It has been a few weeks since I visited India with my daughter, but so much has happened since then that I’ve barely had time to put fingers to keyboard!
Caught a bad cold with a stubborn chesty cough from one of our group (I won’t mention names :p) and then something remarkable happened…..
SHAH RUKH KHAN replied to one of my Tweets!
Sorry. Had to get that one in. I wouldn’t be a true fan otherwise, Ha ha!
Will write more on that subject later. Or in my other blog ‘Drawing @iamsrk’
Firstly, I will explain a little about how the trip came about:
It has been my dream to visit India for some time and after taking early retirement, I thought I would spend some of my retirement money on a long-awaited holiday.
So my daughter Lizzie and I started looking at brochures in the travel agents.
We came across one which took my daughter’s fancy in particular. It was with ‘Intrepid Travel’ and was entitled ‘Real Food Adventure’.
http://www.intrepidtravel.com/india/real-food-adventure-india-94465
India AND Food? What more could we ask for. I have to note here that my daughter is particularly fond of Chilli and spicy foods. I like spicy too, but don’t quite have the chilli threshold that she has, ha ha!
I scrutinised the brochure for details of places to visit and found it perfect.
Food, the ‘Golden Triangle’, Goa and most importantly Mumbai. Shah Rukh Khan‘s home city.
That was several months ago and the intervening time seemed like a life-time away.
It was soon filled-up with wondering what to take and what we might need for the trip.
The Intrepid website is very informative on the subject of what to pack and we followed it carefully including buying what we thought were appropriate suitcases.
http://www.intrepidtravel.com/india/real-food-adventure-india-94465/tripnotes
We soon came to regret packing SO MUCH stuff!
So, finally the day arrived and we set out by car to travel to Manchester airport.
We booked an hotel to stay at overnight, as the flight was early in the morning and we didn’t want to risk getting delayed.
Manchester to Frankfurt, then Frankfurt to Delhi
I’d like to say that the flights were uneventful, but the arrival time in Delhi of 01.30 (+ 1 day) stretched quite a bit further than we expected.
The Frankfurt-Delhi flight was delayed by around 45 minutes and then we had fun trying to find our way through customs and baggage retrieval.
We joined a queue which read International Passengers ( which is what we thought we were) and waited 30 minutes or so to get to the front of the line and the waiting official.
I was the first to reach and was informed by an official in a very supercilious voice,
“Madam, you have been wasting your time. You should have been in the queue for eVisas. It clearly says on the sign over there”, pointing to a sign much further away from the queue that we had joined!
Torn between wanting to tell him ‘where to go’ and feeling like a complete idiot, we dragged our suitcases to the correct queue and waited another half-hour or more to be interrogated.
Having survived the fingerprinting and photo-taking regime and careful scrutiny of our eVisas, we hastily made our way to find our baggage-which by this time had been taken off the conveyor belt and stored in the middle of the floor, to make way for the next incoming flight.
Acutely aware that our taxi-driver must have had a long wait for us (we had pre-arranged a transfer to the hotel), we just had the presence of mind to go to the foreign-exchange desk to get some rupees before making our way to the greeting area.
By now we were getting a little panicky about being met and picked-up by our taxi driver. The delays were such that we wondered if he would still be there, or have given-up on us.
I’ve never been met at an airport before, and rather than feeling like a superstar who has just landed and has a limousine awaiting, we frantically scanned the bored and frustrated taxi-wallas for a sign bearing our name.
I’ve never been so glad to see my name scrawled on a cardboard plaque before.
Yes! There was transport to the hotel. The taxi-driver couldn’t have been more relieved either. He must have waited for almost two hours and paid a fortune for parking.
Wearily, we followed our un-talkative driver to the taxi and then took the ‘trip from hell’ through Delhi’s highways on an hour-long drive to the hotel.
If you have never experienced traffic in India before, you will not understand what I mean.
I had watched lots of programs on TV about India and the lifestyle etc. But nothing quite prepares you for Delhi traffic.
We took our life in our hands (or rather the driver did) as we wended our way through a nightmare of crazy driving, blaring horns, cows & dogs in the road and bikes and people ‘jaywalking’ across each and every lane of traffic.
At one point we thought we would be squashed like sardines in a can, as two lorries converged from either side of the lanes towards our taxi, narrowly missing us as we squeezed through the closing gap.
If I have time, I hope to include some video footage to show you what it was like.
( Perhaps if you’ve seen the movie #FAN in the meantime, you might get an idea)
After an hour of fearing for our lives, we arrived at what seemed a very ‘seedy’ area of Delhi. We had been warned that we may be staying in less-than luxurious accommodation and hoped that we would feel safe for the night here prior to meeting our group later in the evening of the same day.
