Delhi? Of Course We Can!

Short Version:
We make it to the hotel, which is quite an achievement

Long Version:
Off the plane and on to a terminal bus, along with the rest of our fellow passengers. Full bus. Slight delay in actually setting off for terminal as official chap stands in doorway shouting about a black mobile phone which has been found on the plane. For quite a while. Woman sitting near our standing place pipes up, volunteering the information that the phone was found at seat 24. Wait a minute... That'd be ours then... Thank you, nice shouty official man! Thank you, nice phone-finding woman, who is from Nepal, is en route home from a migration conference in the Phillippines, and with whom we chat as the bus navigates the tractors and other vehicles swarming according to some master plan indecipherable from our perspective.

Into the terminal and up to the Visa-on-Arrival counter. Interesting assortment of countries listed as eligible, including New Zealand, Vietnam, and Finland. No Orstralia, no Canadia. It took a while to get our stamps, partly because the two men manning the counter had to handwrite our details in umptiplicate into many ledgers, but mainly because the one who spoke discerned that our travel plans involved a return to Delhi post-Nepal. This, it transpires, is not a viable course of action, as on-arrival visas are one-time entry only. Rats. Suggestion is that we apply to the Indian Embassy in Kathmandu for a transit visa, which we promise to do, several times.

We are then whisked through Immigration, bypassing queues galore, escorted by a young official chap who rebuffed all challengers to our whisking, to find our bags waiting, already loaded on a trolley. Nice!

Next stop: the Delhi Airport Metro Express, a new metro* link from the airport to the heart of New Delhi. Signage directs us part of the way, and then vanishes. We ask a venerable army gentleman, and he directs us with his cane towards a descending ramp, which we follow to the ticket booth, and then past the multiply-manned machine-gun emplacement and down to the platform. Train arrives within minutes and we embark, onto a clean, predominantly empty carriage for the 20-minute journey into the heart of Delhi.

So far so easy.

I continue feeling rather pleased with myself right up to the point where we exit the metro station, and enter three or four of the circles of hell, which have been munged together to produce a cacophonous, seething, megahell, reeking of piss and shit and filth, and thronging with people, who are completely indifferent to our existence, or are determined to accost us for random, ill-communicated and doubtless nefarious - or at least avaricious - purposes. We have no idea where the fuck we're supposed to go, so we go left. The smell of rubbish decreases, or is overwhelmed by the odours of piss and shit, which are becoming more intense. Crippled, broken people lie on the ground in the filth. Their feet are quite dirty. Massive puddles - which in NZ would be a) fixed pretty quickly, and b) made of water - turn out on closer inspection to be of piss. There is reason to suspect that the liquid lies atop a layer of shit. The smell is incredible. Rubbish is everywhere. People are everywhere.

It feels like hours but is probably only minutes since we reached the outside world. We see a clustering of taxis and tuk-tuks and feel relief, which is dispelled by the fact that the operators refuse to take us to our hotel. Someone tells us we need to walk up and over the pedestrian bridges to the far side of the railway complex. Hooray! A destination! An achievable goal!

We walk to the stairs, are greeted by frenzied blasts on a whistle by a khaki-clad stick-brandishing policeman, who bars our way onto the descent-only staircase and directs us elsewhere. As far as I can tell he's just stopped us using the only stairs there are, and there's nothing in the direction he's sending us except thousands and thousands of people.

Bags are heavy. At least mine is an actual pack. Nene is carrying a duffel so heavy the straps pull free of the clasps unless reef-knotted in place. Even so, she's handling this better than I am. We walk past a queue, of several hundred people, who are clamouring for entrance to a large old building. By NZ crowd definitions this queue is a young and enthusiastic riot. A helpful chap - who I greet with extreme suspicion - tells us that there's nothing in the direction we're heading except car-parking. He says we need to go inside the building to get to the stairs. Hearts sink as the concept of joining and navigating that queue is contemplated. We ask one of the many army guy queue-wranglers if this is how we get in to go across to the other side. He is distracted enough for long enough that queue-jumping opportunism becomes rife, and somewhere between twenty and fifty people are past him and in through the doors before he clicks. When he does, he begins lashing out indiscriminately with his beating stick, cracking people across waists and shoulders and upraised shielding forearms. The scurrying past becomes scurrying into line, and the persondamburst is quelled. He turns back to us, ushers us in through the gap between people and doorframe. He's learned his lesson, though, and spends more time eyeballing the crowd than he does looking at us. We flee inside.

