Thursday, January 24, 2008
Dehli-cious!
Semi-miraculously fled a dreary Thursday afternoon in San Francisco to arrive in Dehli Saturday noon-time! After two intercontinental flights, and a brief but most reviving 10 hour layover excursion to Mark & Nicky's home in central London and five somewhat blurred and incoherent movies (mostly my fault but Hollywood was also partly to blame), I was most relieved to see my sister Jennifer waiting for me at the Delhi Airport.
After checking into our "hotel" which under any other circumstances would have been underwhelming (to put it politely), we braved the streets of Dehli. Immediately we were immersed in a endless barrage of ridiculously cheery ticket touts and rickshaw drivers who have the poor taste to drive on the "wrong" side of the road. I suppose we should really blame the Brits for that - but sheer volume and seemingly chaotic waves of traffic was astounding.
To the evident surprise of the various travel agents that we stumbled through, Jen and I were primed to get the hell out of Delhi as soon as possible with visions of visiting the folk art weirdness of the Garden of Nek Chand in Chandigarth. The crazy looking rock garden is constructed with trash and stones from the nearby Shiwalks that have been carried by his bike. Supposedly bottle tops, florescent lights, tin cans and whatever found objects he could acquire have been assembled into a faintly psychotic looking wonderland. First opened in 1976 supposedly its still being extended.
However, the vagaries of modern travel and post 911 insecurity thwarted our plans. Jen's visa needed to be extended 10 days as the Indian Embassy in San Francisco had cunningly used the original issue date (back in August) as the visa's start date. As a result, she had the pleasure of experiencing the Indian bureaucracy at its most surreal and maddening. This involved two days of near orwellian bureaucratic red tape including bizarrely ordered queueing "systems" punctuated by hourly chai breaks, two locations (but three visits), a multitude of officials, form-filling, stamps and (as we now know) the inevitable passport photo-copies...
Fortunately patience, forced smiles and the tourist economy triumphed and Jen was granted her 10 day visa extension. Overall a humbling experience that gave me a renewed sense of the compassion for all those facing the thrills of the INS and such back at home.
