Things didn't work out with the hotel I'd booked in advance. I'll save the details for my catty TripAdvisor review, but what it meant was that I was tooling around the sketchy backpacker slum of Paharganj at 5:30AM Saturday with some tout the hotel had provided, looking for a place to stay. If I'd been asked before I left what I was most hoping to avoid in Delhi, I would have described a scenario a lot like that. That, or the one about being eaten by stray dogs, which, to be fair to the city, didn't happen.
The hotel I was taken to had half a dozen men asleep on chairs and couches in the front lobby. The room was a bit grubby and overpriced, and there was a tiny pink lizard in the shower, but it had an air conditioner and a bed I could pass out on for the next few hours. And it was convenient to the first hotel, in case I wanted to go back and spray it with gunfire.
Delhi, or at least Paharganj, was dusty, smoggy, and generally bananas. Outside the hotel, pedestrians, dogs, bicycles, cycle-rickshaws, autorickshaws, scooters, motorcycles, cars, cookshops, touts, beggars, and piles of building supplies shared a single narrow road.
When I went outside to buy some water and get my bearings, a series of touts attached themselves to me, each swooping in almost as soon as the last had left. They all had exactly the same series of things to say. Delhi is so poor that thousands of touts have to share a single shtick. The conversations all ended with me saying that yes, perhaps later I would go to the sketchy 'tourism office' they were recommending so heartily.
Delhi's tourism industry is a monster (if I had to be more specific, I'd probably say 'the Kraken', with Leviathan coming second). It has tentacles everywhere and dubious offices everywhere. For the first day, I had the illusion that everyone in the city was a tout. I was, though, probably the most lost-looking person in Delhi that day. In the same way, a chubby gazelle with a limp might get the feeling that all other animals were predators. On the second day, I shared an autorickshaw with a young Indian couple, who turned out to be really, genuinely nice -- the man helping the driver find my hotel, and lecturing me about not overpaying.
Paharganj is a slum by most standards, but may not count as one in Delhi, as it has both paved roads and actual buildings. The first thing I focused on, for some reason, were the power lines. They ran everywhere, singly and in thick bunches. They were supported by low posts, where they'd meet up in a huge tangle, and sagged worryingly in between. Delhi is an electrician's nightmare. It's also an architect's nightmare, and a veterinarian's, and the nightmare of any member of pretty much any other profession concerned with human or animal health, safety, or comfort.
The one huge redeeming virtue of the area was that I found a clean and very good restaurant around the corner that served western breakfasts, juices, coffee, and good thalis. It would be hard to overstate the importance of their thalis in my life at this time.
The hotel I was taken to had half a dozen men asleep on chairs and couches in the front lobby. The room was a bit grubby and overpriced, and there was a tiny pink lizard in the shower, but it had an air conditioner and a bed I could pass out on for the next few hours. And it was convenient to the first hotel, in case I wanted to go back and spray it with gunfire.
Delhi, or at least Paharganj, was dusty, smoggy, and generally bananas. Outside the hotel, pedestrians, dogs, bicycles, cycle-rickshaws, autorickshaws, scooters, motorcycles, cars, cookshops, touts, beggars, and piles of building supplies shared a single narrow road.
When I went outside to buy some water and get my bearings, a series of touts attached themselves to me, each swooping in almost as soon as the last had left. They all had exactly the same series of things to say. Delhi is so poor that thousands of touts have to share a single shtick. The conversations all ended with me saying that yes, perhaps later I would go to the sketchy 'tourism office' they were recommending so heartily.
Delhi's tourism industry is a monster (if I had to be more specific, I'd probably say 'the Kraken', with Leviathan coming second). It has tentacles everywhere and dubious offices everywhere. For the first day, I had the illusion that everyone in the city was a tout. I was, though, probably the most lost-looking person in Delhi that day. In the same way, a chubby gazelle with a limp might get the feeling that all other animals were predators. On the second day, I shared an autorickshaw with a young Indian couple, who turned out to be really, genuinely nice -- the man helping the driver find my hotel, and lecturing me about not overpaying.
Paharganj is a slum by most standards, but may not count as one in Delhi, as it has both paved roads and actual buildings. The first thing I focused on, for some reason, were the power lines. They ran everywhere, singly and in thick bunches. They were supported by low posts, where they'd meet up in a huge tangle, and sagged worryingly in between. Delhi is an electrician's nightmare. It's also an architect's nightmare, and a veterinarian's, and the nightmare of any member of pretty much any other profession concerned with human or animal health, safety, or comfort.
The one huge redeeming virtue of the area was that I found a clean and very good restaurant around the corner that served western breakfasts, juices, coffee, and good thalis. It would be hard to overstate the importance of their thalis in my life at this time.
