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Delhi Again! – November 13th
Well, here we are back in Delhi after a long day of travel yesterday. We left Kochi at 7:30 am for a 10:30 flight, but the flight was delayed until 12:15 (it actually left at 1ish). I believe all our domestic flights have been delayed.
We arrived at the Delhi airport at 5 pm, purchased a government taxi ticket to Paharganj, the district our hotel was in (these fixed price tickets are about 1/2 the price of the private cabs). But, these drivers don’t speak English & we didn’t have the street address for the hotel, only detailed directions. There are so many hotels here, especially in the Paharganj area near Connaught Circle, that the cabies don’t know many of them. Our driver did his very best, stopping along the way as we drew closer to Paharganj to ask other drivers & people on the street. Most of them didn’t seem to know much about it! Then, like a small miracle, we stopped to ask a stranger on the street. This man read our lengthy directions, understood them perfectly, said he wanted to go that way & asked for a ride. He directed us to within a block or so of the hotel, then got out at his destination.
We drove through a packed, extremely narrow market street for the length of at least 3 city blocks. The street was full of people, all stalls were open. There were a few cars squeezing through, plenty of motorcycles & bicycle rickshaws. It wasn’t really wide enough for a car street, but this is the way in India. The teeming market with it’s lights & multi-coloured goods looked very magical. It was a good intro to our last day in India!
Our hotel is good, quite retro looking, with the room freshly painted in torquoise, quite clean. The Paharganj area is an alternative to the expensive Connaught Place, which has many upscale shops & hotels (e.g. Benneton). Yet it is tightly adjacent to CP. We’ve seen lots of younger, hippy-looking travellers on the streets here, but also many middle-aged people, mostly European & English.
Today we plan to go to a centre for street children near here, to investigate the work they’re doing & see how we can help. They offer a safe place for children to get off the street for a while, to eat, wash their clothes, & to get tutoring & learn more about hygiene etc. It’s run by a mizo-swiss couple (not sure yet what mizo means).
We leave at 4:30 am tomorrow, Wed the 14th for our return trip to Vancouver, via Hong Kong. Oddly we also arrive home on the 14th! (the international date line I presume).
Namaste
