India Wrap-up

We've been inexcusably lax about posting lately, as we've changed our travel style from "slow and lazy" to "regular tourists" for the past few days. We arrived in Delhi on the 9th, and spent the time since then running around frantically getting to the last few cities on our To-Visit list (Chandigarh and Agra), as well as figuring out how best to ship a bunch of stuff home. Small souveniers: 3 hours, no problem. Sitar: 3 days, horrendous nightmare (but more about this in a bit).

DISCLAIMER: This post is really long. Feel free to read it in segments over the next week or so.

To wrap up Jodhpur, overall it felt like a busier, pushier version of Udaipur with no lake. The fort was pretty awesome though, and we finally got a picture of it.



We also got a picture of the turtle that lived at our guest house.


If you're not put off by the text-heavy post, here are summaries of Delhi, Chandigarh and Agra.

Delhi: in some ways, it's very different from the rest of India. It has expensive shopping, mind-blowing restaurants (including one called "Bukhara" that Bill Clinton once said was so delicious it made him wish he had two stomachs), and a shiny new metro that is fast, cheap, and easy to navigate. On the other hand, it also has the worst air quality of any city I have ever visited, just as many scams and pushy touts as anywhere else (if not more), and the most expensive hotels in the country. Overall, it was a mixed experience. Here's a short summary of some of our experiences, in case you find yourself in Delhi sometime in the near future.

Best food: Bukhara. Expensive even by North American standards, but they served up easily the most tender, delicious leg of lamb that I have ever eaten. The one let-down was their supposedly world-famous dal (lentil dish), which, at $15 for a small bowl, is about ten times as expensive as all other dal dishes in the country, and wasn't THAT much better. Runner-up for best restaurant: Veda. A super-hip North Indian restaurant in the old British city centre of Connaught Place that served extremely delicious fancy Indian food at less than a third the price of Bukhara.

Other food notes: We tried a bunch of fast food places, as towards the end of our time here (and I never thought I would hear myself say this) we were getting a little tired of curry. Most of them were pretty accurate reproductions of their North American counterparts, with one notable exception: no beef, anywhere. Not even McDonald's! Domino's and Pizza Hut both had good chicken and veggie pizzas, and KFC was pretty much identical.

Our hotel: The Pearl Plaza. One of the cheapest rooms in Delhi (at about $30/day) that didn't look like your luggage might be carried off in the middle of the night by an army of roaches. Clean and air conditioned, but with the pushiest service we ran into in the entire country (and that is saying something).

The sights: We went to the Red Fort, but it looked quite a bit like the other 3 or 4 forts we'd seen in the last few weeks, so we didn't go in. Forts are cool, don't get me wrong, but it's like "hey, more cannons". We went to the India Gate, and can confirm that it is indeed a large gate with the word INDIA written on it. Connaught Place is a neat area, with posh colonnaded buildings and fancy shops and stuff. Side note: we're becoming worryingly jaded about historic sights.


The last major thing on our Delhi to-do list was to get my &%*$#ing sitar shipped. The more I looked into it, the more I wished I'd decided on a tin whistle or something instead. The Indian Post refused to ship something so long (it's 5 feet by 2 feet by 15 inches). FedEx wanted like $14,000 to ship it. DHL wouldn't pack it. Luckily, fate swung in and helped get it done. On our train from Jodhpur to Delhi, we had a great conversation with a woman named Aditi, who was traveling with her son. After a few hours, I found out that she (conveniently enough) works for a logistics and shipping company. And she mentioned that before I told her I had something to ship! Otherwise, India being India, it would have been a bit too convenient. I told her my tale of woe and she agreed to help me get it shipped through her company. Not only that, she took the time to make sure I had a ride to her office in Delhi, and met with me a few times to take care of paperwork and stuff. If you find yourself in India with a sitar on your hands, and you have no idea how to get it home, I can highly recommend Interline Global Logistics. Aditi also gives out excellent restaurant recommendations. WARNING: Don't find yourself in India with a sitar on your hands. If you're heading straight home and you can check it as baggage, go for it. They're awesome instruments. But shipping a sitar from India costs several times more than buying the instrument itself. Had I known this a few weeks ago, I might be the proud owner of a nice tin whistle.

