Indian summer

Saturday, 08/12/2012 – 177 A.D.

So, after surviving a nightmare six hour journey over dangerous roads next to lethal ravines while crammed into the back of a small minibus with 19 other blokes, what do we decide? Why, to do it all again!

We had to really, it was the only way to be sure. Our flight out of Kathmandu was at 18:40 and we had to be there two hours before for check-in. Okay, so maybe we had a bit of leeway, but the document we had said the gate would definitely be closed one hour prior to take off. The Tourist Bus leaves at 07:00, but it takes 9 hours…if everything goes okay and there are no delays! No, it was microbus or bust for us. “But, James!” I hear you cry, “What if there is some kind of problem with the microbus?” I hear you, but some things are best just not thinking about.

So, we were up at 7 for breakfast, which for me consisted of a slice of toast. I was feeling lots better this morning, but still a little lacking and taking it easy. Just before 9 we were squashed into one of the Suzuki taxis, which gave me a mysterious brown stain on the knee of my freshly-washed jeans. A little after that we were back in Microbus Town and being herded towards the nearest available vehicle. Actually the Pokhara stand was a lot less crowded and crazy than that in Kathmandu, so our stress levels remained at manageable levels.

Notice the presence of the lady on the right. We had four of them in the contingent for this trip, and it makes a big difference, not that I said anything to any of them. Nope, I was going to take my turn on the window seat and keep cool, calm and collected all of the way, sick bag in my jacket’s inside pocket if needed.

The journey got under way and was smooth enough. The continuous bhangra music was a bit loud, but I had my iPod to hand and The Sex Pistols can drown out anything. The first rest stop came about any hour into the journey and I noticed the guy who’d been sitting in front of me strolling around and knocking back an extra large can of beer, which was a bit fresh for 10 o`clock in the morning. However, come the proper rest stop for lunch an hour later Tim was unfortunate enough to witness the guy making himself sick in a watering hole. Boy, was I looking forward to the next leg sitting behind him! Another curious sight that we saw was a Western woman braving the microbuses like us. I suddenly didn’t feel so brave, until I saw she was with a Nepalese bloke, so that doesn’t count

The rest of the journey went fine, sorry to disappoint all you fans of exciting blog posts (I could make something up if you like?) Kathmandu was not a place I really wanted to see again so soon, but at least we’d arrived in plenty of time before our flight and it was still daylight. In the taxi to the airport my appetite returned with a vengeance. All I wanted was some greased-up stodge a la Macdonalds. In any other city I would have got it, but not here. This is Kathmandu, where fast food restaurants don’t show their neon signs, even at the airport. A cheese sandwich constructed of wooden bread from the snack bar had to suffice. 

[Tim opts for the type of snack that food poisoned people tend to avoid.]

  

Despite having the least high tech facilities in any airport I have ever been to, the security staff at Kathmandu certainly knew how to pile on the security checks. We must have been patted down on about six separate occasions by the time we set foot on our plane. The airline we’d be flying with was Spicejet. An Indian carrier, they name every one of their planes after a spice. Ours was named “Dill”. Anyone who remembers early 90s playground slang from North West England will now have a wry smile on their face. In fact, speaking of flying out of places, for all its lack of size and antiquated facilities, Kathmandu is the only airport on this trip that we fly both into and out of. Err, unless you count Heathrow and Manchester, which we don’t.

The flight lasted barely an hour, yet the Aussie in the seat next to me knocked back two cans of beer. A fine way to use up the last of one’s Nepalese notes! I intended to give mine to the guy from the hotel who was picking us up at the airport, hoping to do it subtly enough so that all his fellow staff didn’t see and falsely suppose I’m this great big tipper. The new terminal at Delhi airport is a dream to experience – modern, efficient, spacious, with no chaos. The guy drove us back through streets which again seemed remarkably devoid of bedlam – were we really in the Indian capital or had we been on the wrong flight? He also had some pretty funky music playing on his stereo, and I came close to asking him where I could pick up the CD.

We’re staying three nights at the Hotel Aura. It’s down a dusty, crowded street with lots of similar-looking hotels, but at least it does look nice from the outside. Should you trust a hotel based on how good its lobby looks? In my experience, it’s sometimes yes, sometimes no. Check-in was fine and everything seemed to go smoothly, though out of the corner of my eye I could see our driver talking to one of the other staff about the tatty Nepalese notes I’d just given him, presumably wondering if anyone in the whole city would bother to exchange them.

