The Black Hole of Delhi

We have moved into the warm pool of urine stage of the holiday. We had a couple of free days in Bangkok and there was wiz everywhere, particularly in the tourist district where we caught our bus to the Bridge over the River Kwai. The other places we stopped on that trip did not disappoint on the wiz front, either. We are pleased to announce that Matt also got diagnosable travellers diarrhoea just in time for a twelve hour bus trip. Our final memories of Bangkok are certainly pleasant ones. At least the tour bus had the situation in hand.



Here is the (current) bridge over the River Kwai.





Then came Delhi. We are now pretty used to banged up cars with no seatbelts screaming down the wrong side of the road. Delhi is a bit different though. Here people actively fight for the road. No one dares crawl through congestion because a tuk tuk will squeeze in front of you if you do. The result is vast amounts of smog and lots of old Tata hatchbacks driven by well groomed young men lurching back and forth.


The touting is also at a different level. You can get rid of South East Asian street merchants by just saying no. Here they will get within about 4cm of you and follow you all the way up the road.


The poverty here is far more obvious. After we eventually found and checked into our tiny internal hotel room (hence the "black hole") in a dusty, delapitated part of town, we caught a tuk tuk into the Old Quarter. Mistake number one. Most of the trip was spent in traffic. A couple of little girl beggars asked for some money while we were stationary on a highway, so the tuk tuk driver got out and belted the oldest one (about 10) around the head. A few minutes later she yelled abuse at him from the side of the road, so he got out again, chased her down the street, and punched her up some more. There was nothing we could do. It was incredibly disturbing.


We walked through a sacred park which is where shot Ghandis are laid to rest. After emerging from the park, a dog with bits missing (tracts of skin and flesh were somehow torn off), trotted by and we wandered past bearded old men sitting in the gutter talking to themselves.


Here is a guy sleeping, we presume, on the side of a highway overpass.




The traffic jams caused by motorbikes have been replaced by traffic jams of people. We made the mistake of walking through the Old Quarter on a Friday night. At times we could not physically move or even bend over because of the masses of people. We were the only honkies for miles, and Penny one of a very small number of females out and about, so the stares were intense.



There are also of course cows wandering around freely and beasts of burden working the streets.

We were emotionally exhausted by the end of all of that. No photos because the drive to escape was all-powerful. When we struggled back to our suburb we collapsed into a Pizza Hut up the road from the hotel. A very touristy thing to do, we know.

Time to crawl out of bed and go see some museums.