India week one

Firstly, many apologies to everyone who has been awaiting the update to this blog. It is 3 weeks since I got home, and this is the first time I have been able to get online to TRY and update the blog for India. As it was a 4-week project, I will split these entries into the 4 week periods, so you don't have a lot to read in one go!! Remember, when the blog is published the final week will appear first, so scroll down to read it in order

2nd March:

The flight from Auckland-Sydney-Mumbai-Delhi was SO long. I had to leave the Auckland hotel at 0300 and had to pay NZ$25 departure tax at the airport, which was really annoying. Good thing I still had some currency on me, wasn't it. It was raining horizontal rain in Auckland, which kinda rounded off the NZ trip quite nicely as on the first day in AKL in January it was also raining!

I got to Sydney really tired and I was not impressed by having to walk through the transfer area rather than getting a full wheelchair transfer. My TCS today was really bad today - stiff and tight back, and painful feet, so that didn't put me in a good mood for the 12.5 hour flight to Mumbai. Luckily, for the time between flights (the outward one was delayed by 1 hour) I found a line of seats all together and slept quite a bit and felt a lot better afterwards. On that Sydney-Mumbai flight I got a bulkhead seat so could really stretch out my legs, but I still had terribly painful feet (pins and needles, cramp, numb feet - grrr).

As we flew over Mumbai the atmosphere was grey and polluted - a taste (literally) of things to come. In the airport I saw surly bureaucrats, and little tin-pot officials gesticulating and ordering people around for seemingly no reason. As my case was very delayed coming through, I feared that it had got lost somewhere between the cities and the spectre of having to deal with those officials hung over me. Thankfully it came through and I got transferred to the Jet Airways flight. The transfer "bus" was very dilapidated and it had to stop on the airport ring road as a cargo plane taxi-ed and stopped just feet from the edge of the road. Health and Safety there ain't!! The Jet Airways flight was a couple of hours up to Delhi and I slept all the way.

Delhi airport - NIGHTMARE!!!!!
I was shattered when we got to Delhi but I still had to wait a long time for my case to come through. I had to fend off the bumsters asking "taxi, ma'am, ma'am" and I walked out through the empty (by now) arrivals hall, expecting to see someone from IDEX to meet me. There was no-one there. I had had a dreadful sinking feeling since part-way through NZ that this would happen, due to many administrative failures by my sending company - and it happened. I was stranded at the AP, with a phone number for IDEX that didn't work and totally alone as I was the only person coming in on a domestic flight to Delhi.

The guard in uniform suggested that I take a pre-paid taxi into town, and after a lot of other things going on I eventually got to the Hotel Surya Shelter - and found they didn't have a booking for me. Apparently (as I found out a week later) my hotel booking had been changed by my sending company, and despite me telling them that I was out of email contact from the previous Friday onwards (and being +13 hours to GMT) they emailed me the new hotel name on the Saturday?!?!? when I was in transit from Auckland to the airport and then in the air for approximately 16 hours. How inefficient can you get?!? By this time I was in emotional collapse - I couldn't stop crying for tiredness and frustration, I couldn't understand all the Hindi being gabbled around me, and I didn't know where I was meant to be staying for the night, or indeed whether I would be able to join the project the next day.

Here I must commend the male night receptionist of the Surya Shelter hotel. He was very reassuring and seemed to know the contact for IDEX, and suddenly a guy from IDEX appeared and arranged for me to go to the Hotel Perfect, just round the corner. The receptionist at the Perfect, wasn't! He was a surly bas***ard and wouldn't help much with contacting the rep. I took the decision to sit in the reception area and wait for the girls from the BA257 flight to come in in the morning. I had snatched bits of sleep, but nothing helpful. By this time I had been up about 26 hours and my body was hurting more than it had done for the whole trip, I was physically and emotionally drained and feeling very lost and alone.

At last Deepak, the rep, came in with the 2 girls from the BA flight - Viv and Jenny from England. They were very pleasant and unfortunately listened to my woes, but were reassuring and helpful. We got showed to our rooms, but by this time it was time for breakfast. We went up onto the rooftop terrace and had, er, cornflakes with hot milk!! and toast! The atmosphere was brown with pollution and not nice to breathe but there was nowhere else to go to eat. Graziella from Sydney/Switzerland came over from the Surya Shelter and that was 4 members of our India team.

We decided to go out and explore Delhi. Although I was crying out for sleep I agreed, as it would be the only opportunity to do so before we got on the road to Agra and Jaipur. We were surrounded by hawkers and transport, tuk tuks, bicycles; we passed fruit stalls, and stalls holding all kinds of products. The overall memory I have of this walk is a dust-covered, hazy brownish urban landscape, full of a crush of people, choking haze, no peace to oneself, no personal space, kids tagging and begging. Graziella suggested we go up to Connaught Place by tuk tuk, and once we had found one which didn't rip us off and change his charges as soon as he turned the thing on (!) we joined the melee on the road. It was every man for himself, no lane control, no lights on any vehicle, no direction, tuk tuks shared the road with cars, vans, trucks, people, horse and cart, hand carts, cows, goats, horns blaring. The smaller vehicles banded together to get across roundabouts and intersections, and went hell for leather, not looking to left or right, but just going. In our tuk tuk we went ooh and aah but got to just outside the rotunda of Connaught place in one piece. By this time we were all feeling frayed round the edges and jet-lagged, and the western-style tea place appeared like a mirage!! We entered an air-conditioned place (like Starbucks) and I had Darjeeling Divine, which was like nectar. When we had finished this, I decided that 40 hours of being up was too much and so Viv and I got a tuk tuk back to the hotel. I did fear that we were being taken in the wrong direction but we got there eventually. I staggered up to my room, locked the door and slept for the next 16 hours non-stop. Even when the girls and Deepak knocked at my door I didn't hear them. Only a text from CJ at home woke me up at 8 pm and then I just went straight back to sleep.

Thus finished my first day in India.