Delhi
October 1998: When you prepare to leave to India, your thoughts are different than those when you leave for Europe. When you leave to Europe, you may think of the clothes you will wear and how they will fit with the places you will visit. You plan nice dinners, shows to enjoy, and long walks on the promenades of European capitals. You probably would not give thought to bad food or undrinkable water, to mugging or contracting horrible diseases, to stray animals roaming the streets and colonial cars fuming on the roads. For India, by contrary, you start by taking shots, visiting your doctor in the and trying to put on the insurance the shots you obviously want to take for travel. “I want to get immunized. No, not for travel. Just for here. You know, with so many things you hear” If you are able to get by only with hepatitis, tecnis and diphtheria vaccine you are OK but the book is asking for so many others and if you take all of them also it comes the constant danger of malaria. If you read the whole section of Lonely Planet of possible diseases you can get in India and you are just a little on the chicken side, just forget about traveling. With so many things listed you wonder if you will not fall down in the Airport lobby. But India is the second most populous country and when you think how many people are living there, you start giving yourself a slight chance of survival. And anyway some other friends went there and came back in one piece and no matter that they were a little sick there, they are OK now and they tell so many stories. And not only them, but you heard that is not so easy like in other countries in Asia, no matter that for the average traveler “those countries” are difficult. You heard about the pollution, about the dangerous roads, about the heat and about the dozen or more people who died in a restaurant eating vegetarian food because I-don’t-know-what-herb was inside which was not supposed to be there, and, in shock, asking a colleague from India about that, he said placidly ” It happens”. We were done with the shots and we planned the trip for the middle of October.
We planned a 3 week trip with two stopovers in Romania, country where we were born, to drop and eventually take back our one year old daughter who we thought would enjoy staying with the grandparents and giving us a break for visiting a small part of the subcontinent. I visited the Indian Consulate and received on the same day a 6 month visa, no matter that I would stay only two weeks: “Everybody gets a 6 month visa , Sir. This is the only visa we have. It is $50” no matter that all the books were saying differently. We decided a long time ago for Rajasthan, finding in the Strand a Lonely Planet guide, and looking in some magazines which have remarkable pictures of the forts in the area. Taking a 3 week vacation is a blasphemy in New York but with the market taking a nose-dive finally everything went through and we found all 3 in a Romanian Airline flight to Bucharest. In Bucharest, like usual, everybody was in arms to see our daughter and for the first time we were not the stars of the visit. Otherwise the same Balkan invitations with a lot of drinking and food which makes you eat only sprouts for weeks when you come back in the States and not touch alcohol except what you take in the church mass. Everybody wants to see the baby so you offend anyone who may get refused to do so, so you carry poor baby all over and everybody is betting who she resemble with. After you hear on and on the same things and after you got really stuffed that you bet they will bring a crane to move you to bed you cannot wait to get in the plane to India no matter what. Of course you shock everybody there that your vacation is in India. “Why India?” you already heard in the USA starting with some of your work colleagues, many of your “European” friends, the daughter’s pediatrician, your dentist, the wife beautician and finishing, amazingly with somebody encountered in the Indian Consulate who had the same destination. The family and friends know that ” he likes very eccentric things” and so they stop hoping to get an answer. They would have been more comfortable if you traveled like many other people in Europe in expensive hotels, renting midsize cars and eating in talk-about restaurants or going to the opera or something similar. Or your American colleagues would have like to see you going to Disneyland or to Virgin Islands in an all-inclusive resort. But you chose India and that shocks the most the friends from Romania who, in a nouveau riche society, would spend a fortune just to go for the New Year, 4 days or a week, anywhere in the west or the USA. For them you are the weirdo because coming from the US you have the money to go anywhere you may want but you choose, ungraciously, to go to India “in that heat and smell and where the gypsies are coming from. Why don’t you go to Paris?” At the airport, the security people ask us in disbelief how come we are going to India when we told them three times that we are not going for business. They look at us like we have a problem, maybe we are the first Romanian to go backpacking in India, and the only thing which helps us is the US passport which categorizes us as not exactly fully Romanian. Dressed in black jeans and T-shirts, we are waiting for about one hour for the plane to depart because of some delayed connection flight from Tel Aviv. Otopeni airport is obviously not the most hectic airport in the world and also not the most crowded we realized when we looked outside and we saw three planes in the entire airport. Finally we depart and the stewardess comes to us to offer something speaking in English. In her utmost surprise we answer in Romanian and we ask for some water thinking that it may the last bottled water drank without fear of punctured bottles for about two weeks.
