Delhi 26th February 2007

I left Bangkok on 25th Feb at 18:15 and had an enjoyable four-hour flight to Delhi. I was sitting next to this Asian man from Birmingham and we had a really good chat, he was returning from Japan where he’d had a business meeting. He had spent seven hours in Delhi on his way to Japan and was afraid to eat or drink anything at the airport in case he got sick; that included bottled water. He was spending seven days in Delhi this time and he got his company to put him up in a four star hotel in the city. He wasn’t particularly looking forward to it, which I found pretty funny! I tried to reassure him that India wasn’t that bad, once you got over the smells, noise and people spitting / shitting / pissing in the streets. I showed him my guidebook and he’d never seen a Lonely Planet guide before and thought it would be a real handy thing to have!

I got a pre-paid taxi at the airport into the Main Bazaar in the Paharganj area of the city, which is where a lot of the budget guesthouses are. Although I’d pre-paid, the driver still tried to scam me! He told me that he couldn’t find my guesthouse (in fairness it took me a day and a half to locate the one I was originally going to stay in) and that he’d bring me to a travel agents and they would ring the hotel for me. This is another well-known scam as they ring someone who tells you that the guesthouse is full. Sure enough the guy at the other end of the phone told me that the guesthouse was full. No problem. The guy in the travel agents kindly told me that he could find me a hotel – how nice of him, and how lucky I was that my kind driver brought me there…

He asked me how much I wanted to spend and I told him 200 Rupees (about £3 GBP), and he told me that that was “not possible, Delhi very expensive, lot of tourists”. I told him that it wasn’t a problem and said that I was leaving and would find my own place. He called out to the driver and somehow got his name right (!!!), the driver tried to get me to go back and get a hotel off the “travel agent”. The advantage of getting a pre-paid taxi is that I have a receipt and if I don’t sign it and give it to the driver he doesn’t get paid. I insisted that he bring me to the area that my guesthouse is in otherwise he is not getting the receipt. This worked and he drove me for about ten minutes (just shows you that he had no intention of bringing me to my original hotel) to the market place, I insisted on checking the street names with my map, which cheesed him off even more and I eventually signed the receipt and sent him scowling on his way. I found a guesthouse for 250 Rupees (about £3.50 GBP); it’s got three beds in the room, hot water (sometimes) and is on the top floor of the guesthouse beside a 24-hour restaurant. It’s clean enough and I can rotate which bed I sleep in, and I don’t hear any noise from the restaurant once I put my ear plugs in.

On Sunday 26th I went for a walk to Karol Bagh market, which is where all the motorcycle shops are located. It’s a four Kilometre walk from my guesthouse, the weather was overcast so it was a fairly easy walk, well it would have been if I hadn’t been stopped by every empty tuk tuk in Delhi trying to get me on board. I took a couple of diversions down interesting looking streets and by the time I got to the market it wasn’t open. That’s not to say I was late, just the opposite in fact, I got there at 08:50 and everything was shut. That’s what happens when you spend so much time in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, you expect everything to be open by 06:00. I hung around the market and answered some new questions. Of course I got the “where you come from?” “What’s your name?” “Where you going?” “Are you married?” and “What’s your job?” but I was also asked, “What are your hobbies?” I hadn’t heard that one before and had to think about it. I suppose my main one is photography, followed by motorcycles / bicycles. Is listening to music a hobby?

One of the first bike shops I tried were Madaan Motors and the guy in there seemed nice enough and very knowledgeable, they repair and restore all sorts of old bikes. He showed me a Triumph, a Norton and a BSA that they were working on. He brought me off to his “warehouse”, which was a Kilometre away. He had about eight spotless looking Enfield’s there, although they were a bit more than I wanted to pay. He told me that he can refurbish one of the second hand bikes, which would take about ten days and I could buy that for 60,000 Rupees (about £750 GBP) and that he would buy it back from me in six months for 60% of the price he sold it to me for. Sounds like a pretty good deal. I also visited Inder Motors, who I’ve heard good things about on the Internet. The chap there was very busy and asked me if I could come back on Tues (lots of shops are closed on Monday’s here). So I’ve made a few enquiries on the Internet about Madaan Motors (some good comments, some bad) and I’ll go visit Inder Motors on Tues and make a decision then.

I went back to my guesthouse after the motorcycle market and had some lunch, I decided to ease into things and had a chicken biryani (chicken and rice) and it was ok, a bit bland, but that’s what I wanted for my first meal in India. No point in getting Delhi Belly straight away! I had a lovely milky coffee as well, I don’t really drink coffee normally, but there’s something about the coffee over here that I like (probably because it’s made from sewage water and therefore reminds me of Starbucks..)

I decided to take a walk to the Red Fort, which was about four kilometres away, and it seemed a good idea at the time. I lost count of the amount of times I was offered a cycle rickshaw, tuk tuk or taxi, but it was a lot more times than I wanted it to be. It took me a bit over an hour to walk there and as I walked down Chandni Chowk (the main road to the Red Fort) I was overcome with the smells from the stalls lining the road. Incense filled the air and this was mixed with the smells from the food stalls and I sneezed a couple of times as the spices ticked my nose. The stalls spilled onto the road and there was just enough room for cycle rickshaws and cars to squeeze through the throng. There were people everywhere, I would have liked to have turned a corner and found a bit of road to myself. No chance.

I got to the Red Fort (photo above)at about 16:30 and bought a ticket (100 Rupees) and took a stroll around the Fort. The Red Fort is a pretty amazing sight as the walls extend for 2Km and are 33 metres high. Construction started in 1638 and took ten years to complete. It was built by the Mugal Emperor, Shah Jahan, but he never got to spend much time there as he was deposed and imprisoned in Agra Fort by his son Aurangzeb! Sounds a bit like a Harry Potter book! I spent just under two hours strolling around and made sure I was outside to catch the sunset as I had hoped that the retreating sun would light up the outer walls of the fort. Unfortunately the sun was partially obscured by clouds, but the walls did glow a bit in what sunlight there was and I got some good photographs.

I got talking to (accosted) by a local when I was at the Red Fort and he wanted to talk, so I told him that wouldn’t be a problem. I got the usual questions (see above) and he told me a bit about himself, he said that he was a film producer, but there was a smell of bullshit in the air.. He wanted to go for a cup of tea, but I politely declined and told him that I was jet lagged from my flight from London (for some reason the smell of bullshit grew stronger). I spoke to him for about ten minutes and made my excuses, he wanted to know if he could walk with me and I said he could if he wanted. As I expected, he tried to get me to visit some shops with him (to get commission), I wasn’t in the mood to go shopping as I’d been walking all day and had a long walk back to my guesthouse. He then tried to get me to visit temples and libraries, teashops and food halls. There’s no such thing as a free lunch or indeed a free walk, it’s the old walking cash machine syndrome here, most people in the city are befriending you for some reason, which is usually to get you to part with your hard earned (I’m sad to say).

Once I left Chandni Chowk the beautiful smells gave way to the less savoury ones, nothing smells quite as bad as stale urine baked in the sun especially in conjunction with cow shit! I passed about five urinals on my way back; they were obviously there on my way to the Red Fort as well. I even used one of these establishments, (well I had drank three litres of water) which was an assault on the senses. Not only did people urinate in the urinals, they also had shits in them! I got back to the guesthouse after refusing god knows how many offers of tuk tuk, taxi and bicycle rickshaws and I was shattered. It’s amazing how draining walking through crowds, heat and refusing rides can be. I had a cheese and salad baguette in the roof top restaurant, downloaded some photographs and crashed out at 23:00.