Delhi - 3/29/1999
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We've been in Delhi for a few days, so I'll send this update today and then probably one more when we head for home this Friday. Time sure flies when you're reeling from culture shock each day.
Saturday morning, I checked out Jantar Mantar, the ancient observatory across the street from our room at the Park Hotel, while Mom stayed in the room to wait for a phone call. Jantar Mantar has several large sundials and similar structures built in 1725. You can climb to the top of most of them, and like all the monuments in this part of the world, there are no safety features (say, guardrails) so you have to watch your step.
After that, we transferred to Hotel Kanishka, where we'll stay through Friday. It's about half a mile straight south of Connaught Circle, and from our room on the 13th floor, we have a view of India Gate and - when the smog lifts - Humayun's Tomb off in the distance.
In the afternoon we booked a driver through the hotel to take us to a few places. He's been driving a cab since 1959, so (given our experience with younger drivers!) we're going to keep him through the week.
After a few Moghul marvels (including Humayun's Tomb), we went to the Bahai Temple. The Bahais have seven temples, one on each continent, and the North American temple is just north of Chicago. Each Bahai Temple has a different design, but they're all multi-sided symmetrical one-room buildings with a very high ceiling and rows of pews inside. The Bahai credo is essentially "everyone should believe in a god, but we don't care which one or how you worship him/her as long as you do it quietly."
The temple in Delhi is in the shape of a giant lotus flower, which is very striking, and the pews and floor are made from white marble slabs like those used in the Taj Mahal. And they run it very efficiently and professionally. Hundreds of people were filing in when we arrived, mostly Hindus with some Muslims too. There were no beggars or hawkers, and although you had to check your shoes at the entrance, there were large signs saying NO TIPPING. Even the waiting line to get in was unlike the rest of India: young ushers maintained a single line with none of the everyone-for-himself pushiness we've seen everywhere else. For travelers weary of India, the Bahai Temple is a treat.
After that, the driver took us to a Kashmir carpet place we didn't ask to be taken to (hey, it's India - we've only had one driver who didn't do this, Ajit the Sikh in Amritsar). We smiled through a demonstration of how the carpets are made, which was really quite interesting, then said NO firmly and politely, and moved on. The proprietor and I got into a good-natured argument about whether our Malamutes could destroy one of his carpets - he kept insisting that no dog could damage a well-made silk carpet, but I wasn't willing to spend $900 to prove him wrong.
Then we went to Qutb Minar, a stone complex that includes "the world's tallest free-standing stone tower" at 237 feet. There is a staircase up the inside of the tower, but it's been closed ever since some people were trampled to death a few years ago. There were many workers repairing sections of the tower, and they were probably using the same types of tools used in its original construction back in 1193; bamboo scaffolding, hemp rope, and stone slowly chiseled into shape by hand. Since Qutb Minar ("victory tower") was built in 1193 to celebrate the defeat of the Hindus and the beginning of Muslim control of the area (which continued until the British arrived in the 1700s), it's a little ironic to see Hindu workers restoring the tower to its former glory.
Saturday night we ate at the Mandarin, a Chinese restaurant on top of our hotel. Ordering drinks was a typical Indian dining experience.
Waiter: "What would you like to drink?"
Me: "What type of beer do you have?"
Waiter: "Lager beer, sir. One or two?"
Me: "What type of lager beer?"
Waiter: "Let me check." (Goes to the kitchen, comes back) "We have only Beck beer tonight, sir, very sorry."
Me: "Great! We'll have two Becks."
Me (to Mom): "That's unusual - every other place we've been has only had Kingfisher or Godfather's. I haven't had a Western beer like Beck's all month."
Ten minutes later, our waiter returned with two ice-cold Kingfishers. We didn't even ask.
Sunday morning, Mom left at 5:00am for a 3-day side trip to Coimbatore (several hundred miles south of here), to visit Manisha (the exchange student who lived with Mom and Dad in the 80s in Seattle). And for the rest of Sunday, I did something I've been wanting to do all month: NOTHING. I never even left the hotel, and by the end of the day, after getting to know the bartender and his stock of India-brewed McDowell's single-malt whiskey (not nearly as bad as I expected, and I told him so), my attitude about India had improved 100%.
Last night I sensed some type of motion in the hotel room while I was sleeping, as if a train had rumbled past. But then I lay awake thinking about how we're up on the 13th floor, and there are no trains within a mile or so, so something didn't make sense. Then, just as I was dozing off, there was another similar motion, less severe, but this time I was awake and was certain it wasn't a dream. I hopped out of bed, turned on all the lights, and looked under both beds, in the closet, and in the shower. No visitors, and the door still bolted from the inside. I felt like a fool, but was so wide awake I couldn't get back to sleep. Then at 6:00 I turned on CNN, and after the update from Yugoslavia, they showed a map of India with a red star near Delhi... "an earthquake registering 6.8 on the Richter scale occurred near Delhi in the province of Uttar Pradesh last night, with aftershocks ... no word yet on damage or casualties." What a relief - I don't have India shell-shock, it was just an earthquake! The final death toll was "at least 100," but authorities don't know an exact total because there are no accurate records of the people living in the rural area where the quake was centered.
Today I had our driver take me to a bunch of places to take photographs: India Gate, Rashtrapati Bhavan (the president's residence, like our White House), the Delhi Zoo, and two ancient ruins that were very cool: Purana Qila and Tughlakabad. Both these places were deserted: I wasn't just the only tourist; I was the only person around, except for some kids playing cricket inside the stone wall around Tughlakabad. Highly recommended.
Well, enough rambling for now. I'm off to meet with Mr. McDowell [whiskey] and a Cuban guy [cigar] from the Hyatt Regency (thanks for the tip, John). More later in the week.
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India Gate and Rashtrapati Bavan (the President's official residence)
Delhi's air pollution is ranked among the worst of any large city on earth, and during our stay it varied significantly from day to day. India Gate was just over a mile from our hotel, and on clear days (such as after an overnight rain), we had a great view of it; on smoggy days, it was barely visible through the haze.

