WELL HERE WE ARE!!! After a smooth flight-but 16 hours of it- we are here in Delhi. Arrived at 2 AM and then it took an hour to get a visa at the airport. (Kiwis have been able to get a visa on arrival since last year- the only English-speaking country in this category along with countries like Thailand and Cambodia. Is it because of Sir Ed?) Luckily, the rather taciturn driver from the Yatri House guest-house where we are staying was still waiting for us,on the very end of a long line of sleepy-looking blokes holding up signs in English,Hindi and Chinese. Plus entire families in their best silk embroidered outfits who'd come to pick up Cousin Raj -unless they just live there.
Or maybe the driver wasn't so much tacititurn as grumpy, as anyone would be after being kept from their bed at 3 a.m.
I don't know whether this guy's subsequent driving style was inspired by dissatisfaction or by malevolence but I like to think it was the former. Neither of us had any idea it was possible to travel through worm holes in space on the Delhi dual carriageway but that's the only way it could have been possible to get between that huge truck belching out a further contribution to the smog and that spindly motorbike carrying nana and grandad on the back, white sari and dhotis fluttering in grandson's face as he wove around the potholes.
Yes,Delhi is smokey and smells of cooking fires and pollution. Huge cranes tower over building sites hung with multicoloured fairy lights and all the broken old bits of concrete in the world have come to rest on the sides of the roads. Blokes teeter along the hard shoulder on bikes laden with their entire market stall, tables included. Those humps of tarpaulin held down with bricks are probably someone's house. A blaze of more fairy lights bedeck a huge Buddha or Hindu god at a roundabout.
Crazy,crazy, crazy says Rereata. Here she is in Yatri's quiet (ish), pleasant courtyard
Somebody's started drilling in a concrete wall next door to the room. It's a signal for us to go out into what is probably mayhem...
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