I travelled to Delhi from Jodhpur, and I’m the first to admit that I was a little apprehensive about arriving in the capital. After a great week in Rajasthan, it was back into a megacity for a couple of days. In truth, I was being a little unfair on Delhi; I was expecting the city to overwhelm me the way Mumbai had a couple of weeks earlier. To my delight, I was worrying about nothing. Now that I’d acclimatised to the temperature – in any case, Delhi in November isn’t engulfed in the humidity that never leaves Mumbai – and I’d familiarised myself with the country a little bit, I enjoyed Delhi. I quickly found a little routine, waking in the morning to have an enormous breakfast on one of the many rooftop cafes in Paharganj, the most popular area in town for backpackers, where I could sit outside and watch over the chaos on the street below. Unfortunately, the coffee I was served in most of those places looked like dishwater and had the taste to match, but other than that it was a great start to the day. After that, I’d go for a long walk from my hostel in New Delhi over to Old Delhi and spend a couple of hours sightseeing or just wandering around town. Invariably in the evenings I’d stop for a beer in one of the bars on the Main Bazaar back in Paharganj before calling it a night.
On my second or third day, I bumped into an English girl called Beth outside the State Bank of India branch on Chandni Chowk. She had the bewildered look on her face that is unique to new arrivals in India – I’m sure I had the exact same look on my face in Mumbai. We got chatting and decided we’d go together to look around the Red Fort, a few hundred metres away from where we’d bumped into each other. Part of the appeal of the city is the immense historical value it offers visitors, and the Red Fort, not to mention the Jama Masjid mosque around the corner, both remnants of the Mughal empire, are prime examples of this, and the importance of Delhi to that past empire is obvious – Old Delhi itself was once known as Shahjahanabad. I suppose getting to name cities is one of the perks of becoming Emperor.
What was meant to be a couple of nights in the capital for me quickly turned into a week, as I was persuaded me to stay on for an extra night, and then another. Eventually, I had to force myself out of town to keep up with my schedule – I had a couple of weeks in Nepal ahead of me before heading back to India bound for Varanasi. The next time I’m in Delhi, I’ll give it the time it deserves.
James lives in West London and credits his parents with giving him the Travel Bug at a young age. He recently returned from a three month tour of the subcontinent which quickly established itself as one of his favourite parts of the planet, and he now considers himself a firm advocate of all things Indian. He’s an aspiring writer and contributes to various travel forums, as well as maintaining his own travel blog, and when he isn’t at his day job or writing he can generally be found scouring the internet for inspiration for his next big adventure.
Peta Jinnath Andersen is a freelance and fiction writer. Born in Sydney, Australia, to a Fiji-Indian father and Scottish mother, she’s a bit confused about her background, but loves it all the same. Currently living in the US, she has just had her first child, and is busy studying hard in an effort to learn more about her Indian heritage – including taking Hindi lessons – so she can teach her son about just what it is that makes an NRI special.
on March 18, 2010
at 11:11 am
We obviously had quite different experiences of Delhi (see (http://www.the-nri.com/index.php/2010/02/india-a-foreigners-first-impression/)! I really must go back and give it a second chance.
on March 30, 2010
at 8:49 pm
Thanks for the comment Barnaby;
I read your article before…a good piece. I think it was the fact that I’d already been in India a short while when I arrived in Delhi…Mumbai was my baptism by fire! (But then I felt much differently about it, Mumbai, on my second visit.) Give Delhi another chance!
on June 7, 2010
at 5:46 am
I remember when my college friend came over from Mumbai, he stayed with me for 16 days but even that wasn’t enough to cover just the major monuments and places even. And just last year, when the rediscovery bug bit me, even though I spent every single day for one whole month exploring a totally different set of monuments and places from the ones I had shown to my Mumbai friend, I was unable to cover everything that I wanted.
In short, if you liked it, make sure you dedicate at least a couple of months to this city which is actually a collection of cities.