Travel Diaries: India pt.3

Another sleepless night followed courtesy of Mia’s vomiting and a comedy-movie snorer. It was our last full day in Goa, and we had loosely planned to go to one of the beaches to make the most of the sun before travelling inland to the colder city of New Delhi. Whatever Mia had eaten stopped us from going anywhere, she spent the day in bed whilst myself and Eden sat by the pool, now a little bit cleaner, refusing to leave a fellow soldier behind. The day was largely uneventful, somewhat unrepresentative of our time in India so far. Eden and I managed to drag Mia out of bed and over to the common room area, to have a few last drinks. We were aimlessly sinking Budweisers, when Anass appeared with a blue carrier bag full of firecrackers he’d just found leftover from Diwali. With nothing better to do, we followed him downstairs with the fresh-faced bartender, Vikram, who Anass assured me was of legal working age and paid fairly.

We took it in turns igniting the firecrackers and sparklers, which killed some time and was actually quite fun - for me and Eden. The fumes and the sound of the explosives forced Mia to voluntarily retreat back to the dorm room, where she spent the rest of the evening, and was sadly missed. The fireworks were timed quite well, as Anass was simultaneously welcoming some new faces to the hostel. An Englishman, a Dutchman and a German, all arrived in unison, and most likely felt like holy figures as they walked through the sparklers, seemingly celebrating their arrival.

The Englishman was Lori (short for Lorimer, though apparently not named after Peter), a 21-year old from Manchester, who had really annoyed us by being so easy to get along with, and only turning up the day before we were leaving. He had seen much more of the world than I had, and had some great stories to tell about Central America and the KitKat nightclub in Berlin.

The next morning we said our goodbyes to Anass and the rest of Madpackers. We hopped into the same Suzuki Swift in which Mia had vomited just 36 hours earlier, belonging to our taxi driver, Budaji. He was mid 40s, had a tuft like David Villa, and was genuinely concerned about Mia’s well-being when she was spewing all over his car. We set off for Dabolim airport, and shortly after made a pit-stop at his daughter’s school, as he had forgotten to pack her homework. It was a wholesome moment, and reminded me that these people, just extras in our travels, have lives that will continue long after we’ve left.

This prompted me to ask him more about his family. He told me he was born and raised in the same house in Anjuna, just a hundred yards away from Madpackers. He couldn’t tell me how old the house was, when I asked, he just laughed and said “it belonged to my grandfather, and his grandfather…” whilst swirling his hand, insinuating it’s been in the family for quite a while. He now lives over the road, having built his own house single-handedly, which is now home to himself, his wife and two children.

He taught us a lot during the 40 minute journey. We discussed taxes, Prime Minister Modi, police corruption, and what happens in India when you have a road-traffic collision. It was all very compelling, but we’ll save that for when Penguin Random House want to pay me a fortune to write a book based on my travels. Unlikely, I know, as even though I’m trying to seem like a clever travel writer, like Michael Palin, I know full well that I’m much more akin to Karl Pilkington on An Idiot Abroad.

We got as comfortable as we could on the front row of our 2-hour IndiGo flight to New Delhi. I was unsure what to expect, but I knew it was going to be off the scale compared to Goa. Before leaving, we had the same conversation with pretty much everyone.

“Why the hell are you going to Delhi?”

An hour in, I was asking myself the same question.

I’m trying my best to keep this little blog as light-hearted as possible. But it’s not all shits and giggles, as we’re bearing witness to extreme poverty. It’s harrowing stuff, and I think it’s important to give a true account of my experience.

The hotel had kindly organised for a pick up from the airport. Our driver looked like an Indian David Jason, and tried his best to explain what things were as we were driving towards the centre. We passed rhesus monkeys perched on the side of highway, rifling through empty wrappers in search of food. We then saw a horse with two horns eating the leaves from a tree. Deep down, we know there’s no such thing as a horse with two horns, but we all know what we saw (we have since found out it was a Nilgai, a type of antelope). The Goa roads felt tame compared to what we were experiencing now, and as we got closer to the centre of Delhi, the traffic got more bewildering.

We were in a standstill at a roundabout, amused at being unable to process the chaos, when a little girl no older than eight-years old appeared from nowhere and tapped on the window. She held out her palms and pushed out her bottom lip. She stared right into my eyes and I felt my heart sink. The traffic then began to move, and she ran back to her family in her bare feet, weaving through rickshaws and taxis, presumably waiting for another standstill. We’d been having a good laugh the whole journey until now, but the child had stunned me into silence, reminded me where I was, and seemingly did the same to the girls in the back.

