Day 52 - Delhi!!!

Having slept a brief hour the travel night on the plane and having very comfortable beds we slept long and we slept good! We even had the luxury of telling the alarm what to do and going back to sleep for another hour 😌. Much refreshed we tackled breakfast and revelled in the 100% vegetarian spread! Curry for breakfast will take a bit of getting used to though.

Then it was time for the main event - the carnage! For weeks now people have been telling us India, particularly Delhi, is very dirty and total chaos, so we'd pysched ourselves up for the worst. We started with a tuk tuk ride to the fort in the old city.

The best employee at the hotel was definitely the security guard/doorman. He would walk you to ATM/pharmacy/shop you needed, escorting you across the road, and he'd also flag down and negotiate the price for a tuk tuk.

We wondered why the security guard ignored someone offering 100 rupees (1 euro), and took an offer for 200 on a route he said would cost around 150. En-route the driver explained it's a common scam and they usually try to extract more, or just plain take you somewhere else - thanks guard!

The fort itself was closed on Monday, which we knew - we just wanted to use it as a starting point for Old Delhi and see the impressive frontage of the Mughar fortifications. We were hassled a bit around the fort, and around the tuk tuk and bike stands but never for more than a few metres, and then apart from that not at all! We quickly left the fort area and dove into the city proper. It's a pedestrianised and electric/pedal area only, but that didn't seem to have a noticeable effect on the cloying smog. Very quickly you stop smelling it, but you can still feel the pollution deep in your lungs, and clothes for that matter.

Almost immediately we passed a massive tech market I'd heard about by chance before, and went in to have a look. In the end we realised we could do with a few cables and a keyboard to help with job applications and the endless stream of life admin that you can't pedal away from, no matter how fast you go! The haggle was on!

The first one we overpaid for an adapter cable. I countered to high to start with and although he dropped a few hundred rupees, and then 100 below his "absolute minumum possible offer" when we started to walk away, it was still probably double the price. Annoying, but not a great hit in the grand scheme. Later we would go back to the same store for a few more things, and to try and exchange/return/bargain with the cable we'd just bought as we realised we'd need a different one.

"I'm sorry sir, but it's against company policy."

Riiiiiiight. That cash-in-hand, haggle transaction in a small stall in the middle of a crowded market is subject to "company policy" is it? So we tried again. "Look sir, I can't do that, it's not policy." And again. "We cannot accept returns, exchanges, I can't give you 50% back, it's against policy." And again. He wasn't having it. In the end we haggled hard for the other things we needed from that stall. We walked away and came back 10mins later. We cross referenced prices. We started so low it was almost rude. We bargained. We hussled. Honestly it was exhausting and quite the waste of everyone's time. Even they looked a little fed up by the end. Eventually we finally had a fair price and everything we needed. It would have been a heck of a lot easier to use Amazon, but the whole thing was an experience and the actual goods we acquired took a back seat to the novelty of shopping from multiple tiny stalls set in a maze of tiny alleys of other stalls.

I can see how haggling is a beneficial process when someone is just short, or has a fixed budget and the shopkeeper can decide if they want a quick or better sale, but it's not very efficient, makes it hard to communicate with your companion when you actually like something for fear of driving the price up and makes it disadvantageous to compliment something on work well done. In one store, full of beautiful handmade clothes, we had to feign disinterest and highlight flaws in order to not get totally ripped off, when we were actually thinking that the stuff looked amazing! We told him our true feelings when we left, but it's kind of hollow then.

In general we really appreciated how at all of these stalls people wouldn't chase you or pressure the sale. They would very quickly have unwrapped 10 shirts, but when none of them were to our liking and we made our excuses, they thanked us and helpfully pointed to another stall that might be better suited. That really adds to the nice atmosphere.

So far things had been busy, but also relatively clean and not particularly chaotic. In fact it was almost disappointly ordered, so we wandered as deep as we could to go for full immersion. Sure, there was some rubbish around, and some mud on the streets, and sure it was busy, but nothing like what we expected. Many French cities are dirtier, Sicily certainly is. I've been jostled more in London. The horn noise and use is worse in Naples. There's more dog poo in Switzerland, let alone France! It doesn't smell and the traffic is heavy but flows well. The subway is downright gleaming, runs efficiently, has air-conditioning, full signal underground and very sensible boards showing you exactly where you are and where you're going. All for the princely sum of 30p per person for a 15min journey... I couldn't name a European equivalent that exceeded the standard. Perhaps it's been cleaned up a bit, perhaps we're a bit desensitised from travelling for a couple of months or perhaps we didn't find the worst bits, but we wandered for 10 miles through different areas of the city over 9 hours where normal people were going about their normal daily business so we got pretty good coverage.

Security is another thing. Obviously we were watching our pockets, but at no point did I feel in any kind of danger or real risk to my possessions. In fact we felt so safe we were walked down a main road through what turned out to be the red light district with no concerns. We found out it was the red light district when a friendly chap got chatting as we walked along.

We ended up spending an hour with Pareem. A Pakistani, who was born in Moscow but lived in Delhi. A registered nurse and practising alternative medicine doctor who wanted to go into software development and passionate vegan, he was veey interesting to talk to, and very caring. We told him we wanted to get Masala spices in the spice market and he took it as a personal mission. It was very cool to watch a native at work in a real market, not like the Istanbul tourist one, especially having just tried the process ourselves! He went in and out, asked literally every other shop the best place to go, went, came back, negotiated, came back, and then we had what we needed. He ended up gifting us the tea before we parted ways which was very generous and unexpected!

At this point we needed a rest and some food so we headed back to the hotel. It was a very brief stop before we headed out again across town to go to a tea shop (highly successful) and pharmacy (highly unsuccessful) and then to dinner (successful but late).

It turns out antimalarials are prescription here. That was sorted in the usual way of things around here with a guy calling a guy calling a guy. In this case the hotel receptionist calling a doctor who Whatsapped over a prescription for two people twenty minutes later no questions asked. Not concerning at all... Sadly this was after our hour mission across town and back to a reputable pharmacy, we'll have to full thst one tomorrow.

The tea shop was brilliant though! They were super knowledgeable, were super happy to chat tea with two enthusiasts, made us 4 sample pots to help decide and threw in a few freebies ontop of our already considerable haul.

What a day! By the time we got back from dinner at midnight we were worn out. Not that that stopped us from giggling like teenagers at a sleepover until 4am in the morning before 3 hours sleep. Guess we were just wired from the day and we're not seeing Emma's parents until tomorrow so there was no one to tell us to go to bed. Remember that rule we made earlier in the tour about no talking after 10pm? Yeh us neither.

Food spend today: 21.80 euros

Tea counter: 24 (addicts defence: "But some of them were small!")