I knew India was going to be difficult. Food poisoning, poverty, scams, language barriers, culture differences, no beef, food poisoning… did I mention food poisoning? The country has all of the obstacles. Naively I thought since I had been traveling for three months in south east Asia I could just waltz in and figure it all out. I was wrong.

Lessons I learned within five hours after landing in India:

1. Don’t fly into the country late at night. Everything closes after midnight. Everything.

2. Despite the fact the taxi driver assured us he knew our hotel and although we had an address and a map of where of the hotel was, we still ended up painfully lost.

3. Confirm and re-confirm and re-re-confirm your hotel bookings as close to you arriving as possible. Our hotel gave up our booking because we arrived late in the day and there was a festival and cricket tournament in Delhi at the time, so they could afford to give our room to a higher paying customer despite our reservations.

4. There is only one legitimate government tourist office in New Delhi and it’s open 9AM to 6PM. I ended up at two “government” tourist offices (scam) between midnight and 1AM.

5. Money can’t solve every problem.

The quick and dirty of it is that we landed around midnight, our taxi driver got lost, our hotel gave up our booking, every hotel (EVERY) was booked because of a festival and the IPL tournament, trains were booked, nothing is open, scam offices tried to sell us drastically inflated trips (thousands of dollars), and the streets are unsafe at night. It’s rare to not have any options. Usually in a worst case scenario you can pull out a credit card and book an expensive hotel or go to something that’s open all night and just hang out until morning. Delhi squashed both of those options.

Thankfully we had a tuk tuk driver that stayed with us and exhausted every contact he had for hotels and drivers and any person he knew for hours trying to help us out. Eventually he found a personal driver, Bablu, who would drive us between some destination towns and cities and arrange accommodation for us along the way for a fraction of what the scam offices were selling. So at 3AM we found ourselves being driven for six hours to a city we had never heard of until 2 minutes ago. And that was all in the first few hours of the trip…

(Floating Palace)

Jaipur was our first stop and the floating palace was probably the highlight for me. The bottom two floors of this palace are under water in the photo above. What’s crazy is in one month that lake will be completely dry and kids will play games of cricket on the lake bed. 

(Our transportation)

In Pushkar we rode camels into a hail storm and ultimately ended up having dinner in the desert with our only light being the heat lightning above. Hanging out in the desert at night, having a few beers, and listening to our guide, who used the word “fuck” like it was his job, describe how he would fight the husband of the woman he loves was a crazy, great time.

(The Taj)

And of course the highlight, while in Agra we went to the Taj Mahal. I can confirm that it is beyond amazing. Even though the pictures of it are pretty great, it doesn’t quite do it justice. And to be there when the sun was just coming up in the morning and the white marble started to have a pale yellow glow, just added to the event. 

(Us with Bablu)

The last few nights we hung out in Delhi and saw the sights. The highlight being when our driver, Bablu, invited us to have dinner at his house with his family. We spent the night watching cricket and eating a home cooked meal with a normal Indian family. A very humbling experience.

————————–

That was India in a nutshell. It was amazing. It started out on as low of a note as I’ve experienced on this trip and yet ended on some amazing highs. In the end, I’m glad things turned out the way they did. Without the initial setbacks which led to the spontaneous road trip, I know I wouldn’t have had the great time that I did. In the end, India felt like the first country where I actually experienced some real adventure.

Just next time I’ll plan accordingly…