We arrived in Delhi at 4:30 am. The air in the airport is stuffy. We get through the passport controls where an almost awake shiks stamps the papers almost without looking and, taking the luggage, we go to the main lobby to book a cab and find out where you can book also the DTDH Delhi City Tours. Looking around obviously tired and kind of lost we got grabbed by some guy from an office who sells us tickets for the City tour (apparently the right one) and miraculously offering in the same time cab rides into the city, no matter that the official booth is apparently the next one, and making also hotel arrangements for a nice a very clean room. He asks us to be at 8:00am in a particular place in Conaught Place where the tour starts, and he emphasis that this is the only place for a city tour. His friend with the cab takes the receipt and we find ourselves in no time outside in the very muggy night going to a hotel through the streets of Delhi totally deserted at that time of the night. Actually is difficult to call streets because, the airport being far away it looks that we go through fields and ghost town. We drive for about half an hour and at one point the driver stops in front of the building totally in dark which he says is the hotel in Conaught Place. Disappointment was high but at 5:00am in the morning after a night on the plane is hard to be fussy about how Conaught Place, the main square in Delhi, should look like and we got in the hotel. The guy from the reception shows us the room which was neither nice nor very clean and is asking us to pay two nights considering that being 6:00 am we should pay at least half a day for that remaining time no matter that we have to be at 8:00 out for the City Tour. Being taken for a ride is OK but the hotel quality being terrible we dragged ourselves for another hotel which turns to be better and where we take a shower and lay in bed for the next two hours preparing to get some rest before the city tour.
But to our surprise at 7:00am a knock in the door wakes us up and a guy is asking very politely if we do not have a tour booked for 8:00am because he would like to wait for us and bring us to the it. We start dressing totally surprised how the heck this guy found out about our tour but anyhow, how nice of him to come to pick us up. But the surprise is even bigger when we leave the hotel because instead of a car the guy is leading us through several streets to a travel agency where a red head man takes our voucher and introduces us to our guide, which turns out to be only a driver with no guiding skills. His name is Subhash, speaks fluently English, and as the story goes it turns out to be a very nice guy, extremely helpful and remarkably funny and in time we developed a friendship which continued even today. He has a very good sense of managing the crazy Indian roads but in the same time he is doing his best to return home in one piece. He takes us with a small Ambassador car, the one most of the Delhi cabs are using, to the city tour. But, in all this speedy arrangement we realize that this is not the tour we paid for no matter that they do all matching promises and in no time we understood the trick: the guy from the hotel had an arrangement with this agency and for a tip he told them about brand the new tourists in his hotel who have a tour booked. The guys from the agency came to pick us up, gave us the city tour for free because they are not making money on the voucher and brought us in their agency in order to convince us to take a longer tour with them. So they asked us where we go and for how long and right away they come with a discounted tour of the whole Rajasthan with car and driver , 14 days for $440, same car and same driver we may use in Delhi Tour. Not completely awake and totally unprepared we tell him that we have to decide at the end of the day. The decision was difficult because we heard many stories about driving in India and no matter what we heard the reality was ten times worse. We planned the whole trip ridding the night trains. But when you get for the first time in your life in Delhi at 6:00am after one night in the plane and jet-lagged the prospective of finding tickets and getting cabs for the train station and all sort of arrangements of this kind look a little bleak so we already started to bite in the guy’s proposition. So we start out Delhi Tour with Subhash a first day of a 14 days trip which turns to become extremely interesting. At 1:00 we stop for lunch a very different approach from the type of travel we were used to, in which you rush the whole day taking advantage of every moment of daylight. We enter a restaurant which was not looking extremely pleasing but he guarantees for the food quality. For the first and last time in India I had a meat dish which was delicious but my wife , less courageous, settles for butter nan with water.The nan was excellent and from then on we keep asking for all sorts of breads in the restaurants which actually are freshly made in front of you. In the evening totally tired after almost 48 hours without sleep Subhash brings us back to the agency. In the condition we were then we were obviously sitting ducks for the guy, so we bite in their deal, paying and making arrangements to see Subhash the next morning at our hotel. Returning to the hotel we are up for a surprise because our bathroom was taken over by wine flies attracted by the lit bulb we left behind and the window open. It was the first contact with all sorts of aggressions by insects, animals and people that we will encounter for the next two weeks. Calling the reception doesn’t help except for the tip he cashes, so we decide to take a quick shower sharing it with the flies.
