Day 1: Singapore-Delhi

Govin and I left Singapore in the late afternoon. I had a minor panic earlier in the day when, with superb comic timing, my phone suddenly hung on me. I was on the verge of just buying a new phone but fortunately the guy at the phone shop told me I just needed to reformat my phone memory. It worked, but at the expense of deleting all my contacts and previous messages. I was bracing myself for a bleak future of rebuilding my phone address book when Govin, who had arrived the day before from Malaysia, mentioned that I can do backups of my address book on my PC in the future, which sure enough, I actually had done some time back when I had nothing better to do. That Govin sure is one smart bugger... I figure that's what you get with overseas education and all, unlike us local yokels. Seven years working in electronics, and I'm still an idiot when it comes to phones.

Phone back to normal, and most of my contacts restored, my zen was restored to the tenth chakra. I had decided to pack light, or as light as possible considering that it was going to be two weeks of being on the road in the sweltering summer heat. In the end that translated to a 7kg backpack and a 5kg small sling bag that I'd be checking in.

Our flight arrived in Delhi at around 8ish, and Dave was there at the airport to meet us, bald head and cowboy hat and all. Much merry-making and joyous shouting ensued, after which we merrily made it out of the airport and to the stuffy van that was to take us to our hotel.

Dave had already told me earlier not to expect much from our hotel, and being the Master of Understatement that he is, I was bracing myself for cowdung on the walls and chickenshit on the floor. But it wasn't too bad... basically, when you're paying 450Rp (SGD15) for a hotel room, you get what you deserve. To get to Hotel Namashkar wasn't that difficult actually... keep walking down the main thoroughfare in Paharganj until you smell the open air public urinal, then turn into the alley with the urinal and walk to the end.

The alley as seen from our hotel.

It was a typical backpacker's hotel, and it was located in a the backpacker's area of Delhi called Paharganj, which was just next to the New Delhi railway station. Our room was pretty basic - a bed, a fan, a couple of cushions that double as chairs, an attached bathroom where we had our first experience of the temperamental Indian plumbing system, no tv, no radio, no aircon. Not really the best way to spend a night with temperatures up to the mid-thirties, but the following day would be an early one, so for a few hours' of shut eye, it would do.

First order of business was food, so once we checked in we walked out to the stretch of restaurants just outside the railway station for a bit of chow-down. It was everything you'd expect your first impression of India would be - the hustle and bustle, the honking traffic, the countless conversations, the smell of cooking fat, the kebabs on display... it was India in your face. We settled into one of the restaurants and had some delicious chicken tikka.

Along the way we decided we should start checking out other alternatives for accomodation for our next stay in Delhi. We had decided prior to this that we'll save our Delhi sight-seeing and shopping for the final days of our trip, so that we keep our itinerary as flexible as possible. But if we were looking at spending a few days in Delhi, then obviously we should be getting better digs. And since it was going to be the last leg of our trip, it was pretty unanimous that we should splurge a little and end our trip with some degree of comfort as a reward. I'd checked out Dave's Lonely Planet, which recommended a hotel a little further down the road than the restaurant we were in, so we decided to walk up and have a look. It turned out that it was one of a strip of garishly lighted and decorated hotels, probably targetted towards the middle-class locals in transit. We checked out the rooms in a few hotels, and were pretty impressed by the room showed to us at Hotel Ajanta, which was actually a suite containing two rooms with king-sized beds, a flat screen tv in each room and a balcony, all for 2500Rp a night. We enquired after its availability but decided not to make reservations until we had firmed up our itinerary, but we now had something to look forward to as a reward for our future endeavours.

Our first day in India wouldn't be complete without some tension, of course. We got onto rickshaws for the return trip to our hotel, and ended up haggling with the rickshaw drivers on the price for the ride. There's nothing like a fight over an extra 10 rupees to ensure you've gotten your money's worth of a ride.

Of course, there was a lot of catching up to do, so we didn't really have much of a shut-eye that night, talking and playing cards up to 3am with a few bottles of Kingfisher for company, along with a round or two of welcome shots of tequila, which we had bought from the Singapore Duty Free. Govin had sweet-talked a chick at one of the duty-free shops into giving us some plastic cups, which he then promptly misplaced somewhere else in the airport. So in the end we got some paper cups from a nearby grocery store, along with some salt, and negotiated for some lime from a guy selling nimbu pani on the road side.. let nothing stand in the way of our welcome tequila shots!