Alright, enough about Delhi, here are some quick summaries of the other two cities we visited this week.

Chandigarh: We went here for two reasons. First, it's home to the Nek Chand Rock Garden. Basically, a few decades ago this guy Nek Chand started building this crazy fantasy world in a government-owned but undeveloped plot of land, entirely made out of recycled garbage (old electrical wiring, broken ceramics, small bits of glass jewelry, etc.). He worked at it every day, and by the time the government found his garden, it was HUGE and crazy awesome. Rather than tear it down, they let him keep working on it, and turned it into a public park. It is easily one of the coolest places I have ever been in my life. Picture yourself, as a kid, trying to dream up the coolest park in the world. It would probably have giant stone castles, bridges criscrossing over each other, waterfalls, secret passages, and twisting walkways surrounded by fifty foot high cliffs. That's this place. Except this place also has hundreds of sculptures made out of recycled materials. It's amazing, and a strong runner-up for the best "tourist sight" we saw in India (see Agra for #1). Totally worth the trip to Chandigarh, but pictures don't really do it justice. That being said, here is a cool/kinda creepy army of garbage people.


The second reason we went there is because the whole city was designed by Le Corbusier, an early-mid 20th century modern architect. I'm not really a huge fan (read: he's more or less my least favourite architect in the world), but we went because we were curious to see how a modernist super-planned city would look in India. It was much more clean and spacious than the other cities we've seen, but the buildings were definitely designed by Le Corbusier, proving that North America doesn't have a monopoly on totally soulless architecture.


Also, all the neighbourhoods are called "sectors", which makes you feel like you're in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie anytime you need to get somewhere. "I'd like an autorickshaw to Sector 17, please."

Agra: We came here for the same reason millions of other tourists come here every year: The Taj Mahal. To be honest, there aren't a lot of other good reasons to visit Agra. It's dirty, and restaurants/taxis/shops are all WAY more expensive here than just about anywhere else in the country. All that makes the Taj Mahal stick out even more by comparison. It is amazing. A lot of famous tourist sights wind up being a bit of a letdown when you get there, for a variety of reasons. Maybe they don't look as cool in person, maybe they've been poorly maintained, maybe they're interesting in a "hmm, cool history" sense. The Taj Mahal, on the other hand, is just flat out one of the most impressive structures I've ever seen. It's so perfectly designed, so perfectly proportioned, that you feel it as much as you see it. There is no such thing as a bad angle to view it from. It just sits there, radiating epic-ness.


A must-see on a global scale. All this is even more surprising, since everyone has seen 100 postcard-perfect pictures of the Taj, so you'd think it would be a little bit spoiled. Nope. Walking through a dark archway and seeing it looming in the distance is one of those moments that brushes away all the bad experiences and challenges of traveling and replaces them in your mind with the cognitive equivalent of "wow". Just don't stick around in Agra too long.

Side note: we paid a rickshaw driver to take us around Agra a bit while we waited for the air to clear in the morning (it's super smoggy until well after noon there, and we didn't want our one trip to the Taj Mahal to be smoggy). On the way, we got an idea of the kind of nonchalance you would develop living in the shadow of one of the world's most famous monuments. An excerpt from his tour: "On your right, you can see some traditional farms growing eggplants, cauliflower, potatoes... over there is the Taj Mahal. On your left is some spinach!"

Final India Summary: Equal parts amazing, unique cities, incredibly friendly people, foul-smelling streets, non-stop tourist hassle, wealth, poverty, dancing, delicious food, constant fear of food poisoning, scams, questionable sanitation, tea, music, spices, and cows. It's like nowhere else on earth (in our limited experience), but we're excited to be moving on to something new.


Alright, we're taking off for Beijing tonight. At one point, I think the Chinese government had blocked access to Blogger from within the country, so it could be a while before we post another update, but we'll do our best! Failing that, we'll be in Mongolia in about a week or so, and we'll try and post from there.