We were shown to our room on the third floor. I always like to be high up in hotels, but they’d allocated us a double room, and we specifically said in our booking that we required two beds. Okay, so it’s probably the widest double bed that I’ve seen on this trip so far, but I’d still have to share it with my brother. The porter tells us there are no twin rooms free tonight, but there will be one available tomorrow which we can move to. Given that we’ve spent the whole day travelling, we’re not going to stamp our feet and argue the toss. We’ll just call them tossers when they’re not listening.

There was just time for us to head up to the rooftop restaurant for a belated dinner. Reasonably hungry, but not willing to chance anything, I was going to adopt the line from the classic Goodness Gracious Me sketch and ask for “the blandest thing on the menu”. As soon as we were seated, however, the waiter told us that there was only Indian food available. Oh well, I still had an apple back down in the double room, even though I’d already had one today. Still, if one keeps the doctor away, two must make you super-healthy, right? Who cares, just so long as there’s a distinct lack of 'lacto fun'!  

Sunday, 09/12/2012 – 178 A.D.

Sunday on the Indian sub-continent – hurrah! We’d slept okay on our wide double bed, but the room is next to some strange pipes and there are constant trickling, gushing and dripping sounds behind the walls. It sounds a little like people are washing themselves like we saw them doing out in the Nepalese countryside, i.e. with water, a bucket and the open air.

Breakfast was okay, but for me there was only cornflakes, and who takes them with warm milk? Ugh! Speaking of warm, the temperature was heading for about 20 degrees today – second hurrah of the morning! Could consider getting the shorts out again! I’d already packed them away for next year and those three days of heat we get in an English summer.

The porter turned up at our room, hoping to collect some laundry (and make a tidy commission out of it), but we had none for him. Instead we asked about moving to a twin room and he started to make out that the twin rooms were very cramped and less space than the doubles and blah-blah-blah. Eventually he agreed to show us one when it became available at 12 o`clock. We would not see him again for the rest of the day.

The hotel has a small desk close to reception where you can organise tours, transport, etc. We wanted to get our three Indian train journeys booked, and the manager had assured us the previous evening that their man would be able to assist. Currently he was busy helping a young couple sort something, so we went to Plan B which was to find an ATM somewhere close by. That went smoothly, but by the time we got back Travel Guy was still dealing with the couple. Then began a strange time for me in which I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. On the one hand I wanted to wait for our turn with Travel Guy, but the couple were taking ages. It wasn’t quite 12:00 so we couldn’t move to our twin room, yet my stuff was all packed up so there wasn’t any point going to the room. And so I sat waiting around in the lobby, aware that my sightseeing time in the great city of Delhi was dwindling.

A game of chess later, we were still in the lobby. Gawd knows what that couple were doing – planning their wedding maybe – but they were bloody ages! To make matters worse, a dodgy guy who lingered about the lobby and referred to himself as a travel agent kept coming up to us and asking if we wanted to come down the street to his place because he could sort our journeys out for us. Not wanting to walk into high commission rates (but not wanting to tell him this either) we kept having to make excuses as to why we wanted to sit and wait for Travel Guy, even though he was taking ages. Eventually I broke the cycle by getting up and asking if our twin room was ready, seeing as it had gone midday. The man in the suit manning the desk had no idea what I was talking about. Explanation occurs and he barks things at various members of staff, who bark things back. In amongst all this another guest comes down to check out, which in my experience takes two minutes maximum, yet the guy ends up being there for nearly half an hour! For my part, I stand around like a spare part at a wedding, wondering if the man in the suit has forgotten about me. Eventually I give him a verbal nudge and he says that there are no twin rooms available, but there is a guest checking out at 17:00 and if I can wait until then I can have that room. Biting my lip to conceal my seething rage, I agree to this crappy offer.

