Welcome to India

hello all!

first off, to parents especially, yes we are still alive and functioning. secondly, i am already a day behind in writing up what we have been doing, so the information may reach you some time after the events took place. thirdly, the keyboard i am typing on appears to be made of spare parts from washing machines. nevertheless...

Tuesday 1st April 2008

for those of you interested in such things, our flight over was fine, despite my chair being broken, my 'entertainment' only fitfully working, and sitting next to a six week old baby, who slept like an angel the whole flight. only being in Delhi for 2 days, and already such considerations seem very trite and unimportant.

we landed early, at Delhi airport, which - like many international airports - appears to still be under construction. maybe it was the time we arrived (between 11 and midnight), maybe it was luck, but the airport was hardly the den of iniquity that some sources had made it out to be. according to our pilot, the touch down temperature was 25 C, a little warmer that we had probably expected for the time of day. proof that we were not in Kansas anymore was provided by the strong humidity, the fact that the first person we saw after customs in baggage control was carrying a ten foot heavy metal pipe, and that the first vehicle that hooted us in the car park was a tractor.

we had arranged for a pick up from the airport to go to our hotel, and he was quiet, pleasant and pleased to see us, considering he had been given the wrong day and had been waiting for us the day before. the drive to our hotel was a combination of long stretches of highway, wonderful old-style lorries and classic-car style white taxis and a sense of unearthly quiet among New Delhi's massive, British built, wide, long boulevards. This was punctuated only by gangs of stray dogs and scattered groups of street children playing along highways now bereft of people. to our surprise, the journey to our hotel took half an hour, despite not being a great distance away as far as we could tell.

we now know that the time it takes you to get anywhere by road is largely determined by the quite wonderful way in which the people here drive. always chaotic, certainly ridiculously unsafe, we have still never seen a single person, car, truck or cow get so much as grazed by anything. everything seems to operate on a basis of centimetres distance between vehicles and objects on the road. the system is horn / manoeuvre / horn, rather than anything as boring as mirror / signal / manoeuvre. if markings exist they are roundly ignored, as are lights and, occasionally, traffic directions. but our journey to The Park hotel was a very quiet and low key introduction to the city and the country.

which is more than can be said for The Park hotel. i won't even include a link on this post, as its is too... embarrassing. even though we were only staying there for a couple of nights, and had already paid for them via a travel agent in London, the rooms there go for, well, let's just say an unfeasible amount more than the hotel we are in at the time of writing. opulent would not be too strong a word. on the one hand, it softened our introduction to India a great deal; perhaps too much, like trying to sleep on a feather mattress lying on top of a water bed. on the other, it's about as Indian as any top end international hotel anywhere in the world. it was also the only place until this evening that we had seen any Westerners in anything more than handfuls.

sleep came late and fitfully. a combination of tiredness, mild jetlag, anxiety and excitement playing games with our sleep patterns. breakfast is served (!) in the hotel 7 - 11, but we didn't fade away until possibly three or later. tomorrow, India!

much love

edd & philippa