We arrived in Delhi at around 9am, unable to even wonder what the time was back home. Our first encounter with immigration soon woke us up. Even although we had applied for an eVisa, we were aware that we would have to show a paper copy of it at the airport. Only problem was that what we’d printed out to show wasn’t the actual eVisa, rather the eVisa application. A frantic search through old eMails to find the right documents we should have printed and luckily they were happy to see it as an email. Next we had to find a cash machine and our taxi into town which we’d thankfully booked.
The taxi pickup regime was bewildering. There were a couple of guys with printed signs at the top of the airbridge, then in the baggage hall. All before we even passed through immigration, which seemed very odd. Anyway, ours wasn’t one of them. Next as we exited in to the arrivals hall we found the expected hoard of people with printed or hand scrawled names. Unfortunately, no matter how many times we went up and down the line, none of the notices had our names on it. Damn Booking.com and their bonus offer of free hotel transfer for being a ‘Genius level 3’ member! Okay, we would have to get some cash and find our own taxi. I’d done that before, I can’t remember if I’d every haggled with a taxi driver after an exhausting long haul flight though.
Every cash machine we tried refused every card we tried it with, all with no indication of the reason for the refusal. Even after my later encounters with cash machines in town and finally getting cash, I still had only the vaguest idea why most cash machines refuse.
Here we were not only needing to find a taxi and haggle a price, we also needed him to accept that we’d pay him when he found us a way to get the money, even if that meant at the hotel.
Out into the Delhi smog and here was a final wall of taxi drivers all with hand scrawled notices, and the far end - ‘David and Vanessa’. What a relief!
The taxi journey to the hotel was everything I remembered from the last time, except that the air wasn’t this acrid before. You could even feel a burning sensation in your throat. The chaotic stream of cars, trucks, tuk-tuks, rickshaws and people weaving a mad tapestry along the ten lane highway.
After about an hour we were in the heart of the city down streets barely wide enough for one car, but managing to accommodate what sometimes seemed like three ‘lanes’ of traffic and people zig-zagging between them to cross the road. It all seemed impossible, a kind of hyper-reality, but real it was.
Our hotel - ‘Prime New Delhi’ had good ratings, but the street our driver stopped in made us think he’d got the wrong place. We turned our heads and right enough - Prime New Delhi shone out at us from that anything but prime location.
Now begins our first day in delhi!