The driver we booked through the hotel was great in terms of safe and sane driving, but he had his quirks, too. For example, we never could get him to take us to Buddha Jayanti Park, just a couple of miles from our hotel. Every time we asked, he said it was not attractive – most likely because he was a Hindu – and changed the subject. And he repeatedly asked to take us to a specific craft shop far south of our hotel, so we finally relented and let him take us there, assuming he would get a kickback. We went only as a favor to him, but once we got there he insisted that he wasn't paid to take us there and just wanted to take us to a nice place.



At the Delhi Zoo, I saw an American coyote. On the way to and from the zoo, we passed elephants and camels on the street. My driver said the camels were being ridden by people from Rajasthan.
Our dinner at the Chinese restaurant on the top floor of our hotel felt like a cultural melting pot. While we sat surrounded by tourists from several European countries, waiting for our very British-sounding waiter to bring our Chinese food, the band showed up. Three young Indian men in white shirts and black ties sat down at the bass, guitar, and drums, and after tuning up they played an instrumental version of the 1920s Czech pop music tune "Beer Barrel Polka." Then a woman in a sari joined them, and she sang a soulful rendition of "Killing Me Softly" by Roberta Flack.
Qutb Minar was one of the most visually striking sites we visited in Delhi. It's a complex of monuments and buildings erected by the Delhi sultanate during the 13th Century A.D., including a 238 foot tall minaret tower that was used to initiate the Muslim call to prayer at a nearby mosque. The tower is beautiful, decorated with intricate inscriptions and geometric patterns, and is the tallest brick minaret tower in the world.



The minaret tower of Qutb Minar

A few years after the minaret tower was completed, Turkic general Qutb ud-Din Aibak had ambitious plans to build a second tower three times as tall as it. But during construction of the base for this tower, he died in a freak accident while playing polo and the project was abandoned. The massive unfinished base still stands, as shown below.

Another interesting detail of Qutb Minar is a 23 foot tall 6-ton iron pillar that was constructed elsewhere near an ancient hindu temple in the 5th Century A.D. and then moved to its current location in the 11th Century A.D. This pillar is considered one of the best examples of the advanced state of Indian metalworking at that time, and it was constructed in a way that makes it so corrosion-resistant that the original Sanskrit inscription on it is still readable, despite being exposed to Dehi's weather for nearly 1000 years.
The pillar has a small indentation 13 feet above the ground that archaeologists have determined to have been caused by a cannonball strike when Iranian ruler Nadir Shah sacked Delhi in 1739. The strike didn't topple or seriously damage the pillar, but the ricochet of the cannonball caused significant damage to nearby Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque. Rich irony: the Muslim leader of Iran, offended by the presence of this Hindu monument within a Muslim holy complex, tried to topple it with a cannon shot, but the pillar deflected the cannonball into the nearest mosque.

My frustrations with travel in India led me to stoop to Ugly American behavior several times on this trip, and I think the lowest I stooped was after our visit to Qutb Minar. A young man kept pestering me about taking a photo from a spot that he had recommended, although I hadn't even noticed him until after I took the photo. He felt I owed him money for his photo advice, and when he wouldn't take no for an answer I started kicking dirt onto his pants and shoes like an angry horse or something, which raised some eyebrows nearby but eventually made him back off.
Then we caught a rikshaw ride back to our hotel. Mom and I were talking on the ride and not paying much attention, and then I looked around and realized that the rikshaw driver was taking us on a long detour. Our hotel was a few miles north of where he had picked us up, and when I looked around I realized he had been driving us straight south instead, presumably headed toward a favorite souvenir shop or something. Knowing that in India you should never touch people with your left (unclean) hand, and it's considered disrespectful and inappropriate to touch the top of a person's head, I grabbed the top of his head with my left hand and yelled at him to turn around and take us directly to our hotel. Which he then did.
Mom sat silently for the rest of the rikshaw ride, and when we were walking into the hotel she said “I don’t like seeing you behave like that, but I guess I don’t know what else to suggest.”

On my final day of solo sightseeing before Mom's return from southern India, I enjoyed the peaceful solitude of Tughlakabad Fort on the southern outskirts of Delhi. I was the only person around except for a group of boys playing cricket.



Tughlakabad Fort
The sheer number of ancient temples, fort, and monuments around Delhi can be overwhelming. We visited dozens of sites that are significant to the long history of Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim culture in this area, and there are many more we didn't have time for.









A few of the historic sites around Delhi that I photographed during our visit.
I had intended to send another email from Delhi after Mom returned from her side trip to Southern India, but that never happened. Our final post was a wrap-up from back home the following week.
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