1995
Having broken from my hotel owner’s shackles, by paying my outstanding debt, I was free to do what I want(ed). I managed to keep $100 from the $200 I was sent from Australia from the hotel scam guys’ pocket in the morning, I found my way to Connaught Place and booked myself in at a backpackers – at Sunny Guest House. I have virtually nothing I’ve saved from this trip, but I’ve managed to fish out the business card from the guest house with its warning, all too late now:
Do not believe the story of Auto Rikshaw & Taxi Drivers Come directly to Sunny.
Oh well, you live and learn. Tuk Tuk and rickshaw drivers can be dodgy for sure, my wife and I didn’t even bother taking a tuk tuk in Bangkok when we were last there on the 50-year backpacker trip, which I have managed to write about in a future post, which is where all these posts are leading to! So be patient. I also warned my friend Fyyaz who was in Bangkok the last few days to steer clear of the tuk tuks! Especially while drunk. Which he was. I hope he went for the dodgy tattoo idea I suggested to him though. Fyyaz did accompany us on part of our Vietnam/ Cambodia leg of the 50-year backpacker journey. I haven’t quite gotten up to that bit yet, I’m currently stuck in Laos (post 30 I think), but it will come! One day.
Okay, now, back in 1995.
The backpackers cost me around 100 rupees a night, maybe even 200, perhaps even less, I can’t remember exactly, but that was still only something like $2-4 a night so with my $100 I could still easily afford at least 10-14 nights in India. My next chance to get a flight out of India was still about a week away where Thai Airways said I might be able to get a seat on a flight to Bangkok. Thai Airways had guaranteed I could get a seat in another 10 days though, if they couldn’t find me one sooner. So I had to budget for 10 days, plus keep a bit leftover for my time in Thailand – the next leg of the journey – which may be another 2 weeks. I knew I’d probably have to lend a little bit more money from someone to get me through that period, but I’d see how far I could get with what I had in my pocket now.
Having bought some cheap street eats for as low as 20 rupees (around 40 cents AUD) over the last few days, I knew it could be done. Some dhal and chapatis, from memory, cost around 20-30 rupees, or 40-50 cents depending on how many chapatis you wanted. I was fine with 2-3 chapatis per dhal. Chai cost as little as 4-5 rupees (maybe 8-10 cents AUD). For breakfast I ended up having corn flakes with yoghurt made from the local street cows, for around 20 rupees, so full of cardboard and marigold goodness – it was actually very good! And then there were activities and transport. Entry into temples was mostly just a few rupees. Motor rickshaws didn’t cost that much, often less than a dollar. Sometimes you’d even get a cycle rickshaw, pedal powered solely by human effort, which was even cheaper, perhaps half that. If I was careful I could make it.
I ended up with a rough daily budget of around $7-10, including travel and accommodation, which would be very tight, but doable. I stuck with my cornflakes for breaky, dhal for lunch and chapatis for lunch and dinner, one piece of fruit a day, and about 5-6 cups of delicious milky and sugary chai, mostly from chai wallahs with a kettle brewing in the gutter, and occasionally a mango lassi.
A few words on the dha (which spell check keeps telling me is spelt ‘dal’ but I keep ignoring it – no AI gonna tell me what to do). I ate what the locals ate. I’d find a place on the street set up with a few chairs, open walls and presumably some iron or something for a roof. You sat and ate your dhal in a little bowl, an almost creamy mixture of beans and lentils. You ordered a chapati from the guy with the plate of chapatis walking around. You rip off a bit of chapati and dip it into the dhal and eat the chapati with the dhal. Then the heat hit you. The spicy heat, a level I’d never experienced before nor since experienced since. My mouth and lips tingled, my throat went numb. The only flavour in the end was spicy heat. My eyes bulged and watered, I sweated profusely, I’d almost trip out with every bite. Then I’d take a sip of water, take a breath and try the next scoop until I’d finished my little bowl. If I’d splurged on a lassi I would sometimes take a sip of that to relieve the pain. I never went for naan, they cost extra. I never got rice, also extra. Almost every day I did that twice a day.
At Sunny’s I got a bed on a roof, again with no walls, just some sort of iron roof overhead to keep the rain out. There were maybe 30 beds up there. The shower and toilets were also up there on the roof. The shower had a door and was enough to get you clean. I didn’t drink the water but I did brush my teeth with it, using my tea tree toothpaste which I figured killed any bacteria in the water. Downstairs there was a little dining area where I got my cornflakes and yoghurt and my chai of the day.
On the first day I went to the Thai Airways to see what chance there was of getting on a plane. They said not to even bother checking for at least 5 days when there might be a chance of a vacant seat. Along the way I found a fancy hotel that looked like it had nice toilets, so I just wandered in there and used theirs. It became my main place of toiletry when I was in New Delhi and I’d make a special trip there at least once a day. The place also had a little train booking agency.
With no plans on what I should do in New Delhi I ended up taking a pedal rickshaw to Gandhi Park, to visit Mahatma Gandhi’s memorial, and just hang out. There was an array of activities including many earwax cleaners who would pour things in your ear to clean them of their wax. I hadn’t had much trouble with earwax but Delhi’s pollution was wreaking havoc with my nose, and at the end of the day I’d have a thick wad of black snot that you could have lit like incense. I gave the wax people a go, apart from the wax they burnt your ear hair. Being 27 years younger back then I didn’t have a huge problem with ear hair. Now I’d happily go to the park every now and again for a good ear burning. They just used a lighter and their adept hands for the practice.
