With our plane delayed by a couple of hours, we arrived in Delhi around 1.30. After finally collecting our bags (and with a precautionary stop in the airports fully functioning toilets) we got into our pre-booked taxi. Unsurprisingly, even in the car park our driver was tooting more than a sensitive derrière after a Friday night binging at the Maharajah in Bexley village.The roads are insane, with a mix of cars, vans, motorised rickshaws, bicycles and seemingly suicidal streetwalkers. There is no order, as three lanes apparently translates as five and often cars simply drive on the other side - or otherwise will simply appear to park up in the middle of it all. In the city, cars and people are wedged together tighter than the loose skin on Gordon Ramsey's face.
It's not surprising though, as with a population of 15 million crammed into the bastis (shanty town districts) the stories of buses toppling over and passengers getting taken out by overhanging cables seems very conceivable. The busiest sections are probably on the metro system. Although we avoided the rush hour traffic, the coaches were packed. If we'd been a tin of peas we were near enough mushy by the end of it. It's all fascinating tough - even aside from the constant hooting from what my mum affectionately calls the toot-toots. Today we visited both a practising Sikh Temple and Jama Masjid (the largest Muslim temple in the world). This seemed strange as with 75% of Indians being Hindu, yet; as the architectural landscape of Delhi and the North is heavily influenced by the Moghuls rule (Persian based settlers) this seemingly makes more sense. Both the temples and the mosque required that we remove our shoes as we were very conscious not to offend or disturb. The Sikh Temple also required we covered our heads amd washed our feet (This may have just been so we didn’t make their shorts dirty as we trod over and around them as they prayed). Further to this we have also seen India Gate (memorial to those killed in WW1), Parliament, Humayan’s Tomb (supposedly the influence of the Taj Mahal), Red Fort and Connault Place. Currently travelling across Agra by coach, we have seen camels, cows, elephants and horses on route as well a whole load of people stuffed in and hanging out of far fewer vehicles. Oh, there goes another toot-toot honking up our boot-boot and a man walking in middle of a duel carriageway – but then again I wouldn’t have expected anything less!
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Samuel FryTraveller Archives
June 2011
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