restaurant and so, after a forgettable meal, we go in search of a taxi and accept a ride in a tuc-tuc (golf cart) for a cold and windy ride back to the hotel where the owner tells us that we should have gone to Old Delhi by the new Metro.
It’s tough being a tourist and things don’t always work out. I will hate the comment from a friend that I know is waiting for me back home: “You mean that you spent a day in New Delhi but didn’t visit Old Delhi?” but we will keep trying to get to grips with this country and to get what we can out of it. We loved Southern India but had the benefit of staying with our good friends Ramesh and Lakshmi and seeing India partly with their help. Now we are by ourselves here in Northern India for the next 17 days and we already have a large part of the Lonely Planet’s 1200 page book on India read and re-read to help us on our way.
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