Touring Delhi Day 2 – Alan

For day two we planned to meet our guide later in the day (to avoid the heat) and see the Old Delhi Market. To spend the hotter part of the day in a cool place he suggested seeing the National History Museum.  Well… Vineet had forgotten that the next day would be Monday, and that all the museums are closed on Mondays. Nor did our concierge inform us of this fact as he was giving us directions. To our guide’s credit, he did realize his mistake when he woke up and saw his sister was getting ready for work for her job at the Toilet Museum!  He  did call the hotel but we had already left!

As we walked out of the hotel complex we were approached by an auto-rickshaw driver who offered to take us to our destination. When we told him where we wanted to go he told us it was closed, but offered to drive us there for 20 rupees ($.40) so that we could see for ourselves. When we arrived it was, of course,  closed and we  had to move on to plan B. We decided on Humayun’s tomb and thus started our tour of the tombs of the Mughal Emperors! The auto-rickshaw driver happily waited as we toured the tomb and the grounds. While visiting we met a young high school (Culver Military Academy ) woman from the U.S. who was traveling on her own. . Susan and I marveled to see this young person on her own in such a foreign land. The three of us listened to a quick explanation of the tomb which the ticket agent was happy to provide, for 150 rupees, and then left for our walk around the tomb.

After visiting the tomb we left our U.S. companion and asked the auto-rickshaw driver to take us back to the hotel. Instead he convinced us to take make a short visit to some shops along the way. I am sure he gets paid for dropping off tourists but we did manage to get out  without buying any rugs! We only purchased a few smaller, and probably overpriced, gifts for family back home.

Next stop was back to the hotel; Susan was a very good sport riding along in the rickshaw. The traffic was wild with the roundabouts and all of the jockeying for position on the roads between cars, motorbikes, and rickshaws!   We arrived  “home” feeling a little windblown and hot but overall in good spirits.

We left the hotel about 4:00pm and I tell you we had no idea what was in store! We arrived at the outskirts of Old Delhi and hopped out of our car and into a bicycle rickshaw. The seat was a tight fit for the two Americans but after a few instructions on how to brace for bumps we were off and into the thick of it. We started out on the main thoroughfare but quickly ducked into a curvy alley that was barely wide enough for four people shoulder to shoulder. In this alley there were scores of people, scooters, and of course a few like us in a rickshaw! Every time we would stop and lose momentum our driver would have to labor with all his might to get the buggy rolling again. I was amazed at how strong this guy was. After a while of going past many, many shops, some no wider than a doorway,  we hopped off the rickshaw and ducked into an alley where there were homes of some of the people that worked in Old Delhi. Our guide, Vineet, explained about how most of the shops were wholesale and that even though shops were small, people from all over India (and the world) were coming to visit the shops and buy the goods. The shops we walked past first were primarily clothing, textiles, jewelry, and accessories. Intermingled in these shops were a number of places to purchase food, some little nooks, others with more of a storefront, but all with a lot of history (we saw signs stating that some had been doing business from the late 1700s!).

After we wound our way through that part of the market we came out onto a larger street and then crossed over to the spice market. First we walked into an alley where they were selling wholesale dried fruit and spices, we saw sacks of turmeric, chillies, salt, dates and other goodies. I had never really thought about it before but having all of those spices together in such large quantities really made it hard to breathe without sneezing! After our trip into the wholesale market we came back onto the street and visited a shop where Vineet knew the owner. He had a number of different spices that we could buy retail, some teas, and also some blends of spices that he had made for different types of food. We bought some  blends, some great vanilla beans, saffron, and a black cardamom which has  a great smokey aroma. The 30ish owner said he was third generation running the spice store, however, it was clear he was a man of the this century with global buyers and the latest technology at his finger tips in this very old world marketplace.  He sent our purchases home via DHL to arrive only in 4 days!

At this point we met our cycle rickshaw drivers again and headed down a busy street which showed the diversity of religion in the area. There was the Jama Masjid Mosque (the largest in India), a HinduTemple, Sikh Temple, and a Jain Temple all within a few blocks of each other.

After our touring, Vineet  took us to a place call Connaught Place. It is a business district with a number of shops and restaurants, clearly a hip part of town. He left us at a trendy restaurant called Q-Ba (pronounced Cuba) and mentioned that it was only a short two block walk back to the hotel.

It was happy hour (it was 8 and we were clearly ahead of the crowd), they wanted to give us each four beers!  We had two and an appetizer.  I looked at our map and asked the waiter for directions so we left thinking we knew where we were going……Wrong!

I thought we were to walk up a couple of streets and turn left to the hotel. What I didn’t do correctly is count the street that we saw just as we came out of the restaurant so in fact we overshot the correct street. What at first was pretty nice sidewalk and shops turned to broken up sidewalk and holes in the ground very quickly! Just as we were starting to think of back tracking, and as you can imagine a little nervous, we saw an auto-rickshaw driver that was available. I asked him to take us back to the hotel and he asks for 200 rupees! I offered him 20 and we eventually settled on 60 rupees (just a little over a dollar US). It was definitely a dollar well spent as we were quite a bit off course, it was dark, and we would have gotten very lost!  Although it was a little tense in the moment, we could both laugh about it once we got back to the hotel.