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| | | | Both sides of the India experience
From the Mail on Sunday
India? 'I love it here... but I hate it here.' In his witty gap-year satire Are You Experienced? William Sutcliffe tells a story of British youths struggling to get to grips with India. His characters - practically unable to breathe without the approval of the Lonely Planet guide ('the book') - are trapped in the ultimate travel writing cliche: the land of contrasts.
'India,' says one of Sutcliffe's characters, Jonah, 'is at the same time the most beautiful and the most horrific country - and Indians are both the warmest and the most brutal people on earth...'
People really do speak like this in India. At breakfast one morning in Agra, I heard an elderly English lady telling her companion: 'Ah, India. I can't wait to get home... but I can't bear to leave.'
'India, you'll either love it or you'll hate it,' people kept telling me before my trip. 'It's not a country - it's an experience.' So as soon as you get off the plane, freshly dosed up with shots of hepatitis and meningitis vaccine and stuffed with anti-malarial tablets the size of horse pills, you just hope you are ready to survive the India 'experience'.
As the British Airways 747 sank towards Delhi, I peered down anxiously for any sign of the sensational experiences I had been assured would be waiting for me.
Delhi airport came as a disappointment. An airport is usually a window to a country's soul, yet this was calm, well-ordered and pretty kempt. It was, however, in the wee small hours, and the city was calm in the way that most places tend to be at about two in the morning.
As I emerged from customs with my bags on a trolley, however, I was still ready to deal with the army of hustlers and scallywags that the guidebooks tell you are always on hand, trying to grab your baggage away. But on this side of Delhi's international terminal, at least, there was only dozing somnolence. It seemed no more Third World than, say, Faro or Torquay.
I was met by a driver and led past fleets of Morris Oxfords - the Ambassador, an ancient Morris Oxford clone, still serves as the standard India taxi. (In another curious throwback, India still has the same round-pin electric sockets that we had 40 years ago.)
Travel guide: New Dehli
Oh, Mr Porter, just what would we do without you?
From the Daily Mail
I could only presume that the cow in front of us in the queue at Delhi train station was after a cattle-class ticket. Then again, with his nose pointed in the direction of the station's answer to McDonald's - an old man in a turban with a heap of samosas in his cycle basket - he might have been in line for breakfast.
'Make sure you take a train journey,' my friend Ravi said emphatically before I left for India. 'It's like nothing you'll have experienced in Britain, even in these troubled train times.' He was right.
Though 20,000 people arrive at Delhi station every weekday, few wear suits or carry briefcases. Most are rural poor who haven't worked for years, in the city for the slender chance of a new life. Overcrowding is such that around the station, vehicles can't set down their charges any closer than a quarter of a mile away.
The back doors of our van opened onto a scene of multicoloured life: painted rickshaws and rickety bicycles; children playing tag; and street traders gesticulating as they did business with women in flowing saris. In the middle stood what at first looked like a human statue: a man, more than 6ft tall, in a maroon and green turban, matching sash and sarong. Without a word, he suddenly bent down at the back of our van, and when upright again, he was wearing our M&S suitcases on the top of his turban.
Momentarily, he adjusted them then turned and began the quarter-mile walk to the station. We paid our driver and hurried after him. Our straight-backed porter not only did two strides for our one, he was used to weaving through this huge body of humanity. We lost sight of him and just concentrated intently on the aerial passage of our cases.
Travel guide: New Dehli
Two faces of delightful Delhi
The story of my trip to Delhi is a tale of two cities — I found a thriving, fast-developing modern metropolis alongside traditional Indian culture.
I arrived at Indira Gandhi Airport on a sweltering hot July morning.
During the cab ride to my hotel I saw an eclectic mix of sights — funky modern buildings and flashy cars clashed with humble street stalls and rickety rickshaws.
I checked into a hotel in Pahar Gang, an hour from the airport.
The Woodland Deluxe hotel — don't be fooled by the name — is very basic. The rooms are small and shabby and there's no air conditioning or dining room.
