16/03/19 Kem drove me last night to the airport and the lady at the desk made me realise I only had the Indian visa application form printed, not the visa itself. Luckily she was happy to request someone to print the visa for me and I left Mauritius on time.
The only Chinese passenger was sitting to my left on the plane and played videos on his phone without earphones. So considerate… but I didn’t say anything because we had no entertainment on board, and I fell asleep anyway.
After a stopover in Mumbai where I had to pick up my suitcase and re checkin, I landed in Delhi a bit early and Lexa, our tour guide for the next 2 weeks picked me up with another couple from the UK.
I had some room service food for dinner (the palak paneer I like) and met Becky, an American single mum living in Hawaï who will be my roommate on this trip.
17/03/19 I met the rest of the group and another guide Maysha. The guides gave us some introduction in the morning about Bamboo (the organisation) and what our travel is going to be like in the next 15 days. The main idea is that for all the trips they organise, they give back to the local communities or animal shelters.
There are 20 million people in Delhi, 1.8 billion in India. 80% are hindus, 20% mostly siks, muslims or christians.
Today we explored Delhi using multiple transports; the van, motorbike tuk tuks, bicycle tuk tuks and the underground metro which was a nice relief from the crowd we had on the street. The metro was surprisingly clean and modern, even with carriages for women only. The smell was very spicy everywhere and changed every street corner we turned into on the tuk tuks. We first stopped by a rooftop from where we saw people playing kites and from where we had a good view on the place where the locals prepare the spices sold on the market around. While on the tuk tuks, some of us were bombarded with water balloons, as the locals were getting ready to celebrate Holi so they had all the equipment ready and like to target the foreigners driving slowly through the narrow streets. There was no way for us to escape!
We walked through the spice market where we bought some tea and spices for which they gave us recipes. Later we bought colour powders and water balloons as we will celebrate Holi when we will be at the volunteering house later.
We had lunch at a local fast food restaurant which looked very fancy in the street madness. A lot of poverty was overwhelming and some of us were not so hungry after seeing all of that. There was a lot of street food, which didn’t look safe at all to us, a lot of beggars and of course cows everywhere that no one really notice, as the locals are so used to them running everywhere. As they are considered sacred they can run freely on the streets, drivers would rather have a car accident then bump into a cow.
We had a welcome dinner at the hotel where we shared some fun stories (ask me about the dead rabbit) before we went out for a last drink. We found this fancy empty bar (it was a Sunday) where we danced on pop music but also learned some Indian moves thanks to a group of locals who were keen to share the dance floor.
We ordered drinks and were not sure whether the ice cubes were made of filtered water so we tried to ask the waiter who could not understand us. After 5 min of trying to explain ourselves he brought a glass full of ice cubes ?. We then asked other customers to translate the request for us and got told it was not made of filtered water so we only had bottles drinks.
18/03/19 Our first stop is the India gate, which looks a lot like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. We felt like superstars as Indians wanted to take pictures of/with us.
Next we went to a giant step well called Ugrasen Ki Baoli, 60m long. We bought some snacks for the road.
Back at the hotel for checkout I left a backpack with some things I won’t need for the next few days. We shared a bottle of tequila on the bus and had some fun trying to pour some in our bottles while driving ?.
