"Delhi" a New Delhi Travel Page by tayloretc

We just passed through, in and out of the airport, but I don’t think I want to go back to Delhi for any reason. The traffic was beyond belief, even though there appeared to be some substantial ring roads. At one point heading to the airport a dozen lanes of vehicles on two separate roads became two lanes on one road.

Life’s just too short.

October, 2007

And just a few months later I did go back, of necessity rather than desire, but with mostly better results. Not with the traffic, that’s still miserable, but the experience of Delhi just might make the traffic worth a (short) stay.

So, to modify first impressions.

Delhi is a bizarrely fractured city, divided between tidy but bland British or British-inspired government stuff, old Mogul stuff in varying stages of crumbling, and the colorful mess of everything else. There’s a lot more greenery than I’d have thought, around the bland government and Mogul stuff, and in beautiful parks.

I hired a car to visit as many of the “sights” as possible in my short time there. From my three days with two excellent drivers, I can say with confidence that to see anything “important” in Delhi you have to go around circles enough to make you sick, and shoot off in a lot of straight lines that life is too short to for. I’ve never seen a city with more roundabouts, and I’ve lived in Boston. I’ve never seen traffic like this, and I’ve driven in L.A.

Sights aside, people in Delhi are more in your face than anywhere else I’ve been in India. Maybe more than anywhere. Beggars on the creeping highways reached into the car and shoved things in my face, and one grabbed my hair. Men passing by felt me up; I thwacked two on the head for it and they looked surprised. The hard young things in Connaught Place leered so hard I needed a second shower.

Anyway.

Delhi has been the capitol of India for different rulers on and off for 800 years or so, and there are remnants scattered throughout the city. They are just remnants, though – unfortunately, the city has been destroyed a couple of times, once so completely that it was abandoned for a hundred years. This means that the fragmentation is greater than implied above. You’re flying around a roundabout, and suddenly there’s a fenced-off plot with a crumbling Mogul ruin inside. You’re inside a park, peer over the wrong wall, there’s the colorful mess. The colorful mess is filling in the gaps between tidy British-era things, too.

Some of the remnants are bigger than others – the Old Fort, or the Jami Masjid mosque, for example, are huge – but they are all at good distances from each other, and the traffic makes it a chore to be a good tourist. The most I managed was four places in one day, and the route was planned in detail between the driver and the hotel, taking into account traffic patterns over the course of the day, known road construction, and what dignitary was visiting where at what time (a dignitary’s visit means no one else gets in). I didn’t get to any of the museums – there simply wasn’t time.

What I did get to see was impressive, though. The Moguls did forts and tombs exceptionally well, and the British did a decent job of building the new capitol on a scale that suits India. India takes care of the rest. Overall, an interesting place.