But it's clean, with friendly service, authentic Indian cuisine, bustling markets on your doorstep and it's a snip at £7 a night.
My foray into Delhi's heritage started with the food — one of the most fascinating and pivotal parts of the culture. My first taster was my hotel menu.
I had a traditional North Indian lunch for around £2. It was a scrumptious meal of chapati (wholewheat bread), dhal (lentils), tandoori chicken and palak paneer (cheese in pureed spinach).
I also had a chance to try one of the many South Indian vegetarian street cafes in Pahar Gang. My delicious masala dosa, a lentil-flour crepe stuffed with curried potatoes and served with coconut chutney, dhal and a spicy vegetable broth, came to £1.
My appetite sated, I set out to explore the heritage of Old Delhi.
The Red Fort, the 17th-century royal residence, boasts over a mile of magnificent marble buildings and gardens, ideal for a tranquil stroll.
For a change of pace I stepped into the nearby Chandni Chowk. One of the older street bazaars, it's colourful but congested. You can pick up silks, jewellery and deep-fried street food.
Travel guide: New Dehli
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| | | | A living masterpiece
Next morning in New Delhi, my eyes pricked from the atrocious pollution and my nerves grated at the fearsome noise of the auto rickshaws (an auto rickshaw is essentially a moped equipped with a passenger cabin that officially carries three, although I saw them bearing a dozen people plus assorted farm animals).
In New Delhi, however, life seemed no more astonishing than New Barnet. Taking lunch at the handsomely restored Imperial Hotel, for example, was as sumptuous a pleasure as dining at the London Ritz.
It was the journey a day later, following the 30-minute flight from Delhi, that offered a different perspective. The drive from Jaipur airport through the city and its straggling suburbs offered the first startling glimpse of the famous India experience. At the junction of the airport road, the driver gave way to a cart being pulled by a camel. I had no idea that camels were willing to, or even capable of, pulling a cart.
As the car taking me to the hotel slowly cruised along the bumpy road, the scene outside became part fabulous Fellini film, part earthy Breughel painting. Life at the side of the road was a throbbing tangle of activity that was compulsively watchable and intermittently repellent.
There were stalls piled high with oranges, kumquats and bananas; men wielding pieces of metal; long-snouted pigs snuffling amid the discarded food; tables stacked with bunches of brightly coloured exotic flowers; girls in neat school uniform. Cows stood in the middle of roundabouts, cows lurked at the entrance to petrol stations, cows grazed in the strip at the centre of a dual carriageway.
But most of all, what was amazing was the sheer quantity and diversity of people. Everywhere there were people sitting in white plastic patio chairs eating, talking, smoking, laughing, watching.
It felt like being too close to a very large oil painting. I was glimpsing small pieces of life - a sudden sight of an ornate temple, a group of men squatting on the ground listening intently to a man in a chair ('a story teller,' said the driver), a strikingly beautiful girl brushing her hair as she studied herself in the fragment of a mirror.
Everywhere looked like my teenage daughter's bedroom. As if nobody had made a serious attempt at a proper clean-up for so long that a proper clean-up now seemed near impossible. Things were messy in an epic way. Piles of abandoned bricks and mounds of sand sat among discarded plastic bottles and heaps of bits of long-ago expired vehicles.
'You probably notice that things are very tidy,' said my driver. Really? 'Everything was given a face-lift for the visit of President Clinton last year.' I tried to conceive how things might have looked prior to this face-lift but it was impossible to imagine.
Window on the world
As we already had our tickets and had no wish to refuel at the 'McDonald's' (hugely inadvisable), it was over to the platform. Here, we tipped this beautiful Indian man the going rate of 50 rupees (around 75p) for a walk more accomplished than Linda Evangelista has ever managed for $10,000 on the catwalks of Milan.