Fortunately Travel Guy has just become free, so Tim and I sit down with him, even though both of us are ready for our lunch. We will be at that desk for an hour and achieve absolutely zilch. You see, all we wanted this guy to do for us was to log in to the Indian Railways website and book seats for us on three trains, but oh no, that would not make him any commission. Should have seen it coming, but we were keen to avoid having to book them at the bedlam of a Delhi station. So for all that time he farted about trying to make us take minibuses over trains (no more minibuses!) and saying that so-and-so train was full and blah-blah-blah. That was annoying enough, but his phone kept going off and he kept answering what sounded like extremely trivial calls. Then his fellow travel agent kept coming up and asking him things which disturbed proceedings. By the time he asked us  how much we were paying for our room at the hotel here I very nearly blurted out, “What the bloody hell has that got to do with anything?” All I could see were the hands on my watch ticking away.

At least Travel Guy was also conscious of the time and, having realised we weren’t going to pay inflated minibus charges, he came up with a cock and bull story that he couldn’t book our final train journey down to Mumbai because rhubarb-rhubarb-rhubarb and we should hotfoot it down to New Delhi station and do it ourselves in person. Why now? Because it’s Sunday and it closes at 14:00 – half an hour’s time. Thanks, mate, you could have told us that an hour ago and saved us all the trouble! What a wally!

The day hadn’t been going well, and it didn’t get any better as we rushed up to the door of the New Delhi Foreigners Ticket Desk to find it closed slightly before time. Instead we decided to start sightseeing…right after lunch! But we weren’t in the right sort of area so we jumped on the metro and went a couple of stops to Connaught Place. This is the heart of New Delhi, the area where the British built their capital. There are malls and lots of trendy clothes shops, and where you get these you tend to get fast food chains. Sure enough, a Macdonalds came our way and we ducked inside, though I was dismayed to see no beef was on offer, given that we’re in a Hindu country and the cow is sacred. The McChicken burger I ate was not the spicy kind which Tim got, but it wasn’t really what I was after. Plus it was difficult to eat, given we had to sit outside due to lack of seating, then had to keep moving on every time a group of beggars approached us.

We would only get to see one attraction in Delhi today, but it is arguably the main one to see, The Red Fort Complex (Lal Qila). This was built in the 17th century by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan. It’s an old residential and governmental complex, which reminded me very much of The Forbidden City in Beijing. In fact, it got me thinking that both these places were being built on opposite sides of Asia round about the same time. And I’ve been to both of them!

I’m afraid there’s not a great deal I can tell you about the place that Wikipedia can’t, but we arrived in late afternoon just as the weather hit that absolutely perfect point when it’s warm, but not too hot and you can see long shadows from the slowly sinking sun. We’d read up that foreigners had to pay considerably more than locals to enter (though not an extortionate sum), so no surprise there, but we were pleasantly shocked to see that we were entitled to jump the extensive queue on account of us shelling out more.

By the time we left the Red Fort we were ready to head back on the metro and check into our twin room. Upon arriving at the hotel, the manager had not received our message that we would be changing to a twin room. Again, we explained the situation. Again, there was more barking at staff and conversations that we were not privy to. Eventually the manager sent us off with a member of staff who took us to a room down the corridor. He opened the door to show us what was still a room full of other people’s belongings, rubbish, and which stank of ale. He said that they were a family who would have come back at 17:00, but were still away, but they would definitely be back by 20:00, at which point the staff would move them to a different room and we could have this one. We asked if the room would be cleaned before we got it – sounds like a stupid question, but the way things have been going, you never know!

In the end we didn’t take the room. Sure it had two beds, but we didn’t want the guilt of having some other people hassled into a different living space because the hotel had ballsed-up our booking. Besides, it was on the ground floor and we’d probably hear every single word that got barked from reception. Instead I told Tim to try and imagine the pipes in our double room were like those relaxing water sounds from those electric powered fountains you can get for your lounge.

It had been a crap day. Although I’m not quite 100% yet (pretty much though), I hope my readers won’t begrudge me a drink at the end of it. We hadn’t found anywhere near the hotel that sold ale apart from a highly dodgy “Beer and Wine Shop” that was for the most part a hole in the wall where customers and the shopkeeper exchanged bottles and notes. Upon fighting our way inside through the crush of raving alcoholics shouting for their cravings, we saw that virtually everything sold here was super strength, including the beer. Now, I have been in some off-licences in my time, but I’d never experienced anything like this. Upon barging my way out again I was treated to the sights and sounds of an Indian wedding band striking up a tune before some kind of march took place. That was kinda cool, but also a little ker-azy. 

Welcome to Delhi? Welcome to hell-i!

(Sorry!)