INDIA, WE ARE IN YOU
So after eighteen months of planning, we arrived on the first leg of our adventure: India. We were aware when we were making our schedule that India would be a pretty intense start to our journey, but, truth be told, whilst a full year sounds like a long time to go travelling (initially) when you actually start planning, you quickly realise with a year you can only see a tiny (TINY!) amount of the world. So whilst we would have liked to start in Europe, with something a little more familiar, we didn’t want to use up time travelling in areas which we can easily access from the UK in the future.
We had already read up on what to expect from India (streets rammed with people, crazy driving on the roads, lots of scams, Delhi belly, forts, temples, beaches, etc.) yet it still felt like an assault on the senses as soon as we walked out of the arrivals gate. You have people everywhere telling you information (for example that you can’t buy a train ticket to New Delhi city centre from this ticket machine, it is local only, but they can take you to a desk to buy international tickets) and typically this would be welcome advise which you receive gratefully. But in India, 99% of what we get told simply isn’t true – it is just scam after scam after scam! The complexity of the scams is quite impressive, involving multiple people at multiple locations, fake ID cards, etc.
We elected to get an (overpriced) taxi from the airport to our hotel in New Delhi, the taxi driver told us it was a pretty dodgy area, which we didn’t listen much to, as one of the many scams is to convince you not to go to your intended accommodation and instead go to one of the hotels that the taxi takes you to, which they get commission for. But, this was the 1% case where the taxi driver wasn’t misleading us – the area was pretty dodgy. We decided to get a hotel for the first two nights, to help us ease into the adventure, but the area the hotel was in meant it was still a pretty sharp descent into a very challenging environment! After a few hours rest (we didn’t sleep much on the overnight flight so were exhausted) we headed out (still exhausted) to the train station, to book in advance some tickets we’d need over the next week or two. We didn’t end up making it to the train station (a scam we’ll tell you about in another post), but we did end up with a tour arranged to take us around all the sights of not just New Delhi, but also Agra and Jaipur. In some respects it was quite a relief to have the tour arranged, whilst it was not what we set out to do, we found India overwhelming – there is constant noise (you have to forever keep honking your horn on packed roads), the locals constantly shout at you asking you to buy something from them, there are pickpockets and scam artists everywhere, the locals want to get photos with us, there are lots of unfamiliar smells, sweet, savoury and, shall we say otherwise. Despite looking forward to coming to starting our adventure for a very long time, part of us just wanted to lock ourselves up inside our hotel, where it was relatively safe – but the tour meant we didn’t have to go into the unknown without guard (even if we couldn’t 100% trust our guardians either)!
Our tour of New Delhi took us to many places including:
- Sri Laxmi temple (Hindu)
- Old Delhi (with narrow streets you can’t get a car down, so you get either tuk-tuks or rickshaws – we opted for a rickshaw who kindly let us take some photos of me in the drivers seat – the area itself feels like you are a film set from years gone by, it’s hard to believe it is a living breathing city)
- India Gate (war memorial)
- Raj Ghat (memorial dedicated to Gandhi)
- Humayun’s Tomb (one of the first examples of the architectural style used to eventually make the Taj Mahal in Agra, and a good place to get a Taj Mahal-esque photo)
- Lotus Temple (a place of worship open to all faiths and religions, something we strongly approve of)
So after a shaky start, we have started to get a better feel for India and seen some amazing things. We have whizzed around on the back of a tuk-tuk (an experience which is only petrifying for about 5 minutes, after which point you become strangely unphased by the crazy roads), seen lots of monkeys, cows, goats, dogs, cats, yaks, etc. roaming the streets and met lots of other interesting fellow travellers from all over the world. Next stop, Agra, home of the Taj Mahal!
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