We were travelling the 200 miles to Jaipur on the Delhi-Jodhpur Express, one of two 'fast' trains a day. The old train, for the first 20 minutes, travelled alongside a rippling grey river of tarpaulin-topped shacks - home to such a dense concentration of people that it would be impossible to put a figure to it. Children played in the puddles around the train tracks, pigs wallowed in sewers and the ubiquitous cows nosed through rubbish for food.
Next came a landscape of quarries, factories and refineries, then open land, with the occasional tree and bush but seemingly barren. As darkness fell, I opened the window and looked down the track. Ahead, a great red gash swarming with life had opened. We'd reached another station.
The arrival of the train was clearly a major event and the platform was thronged. Gripped by a spirit of adventure, we got off for a look around. After our air-conditioned carriage, the heat was like a dragon breathing in our faces. A dozen or so children followed us a short way along the platform, where traders had set up shop - well, sheets on the ground - and Lama-like old men in white tunics strolled about.
It was such a colourful night scene we'd love to have stayed a while. But the train was leaving, so we climbed back on board to watch a world that seemed not to have changed in centuries.
Cultural window
Next stop in my study of ancient Delhi took me to the centre of the city.
The impressive public buildings which date from the turn of the century are centred around the broad thoroughfare Rajpath.
There's India Gate, an imposing memorial arch, the president's residence on Raisina Hill, blending Mughal and Western architecture and the virtually hidden parliament building.
If you want to learn about the characters who've lit up the country's political stage over the last century it's worth visiting the city's fascinating free museums.
The Indira Gandhi Museum in Safdarjang Road tells of the dynasty which helped run the country for many years.
The Nehru Museum in Teen Murti Bhavan has riveting articles and photos and tells the story of Indian independence.
Leaving historic Delhi behind, my foray into the modern city started when I checked into the £100-a-night, five-star Grand hotel in Vasant Kanj. Its cool modern interior and European food options could make you forget you're in India.
Gurgaon, the emerging silicon valley on the edge of Delhi, is worth a visit. It boasts impressive modern skyscrapers and slick, cutting edge shopping malls.
To sample the nightlife, I headed to the Hyatt Regency hotel in Bhikaiji Cama Place, just one of the luxury hotels in southern Delhi.
Its Djinns bar had been recommended to me by locals. The pub-style interior was a bit of a shock but admission was free, there was a live band and my fellow drinkers were friendly.
Delhi changes shape from rugged street culture to polished glamour, depending which neighbourhood you're in. It's a window on India's multilayered culture.
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| | | | Royal treatment at the Rajvilas
I stayed at the Rajvilas, part of the Oberoi group, which is about as palatial as a hotel can get. Clinton was said to be very impressed. So were the two Americans in front of me at the reception desk. 'Wow,' said the man. 'You can say that again,' said his wife.
The recipient of this year's Tatler Hotel of the Year award, the main building of the Rajvilas is a faux Rajasthani fort - around it are clustered luxury villas, some of them set up as lavishly appointed tents (Clinton had one of these). A few hundred yards away in another world people are hacking a living from selling old bricks and welding bits of old scooter together. In here you live like a film star in rooms with sunken marble baths. Wow!
I would have been happy to linger indefinitely in the Rajvilas but a car was waiting next morning to go to the Amber Fort, which stands at the top of a hill and is reached by an elephant ride.
'Hold on to the seat tightly,' said my guide before I climbed on. This was superfluous advice. Sitting on an elephant is like being carried on the top of a Transit van with a flat tyre. It tottered up the hill often straying alarmingly close to a perilous drop at the edge of the path.
Even more worrying, half way up the hill the elephant driver took his eye off the road and turned round. He began trying to sell me the metal spike which he used to poke his elephant. I told him that while it was a perfectly nice spike, it was of no practical use to me. He took this information with obvious disappointment.
My guide was waiting in the palace at the top to help me off the elephant. 'Much work was done here for the visit of President Clinton and Chelsea,' he informed me. 'They built six helipads.' The fort itself is a delight. The highlight is the Sheesh Mahal, the regal bedroom with a ceiling studded with mirrors - illuminated by a single candle, it bursts into a million points of light.
