While it’s easy to write about places which you really enjoyed, writing about places that you came away from feeling negative about is much harder. Delhi is one such place for me. And looking back, was it all negative and is this over-riding feeling fair to the place, or was a lot of that subjective and just down to bad experiences on the day or week you were there?
Delhi was our landing spot in India and the first place we saw when we arrived. It is a huge, populous and at the time often very poor city. It was also our first destination outside Europe. So culture shock hit very hard, and it was only when we got out of Delhi into some of the smaller cities in north west India that we started to relax and enjoy ourselves in these very different surroundings.
While there are many things to see in Delhi: temples, forts, tombs, spice markets, parks and gardens, looking back at my photos of India the only photo I have is of the Jama Masjid. Not a good sign for someone who usually takes many photos on a trip.
We went through Delhi several times: on landing in India, on return from Rajastan then heading to Kashmir and Ladakh and then on our return. Did we like it more each time as we became more familiar with it? Well I’m not sure. We had got used to India in general, but Delhi was still next level.
We were warned about walking the streets, and not immediately but after some time we did head out into the streets of Old Delhi and got the full experience of walking around and experiencing the full sensory overload this involves. Did we enjoy it? Well again, I’m not sure, but it was certainly an experience and crucial to our understanding of urban India. It would have been easy to just get ferried around in taxi’s and not really experience the streets.
We did agree that we prefered Old Delhi to New Delhi. Old Delhi seemed to have a lot more life. New Delhi in comparison at the time, seemed much more sterile.
After some time we started jumping into Tuk Tuk’s and cycle rickshaws, surely a way to get around instead of walking with a big rucksack and eventually we used them. There was no metro then.
We were greeted on all sides by people trying to sell us stuff, sign up to things or just give money to them begging and in the sorry state some of the people were in, it was difficult to say no.
We saw a couple of the main sights of the city but I’m not sure we really did those full justice. Delhi has changed hugely since we were there, so now there would be even more to see. With the Taj Mahal so close to Delhi in Agra, it was also easy to get sidetracked and head out to see this and not see as much of Delhi as it may warrant.
We were a little afraid of the food, we had heard so many horror stories of people getting ill. Although I eat meat normally I stuck to vegetarian food to start with. Lentil soup was a favourite. Later I would start eating street food, and then I did indeed get ill.
When we visited air-con didn’t exist, so the hotels and cars didn’t have this. There was no escape from the heat unless you parked yourself under a nice large fan.
Has Delhi calmed down since we visited it? Well again I’m not sure. It still has the heat and smog, and it still looks pretty intense on the videos I’ve watched recently, but I won’t know unless I decide to go back there will I?
My one photo from Delhi: Jama Masjid. Header image by Aquib Akhter, side street near Jama Masjid.