Seat of Our Pants » Delhi

You’ve Been on the Road Too Long When…

Jaime — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 12:07:59 +0000

You know you’ve been on the road too long when you’ve checked into a five star hotel and the following conversation takes place:

Jaime: “Is it embarrassing that we’ve just checked into this hotel carrying our own toilet paper?”

Martin: “Not any less embarrassing than checking out with the two from our bathroom. Did you see that there’s two rolls in there?”

Jaime: “Score!”

When you’re on the road for as long as we’ve been, you learn that the one thing you cannot do without is your own roll of toilet paper. You never know when disaster will strike…

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This Luxury Calls for a Muumuu!

Jaime — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 12:02:08 +0000

Is this a Delhi monument? A museum, perhaps? Or maybe it’s a palace?

No, actually its our hotel in Delhi. Travel has been rough and dirty for the last few months and we couldn’t get excited about staying in a backpacker guesthouse during our two days here – so we went five star.

Pool side at the Maidens Hotel in Delhi

Thanks to a wedding present promise by my friend Alessandra, we’re living in style and doing things we haven’t been able to do in months. Taking a bubble bath has never felt so good. Splashing around in a pool is like a little piece of heaven. Crisp white sheets wait for us on our huge king-size bed – and get this, they change the sheets daily! It’s madness.

Granted, we have to sneak out of the hotel at mealtime to eat street food (we can’t afford much else), but playing rich feels good, people. So good, in fact, that I broke out the special muumuu in celebration. It’s my fancy one – the one with mirrors sewn into the collar.

The five star muumuu

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Delhi Impressions

Martin — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 15:38:04 +0000

Delhi is an assault on the senses. I don’t necessarily mean this in a negative way. It is just that it is a massive all-out, full-on attack on both your senses and sensibilities.

Today we walked through Old Delhi – a place our trusty guidebook described as having ‘a kind of raw charm’ and warned that it could at times resemble ‘pure pandemonium’.

Just imagine a dirty, cluttered warren where an enormous number of people have congregated to do commerce. They are all going in their own directions, whether on foot, on a motorbike, pushing a wheelbarrow full of plastic toys or sitting in a ricksha. You’re one of these people, trying to get through from one end to another. Your nose picks up a bewildering array of smells: gunpowder, armpit, marigolds, chapatis, grilled chicken, rotting garbage, perfume, wet dog, masala tea and stale rainwater. The din here is incredible – firecrackers are going off above you, people are yelling at each other to get out of the way or into their shops or whatever – it is impossible to tell and at this point you don’t care, you’re trying to get through. A leprous beggar walks up to you and starts crooning into your ear. At the same time, a smarmy salesman with a waxed mustache is talking into your other ear, trying to sell you an exorbitantly overpriced tour of the spice market. You realize that you’re standing in dog droppings. You hope that it is dog, and inch away towards what you hope is a bit of clear space.

Traveling doesn’t always have to be beautiful to be rewarding. Sometimes, experiences make you realize what a fantastic life you are living back home. Today was such an experience. I like it.

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Next Up: Delhi

Martin — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:25:05 +0000

A seven hour, forty dollar taxi ride has taken us to Delhi – the capital of India. The city comes with a reputation as a gritty and nasty mega city, and I can’t help but think that our first impressions confirm what we’ve heard about it. We were just walking back from our dinner restaurant, saying stuff like ‘Bangkok seems like a quiet garden compared to this’ and ‘oh look a sign warning us about pickpocketers, how cute’.

Anyway, we’ve got all of tomorrow to form a less biased view. I’m pretty sure Delhi has more than a few nice sides to it as well – it is one of the world’s oldest cities, and it has 14 million residents. I’m sure something here will prove to be absolutely spectacular.

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A Note on Indian Pollution

Jaime — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:16:00 +0000

I’ve found at least two things rumored about India to be true. It’s hot and it’s polluted. Well, to be fair, it was neither of those things in Ladakh or Himachal Pradesh, but once we left those states its been sweaty and dirty the whole way through.

I know that saying this in a blog post doesn’t do justice to how it feels, so I’ll let you in on a little traveler’s lore. We’ll call it Dirty Show n’ Tell.

I’ve been plagued with dirty fingernails lately. I couldn’t figure it out. How is it possible that my fingernails are dirty just a few hours after a shower when all I’ve done is hang out in our hotel room? Well, I finally figured it out today. I cleaned my nails before our ride from Agra to Delhi and by the end of the ride they were full of black sludge. What was I doing to fill them with this nasty stuff?

Scratching my face.

That’s right. I’ve been filling my fingernails with pollutants that are living on my FACE. And the grossness doesn’t stop there. You know what this stuff smells like?

Toe jam.

So, my question is this: what in the world is floating around (that I’m inhaling, no less) that makes my face smell like toe jam? TOE JAM!

Whatever it is, it makes for 4 hour long sunsets (because of all the pollutants in the air), so I guess they have that going for them.

: A really long Indian sunset

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