The car tour ended in Jaipur at the inevitable crafts workshop. Here a toothless old man was busy knotting a carpet; the next minute the same toothless codger was burning another carpet with a gas blowtorch to show its hard-wearing properties - he immediately brushed off the burnt bits to reveal no obvious lasting damage. The next minute he was demonstrating how they block-printed fabrics. Then he was upstairs handing round cups of tea while a salesman encouraged me to buy a yak wool carpet.
'Feel,' he instructed. It felt like yak wool. 'Seven hundred English pounds - delivered straight to your door.' It was a jolly good carpet, I said, but not for me. 'OK, you say how much - how much? You say good price.' From Jaipur Carpets to Allied Carpets, why is it always sale time in the carpet business?
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| | | | The truth about the Taj Mahal
The drive from Jaipur to Agra was a white-knuckle ride as cars overtook lorries and lorries over-took lorries and lorries overtook camel carts with a breath-taking disregard for safety. 'We believe if it is your fate to die then it is your fate,' said my driver. Is that in the Indian highway code, I wondered.
Agra like Jaipur, was the usual chaotic mix of discarded bricks, football stadium crowds blocking the backstreets and roads jammed with auto rickshaws and decrepit buses. The roadsides were compulsive viewing, with shops advertising 'Tasty-Tasty Biscuits' and 'Coaching? Join our Mastermind Classes' and 'Welcome to our Literature Club'.
A Vespa scooter pulled up next to us carrying a husband, his wife on the back riding side-saddle and assorted children and babes in arms. Behind the scooter was an auto rickshaw crammed with schoolgirls frantically revising for some test.
'The Taj Mahal,' said the driver. Indeed, just a couple of hundred yards away, above the tops of some scrubby trees poked the top of the famous dome. In your imagination the Taj Mahal exists in some ethereal world, entirely separate from reality. But here it was, a stone's throw from complete and utter urban chaos.
Oberoi's Amarvilas hotel has been built a few minutes walk from the Taj Mahal. Every room in the hotel has a view of the temple of love built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan as a memorial to his favourite wife. Completed in 1653, the Taj took 20,000 workers 22 years to build (we think we have problems with Wembley Stadium).
It's so exquisite, so perfect, that even as you look at the Taj Mahal you can hardly believe it's real. An afternoon spent strolling around its gardens is an unforgettable experience.
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| | | | A culture of chaos
The drive back to Delhi from Agra was also unforgettable. Most of the highway is dual carriageway, but don't assume that traffic moves in separate directions on either side of the divide. As we approached a McDonald's drive-through, coming towards us on our side of the road was a five-ton truck. 'Taking a short cut to the McDonald's,' said my driver. Well, that's OK then.
Right next to the McDonald's, women in swirling yellow dresses were making piles of cow pats in an arid field. Across the road under large hoardings advertising the benefits of high-speed Internet connections, a family was living in a shelter made from fertiliser sacks.
Further up the road, if you wanted sustenance there was no need to leave the dual carriage-way for the service station, the services came down to you. The super highway was blocked with all manner of stalls selling hot food and cold drinks.
In stark contrast to the calm of the arrivals hall, the departures desks at the airport for the flight home resembled Saigon on the day the Americans pulled out of Vietnam. Chaos barely described it. Before reaching the plane, I had to pass through three separate security checks, one of which requires you to mount a set of wooden steps while a guard feels your legs.
The most perplexing part of the departures process was the 60-minute wait to have your passport checked. I can understand officials being anxious to monitor all arrivals, but India is the first country I've been to that also worries about the people who are leaving.
But even during the worst of this chaos, I was plotting a return. I was desperate to get home but I couldn't wait to come back. Ah, the India experience!
Travel facts Greaves Travel specialises in tailor-made holidays to India. Tel: 020 7487 5687
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