We are in the New Delhi Railway Station. So are thousands of other people. The smell inside the building is different from that outside, but no less potent; here it is the people themselves giving rise to the reek, except for occasional patches of overwhelming urine stench where clouds of fetid mist billow out from pissoirs formal and not.

Beggars lie on the floor. So do entire extended families; babies and children are watched over by the elderly while the middle generations keep close eye on towering piles of luggage. No-one is trying to speak to us here inside the station, which is a nice change, but our shoulders are starting to hurt rather a lot. Either that or being free from external harrassment is leaving us more capacity to notice the pain.

Pretty soon we're heading downstairs. It's hard to see where feet are landing with a backpack on the front. I'm lucky to avoid standing on the trailing edge of an old woman's sari. I do some imagineering, and figure that if I DO stand on it she'll end up naked at the bottom of the stairs, and I'll be running from an angry mob.

The decision not to stand on the old lady or her clothes proves to have been a wise one, as we make it to the bottom unmolested. Then we're well and truly molested, by a swarm of people who enjoy shouting. Nene and I employ different strategies at this point; she engages with a sub-horde, enlisting them in her quest for transport to our hotel; I say "No!" and stride away purposefully. This confuses everybody, including me, and eventually we find ourselves in a clear(ish), quiet(ish) space, which would be glorious except that we still have no idea where the hotel is or how to get there.

Nene espies what appears to be a fifty-plus car pile-up comprised solely of taxis. On closer inspection, this turns out to be a taxi rank, and we head for it. We're intercepted by a gaggle of men exhibiting various levels of clean but a near-universal level of yell. One knows where our hotel is. We are pleased. He leaves. We are sad. Heated discussion continues all around, as more and more taxi- and tuk-tuk drivers, nosey-parkers, and other hangers-on join the group. We sneak off. A small, grim man nods at us and we follow him to his tuk-tuk. He manages to cram us and all our luggage in, and takes off into traffic the likes of which I have never seen before in my life. I am agog at the madness unfolding on all sides, although I am especially taken with that on the side I am on, because it is so close to me. So very, very close. It's exhilarating, and completely insane.

There are so very many vehicles crammed into every available inch of space. Every one that has a horn is sounding it, and at first I think it's because we've just cut all of them off at once by driving straight out and onto a main road in front of a free-flowing stream of traffic. I am convinced that if we don't die in an accident, we'll be ripped limb from limb by a mob of angry motorists, enraged at the effrontery our driver has displayed. But wait! Everyone else is pulling rancid maneuvres also! And we are doing some tooting of our own! I'm starting to think this may just be the way it's done here, and then we hang a sharp right across an onrushing wall of cars, buses, tuk-tuks**, rickshaws***, and pedestrians, and begin driving up the middle of a street market, fast, tooting at pedestrians to get out of our way. This is like a scene from a film, except we're not being chased by gun-toting evildoers intent on laying hands on our drugs/diamonds/stolen moneys. And we're not actually knocking over fruit stalls in spectacular cascades of colour. And then we're swerving to avoid a rickshaw coming the other way, and then another one, and a car, and we realise that this, too, is just the way things are, and then we're outside the hotel and paying the still-silent little chap about five times as many rupees as we should have and we don't care because we've made it to the hotel and it really probably is time for a nice cup of tea and a lie-down.






* = That's light rail, partly underground, for all those who live in places bereft of this basic metropolitan necessity.

** = Auto-rickshaws. Three-wheeled vehicles that look like the back half of an old green Mini with a yellow canvas roof bolted to the front part of a Vespa. Run on CNG. Wonderful.

*** = Previous century's version of tuk-tuk. Massively steel single-speed tricycles. Wonderful from the outside, bumpy from in.