Delhi: Old, New, and Newest

Diwan-I-Khas (Hall of Private Audience), Red Fort, (old) Delhi

By the time we made it to Delhi, in all honesty, we were ready to move on from India. The day of our arrival, we hid out in our small hotel room, unwilling to tackle the tangled streets of the old city or to try and figure out the journey across town to where the government buildings stood. Despite our bad attitudes, the city turned out to be rather a pleasant surprise.

Delhi is a series of historical cities, overlaid one on top of the other, each in fact constructed as the Indian capital of a foreign power: Afghan, Mughal, British. "Old Delhi," such as it is, survives from the Mughal era, when it was the seat of power for one of the world's greatest empires. We visted the Red Fort, whose geopolitical history, if surprisingly brief, is no less impressive than that of, say, Beijing's Forbidden City -- though its architecture, while distinguished, is not as spectacular as that of its Chinese counterpart.

Old Delhi is linked to the British-built New Delhi by a conveyance of the newest Delhi: the city's fresh-out-of-the-wrapper metro system, which can whisk you rather disorientingly from a chaotic and rubbish-strewn alley in one district to a splendid monumental avenue in another. Our three-day stay wasn't enough to develop any sense of how it all fit together, and we saw almost nothing of the city's vast slums, but at the very least we were afforded a glimpse of the kind of contrasts that make Delhi -- old, new, and newest -- in its own way a suitable encapsulation of the nation it governs today: no longer as the seat of a foreign emperor, but as the capital of a complex and often disorienting democracy.

A row of white Ambassadors, traditional car of India's government elites, outside central government buildings near the Presidential residence, New Delhi

Fountain and government buildings, New Delhi

The brand-new Delhi metro

Two Views of Rajasthan from the Train

Our only camera was a little Canon PowerShot SD1100, no bigger than a box of Altoids. It had its limitations, but it was capable of impressive clarity and agility. We're not professional, or even really amateur, photographers, so doing what we could do with the PowerShot was plenty for us. Anyway, it managed to pluck these two images of Rajasthan's countryside from the blur that raced along outside the window of our speeding train.

Varieties of Travel Misery

A backpacker is a wretched creature. Your body dirty, your clothes rumpled, unfashionable, and smelly, you spend much of your time reduced to a primitive state of seeking out the basic necessities of survival: food, shelter, toilets. The language barrier renders you illiterate, and indeed barely able to communicate at the level of an articulate four-year-old, while you blunder about blithely violating customs, social norms, and basic rules of civility.

The locals, accustomed to the notion of rich Westerners, find you cheap and bewilderingly uncouth. Those who are more used to dealing with your type figure they have you pegged: what you want is to drink a lot of beer, listen to Bob Marley, and eat banana pancakes, in between being overcharged for taxi rides. Your fellow backpackers are mainly keen to impress upon you how much more intrepid they are than you, while your expat compatriots just find you embarrassing (though the feeling is very often mutual). Every so often you find yourself in your grubby hostel or third-class train carriage thinking wistfully of the mid-range comforts you could afford if you weren't trying to stretch your dollars through half a dozen different countries -- and if you happen to stumble into a high-end restaurant or a luxury hotel (maybe you're still looking for that toilet) the contrast, and the prices, make your head spin.

Of course it's not all bad. Of course your trip is filled with astonishing experiences and serendipitous pleasures; of course you can find all kinds of grounds to smugly pity the high-rolling tourists who will never have the experience of meeting the locals in the hard seat section of a Chinese train, or of the stark and simple joy you feel at the early morning appearance of a chai walla. And anyway, once you've been home a couple of months, all the bad parts begin to disappear from memory.

But sometimes things just suck. And in recognition of that simple fact, herewith I present three visions of travel misery for your schadenfruede-soaked pleasure.

1. Top Bunk Purgatory


Jaisalmer-Delhi Express, India. Top berth in a sleeper class carriage. It was hot, cramped, and dirty, and the train was sitting motionless at the platform, our departure delayed indefinitely while the conductor banged away at a broken bunk with some sort of hammer. The fans weren't working. Rachel thought it would be a good time to take a picture of me.

