India!

We arrived in Delhi around 11pm. Customs took a long time and even though we arranged for airport pickup from our hotel, no one was there to get us. We found out later that their online reservations weren’t working. We got a prepaid taxi instead but didn’t get to our hotel for another 45 min to an hour. Even though it was so late at night, there was terrible traffic. This might be because there are almost no traffic rules; lanes are a suggestion, everyone drives on the shoulder and anything is allowed on the highway…camels, cows, bikes, rickshaws, trucks, families walking…anything. As crazy as it is, driving here doesn’t scare me. People seem to be pretty good drivers and aware of what’s going on around them.

Since our reservation was messed up, we actually got a better room than we booked and didn’t have to pay anything extra. We were exhausted so we ate at the hotel restaurant and went straight to bed.

The next morning, the brother of our airport taxi driver picked us up to take us around the sights in Delhi. There’s only one official tourist office in Delhi, the rest can sometimes be scams or overpriced, so we specifically asked him to take us to India Tourism Delhi. Well, we soon found out that practically every tourist office in Delhi is named India Tourism Delhi. And we procrastinated booking our train tickets so we wanted some advice on that. He took us one of those tourist offices but we eventually figured out that it wasn’t the right one. We left there and went on to sight seeing. Our driver took us to India Gate, the Ghandi memorial at the spot where he was killed (we saw his glasses), Parliament, and the National Museum. The National Museum was really badly lit and probably would have been more interesting if it had been air conditioned and I knew more about Indian history.

We also drove through a monkey garden where there are monkeys and cows everywhere. There was even a monkey eating a banana. Animals just roam free around the city. There are tons of dogs everywhere that don’t seem to belong to anyone…it’s really sad.

We decided we would just go to the train station to book our tickets. Our driver kept wanting to take us back to the tourist agency but we finally got him to take us to the train station. The day had been pretty stressful so far with everyone telling us something different and sending us around in circles so we were at a point where we just wanted to get everything figured out. They sent us over to fill out some form with the train numbers on it, and the guy who did it for us said it would be better to go to another place where they could book everything at once since we were doing the Golden Triangle loop. We said fine and our driver took us to a different place. We talked to a guy there and it turned out the train to Agra the next day (Thursday) was booked and the Taj Mahal is closed on Fridays. That would have put us almost 3 days behind. The guy we were talking to suggested we hire a driver for our entire trip and said it wouldn’t cost very much more. Since the trains were booked, we didn’t really have a choice, and we also thought it would make for a more relaxing trip if we could go at our own pace and stick to one driver. The plan was for our driver to take us all the way to Jaisalmer, stopping at Agra, Jaipur, Pushkar, Udaipur, and Jodhpur along the way. After our time in Jaisalmer, he would then drop us at the train station there and we would take the 19 hr overnight train back to Delhi. Also all of our hotels, etc were booked with the trip so the only extras we would have to pay for would be food and admission into tourist spots.

I’m sure this was the first time where we overpaid for something, but really, it was still pretty cheap and seemed like the better option. So all there was left to do was hope there would actually be someone there to pick us up in the morning.