Apart from being up several flights of stairs, our room was acceptable. It being somewhere between 4 and 5 o’clock in the morning, we were only too glad to unpack as little as possible, apart from essentials and mosquito plugs, and fall into bed.
Less than two hours later, I was rudely awakened by the telephone from reception.
They had made a mistake. One of us should be in another room. Only half awake, I couldn’t understand what this was about. I wearily replied that it was OK and that we were together and didn’t mind sharing. I wasn’t too sure how much they understood, as I didn’t have enough Hindi to carry out a prolonged conversation and their English wasn’t much better!
I lay back down and dozed off to sleep again, only to be awoken a second time by another receptionist who tried again to get one of us to move. Again I tried to explain that we were mother and daughter and were quite happy where we were.
However, they insisted and we gave in. Lizzie agreeing to be the one to move to another room.
By this time, our sleep being totally disturbed, we gave up and decided to find out where breakfast was.
Breakfast turned out to be in the adjoining hotel on the rooftop, accessible by a lift/elevator.
View of street from rooftop
Not being accustomed to Indian-style breakfast, we chose an odd assortment of foods to eat and joined the first of the couples that were to be part of our party of eleven.
After breakfast, there was still a long stretch of the day to go before meeting with the rest of our group and our ‘Welcome Dinner’.
My daughter, Lizzie was all for going back to the room to continue our sleep. But I wanted to explore. Why waste the best part of the day?
“How about we just walk to the end of the street, just to see what we can see. If you don’t feel comfortable, we can soon come back to the hotel”, I said.
“Oh OK, just a little walk”, she replied.
15 minutes later, after dodging traffic, avoiding broken pavements, rubbish, stray dogs etc, we had turned a corner to further investigate; keeping a careful note of our surroundings in order to be sure of our way back. We were already getting curious glances from the locals and unwanted attention from beggars and touts of trade.
Then we were accosted by a slightly more friendly and English-speaking Tuk-Tuk wallah, who asked if we would like a tour of the area for only 50 rupees. Doing a quick calculation ( 50 rupees = approx 50 pence GBP or 0.75 USD) we couldn’t fault that and decided it would do no harm.
And here we go. Some awful video footage I uploaded to You Tube. It’s blank at the beginning, cos I forgot to remove the lens-cap, duh! OK, it was a brand new camcorder and I wasn’t used to it yet.😝
How gullible we were. The tour involved sightseeing the local shops selling a variety of merchandise which we were eagerly persuaded into getting out and viewing, stopping to admire the Hanuman statue and having our selfies taken outside the Sikh Temple.
Two rugs later, we agreed that we had been well and truly ‘Tuk-Tuk’ for a ride!
The rugs were very cheap compared to back home, I hasten to add.
Feeling that we had spent more than enough for one day, we refused any more offers of jewellery, sarees, pashminas etc that were thrust upon us by eager salespeople and persuaded our Tuk Tuk driver that we needed to be back at the hotel to meet up with our group.
On arriving back at the hotel, we were again confronted by the manager, who apologised profusely, and told us that they had made a mistake about the room situation. Apparently, there was another lady in our group who had the name Lizzie and they had mistaken her for my daughter. To cut a long story short, my daughter Lizzie had to move back to the room we had already been sharing in order to accommodate the ‘other’ Lizzie! Fortunately, she hadn’t actually unpacked her suitcase and the move back wasn’t too arduous.
But we were tired by now and decided to have a ‘nap’ before joining the rest of our group for the ‘welcome’ talk and dinner.
The ‘Welcome’ was down in the basement of our hotel, where we met our ‘Intrepid’ guide Veerendra and were introduced to our fellow companions for the duration of our holiday.
We were a party of eleven. Three Americans, two Australians, one Irish and five English.
After introductions and instructions, we were whisked away via Tuk Tuks again, to a restaurant to sample our first taste of Indian cuisine.
The restaurant had a slightly ‘gangster-like’ feel to it, with an old car taking up a large area of the room, an adorned with choice dishes!
The dishes we ate were delicious, confirming my belief that this was the right choice of holiday We had an assortment of vegetarian, paneer (cheese), chicken and mutton dishes. I must add here that mutton in India is ‘goat’ and not ‘lamb’ like it is in England and elsewhere and has a rather distinctive flavour.
Since I started writing this blog, I’ve realised that it’s going to take me forever. So I shall stop here and just post it in short bites. Otherwise you’ll be waiting until this-time-next-year for the whole story!
Don’t worry, there are only 14 more days to go……..
Ramblings of a #Jabra @iamsrk admirer- Intrepid travel-India: Day 1 It has been a few weeks since I visited India with my daughter, but so much has happened since then that I've barely had time to put fingers to keyboard!