2. Despair on a Train


As I mentioned above, traveling in hard seat class on a Chinese train is a great way to meet locals -- who are, it must be said, mostly solicitous and kind. It's also a great way to spend a night jammed upright among at least six other people, enveloped in a noxious cloud of cigarette smoke and the stench of un-flushed squat toilets, dodging the phlegm noisily hocked up and spat on the floor all around you, wishing for the comparative serenity of an Indian sleeper car.

This photo is actually slightly posed, though the sentiment was real. It was taken shortly after boarding, when we were starting to get an idea of what our night was going to be like, but before we were invited to take seats in what looked to us like a completely full compartment. I'll be bragging about the misery of that night for decades.

3. Washed Up in Likeng


Our first evening in Likeng, a tiny and painfully picturesque village in China's Jiangxi province, the owner of our guesthouse told us she was turning in early because she had to get up before dawn to slaughter the pig. Sure enough, we were awakened at three a.m. by the harrowing sounds of the deed being done ten feet directly below our window. In the morning there was blood on the rocks and a major butchering operation underway in the family's living quarters.

Likeng is a widely recognized historic village, under assault by waves of day trippers during holiday periods. It happened to be where we ended up parking ourselves during the May Day week, when, we were told, it would be foolish to try getting around or finding a hotel room anywhere in China. We stayed put in our simple room, with its hard beds, smelly squat toilet (yes, it's a theme in China), and wide variety of available pork-based dishes, venturing out to take pictures of the village or walk along the lovely path through a narrow agricultural valley surrounded by pine-wooded hills. For two days, it was charming. The third day, it began to get a bit old. The fourth day, it rained. We were confined to our guesthouse, sick of our books and our conversations, and totally fed up with the simple pleasures of the countryside. I spent much of the day on the balcony staring like an angry hunchback at a world I had come to loathe, no matter how beautiful it might be. While I was occupied with this, Rachel surreptitiously took my picture, capturing for posterity a moment of the impressive self-pity one can work up while enjoying the trip of a lifetime.

The Great Thar Desert: Dawn

The only clouds Jaisalmer had seen for a month hid the stars that night, and they muddled the dawn, but the dawn was beautiful nonetheless, bleeding in from behind the gray. The sand was combed by the wind and it picked up the uneven glow of the sky. I took a few pictures.

Camel Safari Pictures: The Great Stinky Desert

So it turns out that camels fart constantly. During the whole of our two-day trek through the Great Thar Desert outside Jaisalmer, we were enveloped in a cloud of methane, much of which was generated from all the deposits left behind by other creatures on the desert floor, but to which our camels made prodigious contributions as we rode.

I'd heard that camels were uncomfortable to ride, but the abstract knowledge is nothing against the actual agony of the experience itself. You spend your first ten minutes on the back of a camel marveling at the view, the stilt-walking feel of the ride, and the comedy of the animal itself. You spend the rest of the time desperately looking forward to getting back down again.

We rode out through bean fields dried up for the summer, across a vast scrubby plain (stopping for a break at an atmospherically-abandoned village), to an isolated sand dune where we spent the night sleeping in the open air under a field of clouds that hid the spectacular stars we had been promised. We were cripplingly sore, the food was awful, the camels were surly, and there were scorpions in our blankets (okay, one scorpion). But, also, it was amazing.

The picture above, as well as the second and third photos below, are by Rachel.







More camel safari photos here.

North India Photo Highlights

Tombs of the Maharajas, outside Jaisalmer, India, at dawn

Rajasthan, Delhi, and the Taj Mahal...North India highlights from the Flickr page are here.

South India Photo Highlights

Fishing boat at Chowpatty Beach, Mumbai

It's time to revisit this blog and finish out the posts - I'll start by pointing out that we've been getting the Flickr page organized. The next few posts will be links to the "highlights" photos for each country, which now feature captions for pretty much all the pictures (if you want to see more than that, feel free, but that makes you pretty hard-core...)

So, South India highlights are here.