Also going on in the park was yoga and a lot of shoe shining. I had my shoes shined at least twice a day while there, but my Italian Scarpa boots would look almost as dry and dusty as they had been before the shines just 2 or 3 hours later. I sat down and warded off the throng of Indians trying to sell me their wares, they were persistent and very common. As soon as I walked out into the street from your accommodation or got off your rickshaw I’d have at least 3, usually 4-5 people following me around with bracelets, knick-knacks and the like. I never bought anything but that didn’t stop them trying. It drove me crazy after a few days, as did the intensity of the place. There are billions of people in India, like literally a billion people. People are everywhere, the noise is intense, the only time I felt I got any respite was when I was back at the guesthouse or inside a temple, and then as soon as I walked out the door, or gate, the intensity would come crashing down on me.
As I was sitting down on a bench, my ears fresh and hygienic, I looked around for a chai as I ignored the beggars and the vendors. I saw a man cutting hair or something and asked with a nod of my head and a point to his glass to ask where I could get one. He nodded his head and a few minutes later a kid came over and poured me a chai. I felt like a king as I sipped the deliciously sweet and milky chai – in a proper glass mind you, not some polystyrene cup, a proper glass. After my chai, perhaps the 3rd or 4th for the day, I made my way to the Gandhi Memorial. I remember it being simple, with some flowers and a flame. I looked it up on wikipedia and the image seemed to align with what I remember. I had another few moments of peace as I reflected in front of it, then headed back to Sunny’s.
Back at Sunny’s, in the bed next to me I found a fellow Australian. He may have been there in the morning but I didn’t notice him. He seemed very uptight and basically all round unfriendly, with a bit of a suspicious sneer, still he initiated a chat and asked whether I wanted to go look at some sites. We went to the Red Fort – my second trip, the sad cobra was still there, and other cruel animal acts that I hope they’ve since banned. Steve, which I think the guy’s name was, wanted to film with his fancy video camera. They tried to charge him at the gate but I suggested he just say he wasn’t going to use it and to just go on in. That worked and he could film for free.
At least I think that was Steve, I may have suggested the same to the German guys I met earlier. Who knows.
Steve was heading to Jaipur that afternoon and asked if I wanted to go with him. He was a bit tight and I think really wanted to know if I’d share the cost of a room with him, it wasn’t as cheap as Sunny’s but I think still ok for my budget at maybe $5 if we shared, so I agreed to meet him there the morning after next. I had nothing else to do and there was no chance of getting on a plane to Thailand for at least another 5 days, so it sounded like a bit of an adventure. Later that day I went back to my favourite lavatory in my fancy hotel and got the guy at the train booking station to book me a sleeper train – so I’d save money on accommodation for the following evening. I think I just spent the remainder of my time in Delhi, sitting around Sunny’s, though I feel I must have visited somewhere else the next day just to fill in the time, perhaps just wandering around the Connaught Place area and stopping here and there for some dhal and chapatis, chai and fruit.
Oh I also had to cash some traveller’s cheques at some point. I think the Western Union had given me most of my $100 in travellers cheques for some reason that is perhaps lost now in 2024, but made perfect sense in the mid-1990s when we couldn’t just get electronic Money transfers and the like. For whatever reason I had to go to an exchange place to exchange my traveller’s cheques for real money I could spend. I think I had $80 in travellers cheques in different USD denominations so I could get a little out at a time. I went into this fancy place and waited in queue to swap my travellers cheques. I watched some Japanese tourists leaving the exchange window with a plastic bag full of rupees, like they were carrying bags of bricks. My rupees would have been lucky to fill my wallet. I got to the window and I handed over my travellers cheques to exchange, and then the guy asked for my passport, I cringed a little and then handed it to him, he examined it, and unlike the immigration guy, he spotted the visa was over 3 months out of date. He looked at me with a great amount of suspicion and a frown in his brow that was also clearly under his manly black moustache.
“We cannot exchange these, you have no valid visa for India.”
I thought he was about to call the cops on me as he looked around the room, so without saying much more than another little whimper, I grabbed my passport and travellers cheques and got the fuck out of there. Around the corner and down the road a bit I paused, and took a breath having walked very quickly, just below a job, around the same pace as an Olympic walker, reckoning the immigration police weren’t on my tale just yet. I was like, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, in my head. Was I back to having no bloody money again. I calmed myself down and looked up and saw that a place across the street had a sign that they exchanged travellers cheques. It looked dodgy and had no Japanese tourists with wads of cash, more of a convenience store/ traveller agency/ ad hoc business. I went in there and decided to give that one a go with a smaller cheque. They didn’t even look at my passport and just handed over $20 worth of rupee. Quite the little fortune for a backpacker in India in those days.
“On second thoughts”, I said maybe I’ll exchange a few more. My heart relaxed a bit from its pounding, poverty narrowly avoided again.
After that I went back to Sunny’s, probably after getting another chai, and perhaps these peanut things covered in some sugary syrup which I’d been finding around the place, had a shower, packed my blue backpack and headed off to the station.
Which you would think should be relatively straight forward, but which turned out to be an adventure in itself.