delhi

Varanasi was not about to let our trip out of the city an easy one. Varanasi is a big jerk like that. Our whole plans for Nepal had shifted a week or so before when we sat down and tried to book a ticket back. The big picture was supposed to have us taking a train and buses to Nepal , kickin it there for 10 days, then flying to Delhi, staying the night then flying to the city of Trivandrum in the very far south. Even though it was more then we wanted to pay cause of airfare and all, we knew this would be the only thing that would work for us considering 10 days (including travel) is not near enough when you have to take a journey that is s a full 24 hours . So when we sat down and booked the airline ticket from Katmandu, it kept emailing us that what we wanted was not available. After 3 attempts of not being able to get what we wanted, we decided to let go of the headache it was giving us from the start and figured maybe it was a sign that we weren’t supposed to go. We were wanting to see the Himalayas in a big way, so our new plan was to get out of Varanasi by train to Delhi, then take a bus up to Dharmasala. It is the home of the great dalai lama and scores of Tibetan refugees live there. Well, the way it worked, we get to the train station in Varanasi just to learn it keeps getting delayed. And delayed again. We sat around for at least 6 hours til the train finally came. Not only were we waiting too long on the platform, throughout the whole night we kept stopping and what should have been a 15 hour trip turned into over 30 hours. With that, gieves slept over half of the time and a couple hours before we got to Delhi started feeling real sick. We decided we’d take a bus from delhi that following morning if he felt better and took a cab to a part of the city I heard about that was all Tibetan called majnu ka tilla. We booked a room and ended up staying there for 3 days while gieves was violently ill and I myself was feeling pretty shietty. It ended up being one of the better places we could have probably picked to stay. A lot of good soups and a break from the spiced up Indian dishes we had been having for over 3 weeks. Also a bunch of good Tibetan shops and good people. How could a place be bad with a bunch of sweet faced monks walking around the town.

After we had to leave that room since we were indecisive and weren’t committing to anything we decided that only having a few days left before we were going to fly south, we’d stay in delhi for a couple more nights, check stuff out, then try and change our flight to go down to the beautiful paradise aka southern India early. From being sick and all we were jaded at that moment on northern India and needed a good vacation from our vacation. We changed our tix to get to Kerala 5 days early and jumped in a rickshaw to paharganj which is a huge market area. After finding a room we jumped in some tuktuks to scope out India’s capital. We were hesitant about delhi. Although I got some inside scoops from Divya and was stoked on that, most of the travelers we had met didn’t have one nice thing to say about the place. To us, we really liked it. Yeah the pollution is so horribly bad, but it was the first city we had seen in WEEKS that was for the most part clean and organized and had grass and was spread out. We hardly even saw any cows that we had been dodging and weaving our whole stay and were confused by their absence. Wanting to take a break from forts and palaces, the first place we went to was the Indira Gandhi museum. After reading some things about her while in India I was excited to see the memorial. It was a really moving experience. The museum is at the home she lived in and where she was actually assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984. After museum one we decided to go to the national gallery of modern art. It was in fact a pretty amazing gallery and we saw some beyond amazing Indian art. I found myself writing name after name of artists I wanted to check out so that’s always a good sign. We saw some other cool sites too and were really digging the vibe.

One of the craziest things that happened was eating lunch at this rooftop restaurant in Parahganj. It was on November 26th, the year anniversary of the Mumbai terrorist attacks. It was a very somber day for everyone in India. As we sat eating, I looked down below to the very busy center of the market and noticed people being abruptly stopped by police and getting pushed back to little alleyways that lead to the middle. Sirens and announcements in Hindi started, and some police cars and ambulances pulled up. Everyone started getting pretty worried, but the waitress came up and told us it was just a police drill. Within 10 minutes, there were bomb sniffing dogs, about 100 officers with guns, a swat team and scores of fire trucks. They definitely were checking shops but it didn’t really seem like there was a central area in the square they were concentrating on. Although it seemed pretty weird to me, all this chaos and some of it seemed like maybe there was a real threat, we saw some officers laughing and some other things that looked a bit hoaxy it made me feel a bit more at ease. Everyone was on roofs just watching, and an officer actually ended up coming up to the restaurant and told the manager to have everyone move away, stop looking and to not film anything that was happening anymore. After about an hour of being stuck there, they slowly started letting people walk back in the streets. I overheard the manager tell people something and I called him over. He said he heard it WAS in fact a bomb threat that was called in, but he supposed it could have been a test as well and they just wanted to show the people how fast they could get to the scene. The later as a way to restore India’s faith back in their military after what happened on 26/11. He also said right below the restaurant where the ‘test’ was there was an actual bombing 4 years ago and he saw all the blood and bodies lying on the ground afterwards. It was a Pakistani bombing, most likely against tourists. It was too much. I was a bit relieved after that deal to be flying out the next day. I guess we’ll never really know the real deal. Nothing happened that’s all that matters.