We reached the edge of Paharganj, a central Delhi neighbourhood known for its bustling scene. Three-storey buildings enveloped Main Bazaar Road either side. Generally, the bottom floor is a commercial store, and the middle and top floors are the living quarters. The store fronts on the ground are flashy and colourful, proudly displaying what the vendor has on offer. Electricals, pharmaceuticals, jewellery, carpets, bags, shoes. The second and third floors consist of nondescript derelict concrete, decorated with clothes hung out to dry and electrical wires joining one side of the road to the other. Water tanks, electric generators, scaffolding, ladders, tarpaulin… all the ugliest things mankind has ever invented were in plain sight above. For every retail store there is an adjacent food joint… you can get anything in Delhi. The easiest thing to get would be food poisoning by the looks of it. Biryani, golgappe, paneer, paratha, momos - the list is endless. There’s also an abundance of “fresh” fruit and veg, each stall operated by a noisy salesman, trying to lure customers in. We exited the taxi after being forced into giving the driver a tip, and trawled through a litter ridden alleyway to our hotel.

We’d been so excited at the prospect of staying in a proper hotel, but when we checked into the Mohit Guesthouse, we remarkably longed for the comfort of Madpackers Goa. It was an absolute shithole, much like the rest of the city. Five or six Indian men in leather jackets looking like an Eastern European mafia stood behind the reception, and stared us down whilst the manager made copies of our passports and visas. The security guard-come-maid-come-waiter-come-bell boy accompanied us to our room, and when asked about the laundry facilities, spoke to us in fast fluent Hindi, assuming we understood what he was saying. Google translate has a handy conversation feature whereby I speak to it in English, and the other chap can talk back to it in Hindi, the app translating and transcribing the whole conversation. I spoke into my phone, and asked him if we can give him our dirty clothes. When the app translated my question, and prompted him to speak, he bizarrely whispered into the bottom of my device.

“How many piece of cloth?”

We then had to count out how many pieces of clothing we had, as the cost was calculated on a piece by piece basis. A strange way to measure laundry I would argue, does a big heavy towel cost the same as a sock? We asked about the terms and conditions, but he didn’t have a clue what we were asking. One thing we did determine, was that it was Rs50 per piece. Ten minutes of awkwardness followed, as the girls rifled through their knickers and I did the same with my boxers and football shirts. Fifty-four was the final number, meaning it would cost us roughly the equivalent of £28. A bit steep, but we were running out of underwear.

We stepped out to get some food and explore the area. Thankfully, I’ve never suffered with a migraine, but I ever get asked to try and guess what it felt like, I’d put my money on walking through Delhi. I was in sensory overload. My eyes were jittering left to right, up and down. There’s always something going on. A tuk-tuk is coming towards you, a moped is beeping behind you, both dangerously close to flattening your feet. A stray dog brushes against your leg, a salesman latches on to you and doesn’t take no for an answer, following you down the road. What the hell am I going to do with a 3x3ft map of the world? Beep beep. “Hello brother, where are you going?” Beep beep. “Yes ginger man, where are you from?”… Then we had to cross a main road. The trick is seemingly to just walk out and hope that nothing hits you.

The dirtiness is not a stereotype. There is a complete disregard for cleanliness and hygiene. I’m not even talking about the overflowing garbage, or stray animals wandering around, I’m talking about a public toilet sandwiched between two raw meat stalls, where freshly slaughtered chickens hang from dirty hooks. People urinating and defecating amongst markets, coughing and spluttering. It’s perplexing that people live like this in the 21st century.

We fought our way through intimidating groups of sleazy blokes pointing and staring, to the more civilised Connaught Place. A thriving hub for shops, bars and restaurants, but still ridden with aggressive sales tacticians. Even in the fast food places, they hound you! “Yes sir, yes madam”… we’d barely walked through the door to Subway before it started, almost as if they work on commission.

It felt like I’d seen more people in the last couple of hours than I’d seen in my entire lifetime, each pair of eyes burning through us. I felt like an alien, never so far, and so emotionally detached from home. My anxiety was through the roof, and it was time for bed. We got as comfortable as we could to the sound of drilling, bass music and shouting. One of the mobsters in a leather jacket came into the room to, we think, change the quilt cover. It was quite a frightening experience, he shook the quilt around, staring and smiling at the girls who were laid in bed half-clothed, refusing to leave until he had solved whatever problem he had just created.

The next morning, we woke up late for our day trip to the Taj Mahal, which we had organised through the hotel. We paid Rs7500 for a private car to take us 3 and a half hours away to the city of Agra, departing at 6.30am, to return back for 10pm. We didn’t have any text message or email confirmation or record of the payment, as we paid in cash. We woke up at 6.35am, and rushed down to reception to find the staff asleep on the floor, with blankets over their heads, in the pitch black. I said we’re down for the trip to Agra, and one of them got up and let me outside. I stood there for ten minutes before a taxi driver appeared and shouted “Agra?” out of his window. This was our guy.

We set off, and twenty minutes into the journey our driver pulled over to have a piss at the side of the highway. At this point, the sun was starting to rise over Delhi, and the sky was thick with orange morning mist. You could barely make out the silhouettes of trees in the crop fields either side of the deserted highway, the whole journey feeling a little post-apocalyptic. Groups of young men stood waiting along the edge in sporadic clusters, they make the journey from local villages so that they can be easily picked up and taken to work by passing vehicles. Our driver then pulled over an hour later to vomit red liquid at the side of the road. He advised us he suffers from travel sickness, and pulled over again to do the same thing an hour later.