Shekhawati – Haveli in Mandawa
The next morning Subhash gets us on the road and we get on our way to Shekhawati, an area with magnificent painted haveli that are located in the northern Rajasthan, in the countryside. If we were able to see the road and traffic in advance for only 10 minutes we are absolutely convinced that we would never have rented a car. In India renting a car with driver is cheaper than a car without driver and after I saw the Indian roads I understood why. Beside the fact that the Indians are driving on the left side, a British inheritance, the roads in India are, especially in that rural area, extremely narrow. The roads are the main artery for transporting goods on trucks, gaudyshly decorated and being called Lorries. They roam the Indian roads and they totally master them in the nights when their number swells to three times more than during the day. Because of this, night is a very dangerous time to be on the road, most of the accidents happening then, when the marijuana is combined with some alcohol to keep the driver awake!!! It is a very common occurrence to see early in the morning turned over trucks or accidents that apparently happened recently. If you drive daily this “occurrences” happen so many times a day that after a while you become immune to it. The trucks, or in the general the bigger vehicle is the master of the road, and you realize this thing in the first 10 minutes on the road, when motorbikes and bicycles are flying for dear life in front of your car and your car does the same thing in front of the lorries. The animals roaming the roads, called “traffic inspectors” by our funny driver, are an interesting presence. Goats, sheep, the holly cows and not so holly buffaloes, camels, and even elephants are occasionally surrounding the car like in a safari and the only difference is that you do not have a gun or binoculars but only a desire to get quicker back to a not-so-stalled-traffic. But the traffic is going at Indian pace at around 50km/h max. Our Ambassador Car is new, made in 1996 based on unchanged model designed by the Brits in 1938 And you don’t even want to go faster considering the small car which does not have seat belts only because they are useless in a car that, we are assured by the driver, is blessed and protected by all Gods: “Here we have Lord Shiva, here Lord Krishna. We have a Bible from USA and the Koran. All the Gods blessed this car Sir. You don’t have to worry about. No Problem.” Unfortunately we are not very convinced about that and reading about the tremendous number of unblessed cars involved daily in accidents and the number of not-so-religious casualties listed in a central board in Delhi, we keep looking at the road like in a video game with associated screaming by seeing something suspiciously close.
Shekhawati area is quite poor, comparing with several others we saw latter and you can tell right away by its narrow one lane roads. I was looking on the window and I could swear that the our tiny Ambassador car was taking the entire road. So when I was seeing a truck coming totally facing us at the beginning I was sure that we are done: my last view in this life would be the motor of a TATA vintage truck, but by some delft miracle both Subhash and the truck were swerving full speed at exactly the right time and, in a cloud of dust coming from the theoretical shoulder, the truck was gone and we kept going, still alive and kicking, and calmly Subhash was uttering his mantra ” No problem Sir”. The road is a shared resource and everybody takes a small slice of it. Starting with the lorries and bikes, on the road, I mean physically on that very narrow one-lane strip of moth-eaten asphalt you find people, peasants who are coming or going to the field with their sickles, women dressed in the beautiful Rajasthani saris caring water jars on top of their head, overcrowded buses with as many people on the roof as inside (“Outside Air Conditioned, Sir”), kids playing ball, old man sitting and talking, 18 people hanging in, on and from a tuk-tuk, animals eating, eagles eating dead animals, 5 start tourist buses, hayvans dragging themselves through the heat, camels with plows going to the field, skinless lorries (only seats and the exposed motor), and many others. And this is because the road is the Indian life, the vessel crossing through and connecting the urban and the village life. After 7 hour in these charming conditions punctured by a stop at a Midway restaurant, oasis of comfort in the middle of the wild condition of traffic, we reached Shekhawati at the Juhnjuhnu resort, a collection of inside painted huts with a swimming pool in the middle, outside of the city. We left the luggage and after a very quick snack we got back into the car to get to the city. Subhash, reluctantly, dropped us in the city and promised not to forget us there more than 2 hours. We started to explore the streets that had a particular smell we couldn’t quite define. No matter where we went the smell was overwhelming and it made us sneeze constantly. After about an hour, we got to a remarkable building from Juhnjunu, called Ketri Mahal. Totally deserted is the perfect habitat for bats who are squeaking from each corner, flying around your head and depositing guano all over the building. After two hours in Jhunjhunu, with the smell penetrating all our tissues and the bats squeaking in our ears from the top of a bat ridden palace, we discover the smell’s source, a whole collection of animals metabolizing in the center of the city aside with dogs eating some of their dead peers. The view, taken almost from Dante’s Inferno, made us decide to call the day and look for shelter our resort. We were longing for Subhash to come and pick us up and finally protected by our tiny car we got to the hotel surviving the first day of Indian countryside.
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