We arrived in Agra and our driver said he was taking us to meet our guide. We didn’t know we were getting a guide, we didn’t ask for one, and in all honesty, didn’t really want one. A stubby middle aged bloke with a cleft lip and a fedora waddled over to the car and told me to get into the back. He squeezed into the front seat of the Suzuki Swift and introduced himself as Amit, our guide for the day. He charged us Rs4,000 for three tickets to enter the Taj, and then said it’s Rs100 for a golf buggy to take us from the gate to the entrance and back. We paid up and left our belongings in the car at the request of Amit, who said that we would save time by not having bags, as everything gets checked. The golf buggy took us a distance of 30 yards and then pulled up. I told Amit that we could’ve probably walked that, but he said it’s common for people to get attacked by the monkeys. He then asked us if we wanted to use the toilet, as there are no facilities once you’re through the gates. We thought it would be best to go, and obviously had to pay Amit for the pleasure.

Upon approaching security, the men and women are separated and go through different pat-down processes. Mia and Eden had brought their bags with them, so were a little delayed coming through and meeting me and Amit. We waited a few minutes for them to catch us up, and it was at this point Amit confirmed everyone’s suspicions that the whole thing was an elaborate scam.

“So, did the driver tell you about my fees? I charge Rs1,000 and then you give me a good tip.”

Hang on a minute pal… we’ve already paid £75, we didn’t ask for a guide but if you’re not included in that price then we don’t want you. You’ve dropped this on us now that we’re through security and you’re my only way back to my belongings that I’ve left in the car. All this after taking money off us for using the toilet and a golf buggy that we didn’t even need or want. That’s more or less what I said to him, but in a much angrier tone. He then said we could see what his service was like, and if we were happy with it, we could pay him what we wanted.

The Taj Mahal was amazing. It was overcrowded, but it felt surreal to see one of the seven wonders in the flesh. It’s such an iconic building and I’ll be able to picture it in my head for the rest of my life. But I’m not the first to write about the Taj, and this isn’t a travel guide, so let’s get back to slagging Amit off.

He overloaded our brains with information and didn’t come up for breath, and we could only make out what he was saying fifty-percent of the time. He took us back to the car, sat in the front and said “my service is now completed” and smiled at me with puppy-dog eyes. We paid him the Rs1,000, undeservedly, and he asked us where we wanted to go next. We asked what was next on the tour, to which he replied “What tour? You have seen the Taj Mahal.”

We instructed our driver to take us back to the hotel in Delhi. We knew there were three more attractions on the tour, but we didn’t know the names of them, and honestly couldn’t be arsed going through the whole procedure of paying for more stuff. On the journey back towards the capital, it hit me that the beautiful morning mist I’d noticed when we had first set off just eight hours earlier, wasn’t actually fog, it was smog. Even the air was filthy, and it was discolouring our mucus and making it black. I’ll attain any breathing issues I have in the future to my time spent in New Delhi, and not to the cigarettes I’ve been chain-smoking for the last couple of days to compensate for the fact I’m vapeless.

Our driver threw up a couple more times along the way back. Mia had the suspicion that this was also part of the scam to make us feel sorry for him. We knew we were getting closer to Delhi because the smog was getting thicker, and the foul stench of egg was getting stronger. No matter where you are on the highway, you can find a photo of Modi, even through the mist. His face is everywhere - plastered all over billboards and tuk tuks like something out of a George Orwell novel. We reach the outskirts and are stuck in standstill traffic. The children see this as their sign to run from the roadsides, into the lanes and go round the vehicles to beg for money. Our car was swarmed; a young boy around eleven-years-old was tapping on my window and putting his head against the glass, an elderly woman on the other side of the car was doing the same to Eden. I shamefully tried to avoid eye contact, but couldn’t help but look into the boy’s eyes. This spurred him on even more, he upped his game and tapped more erratically and raised his voice. I turned away and stared forwards to try and ignore him, heartlessly. On the traffic lights there is a timer, counting down to when the lights turn green - we had 86 seconds. It felt like 86 years, as more children caught wind of us rich white people sitting stationary, in the shadow of a huge billboard proudly displaying Modi propaganda, his face grinning. How he can smile down at these poor people is beyond belief. The lights finally turn green, and the beggars scuttle back to their blankets under the motorway bridges, and huddle around fires made from plastic bottles, to wait for the lights to turn red.

We had another early night. Delhi wasn’t enjoyable in the day, never-mind in the dark. On our last day, we were reluctant to organise a sightseeing tour through the hotel. We thought it best to taxi it from sight to sight, and only spent a combined £8 on 6 taxis. Jama Masjid, Humayun’s Tomb, the Red Fort, India Gate… all beautiful pieces of architecture, but extremely unrepresentative of the depravity found elsewhere in the city. It’s hard to appreciate anything in this kind of place, as soon as you start to have a laugh you’re either hassled by a shoe-cleaner who won’t go away or approached by a child with deformities. Maybe I’m too sensitive, and should be a bit more like Modi. He just smiles through it all.

I’m glad I’ve seen it, but the fact of the matter is, we couldn’t wait to get out. Next stop, Bangkok, bright and early.