Off to Delhi

Graptolite's Sailing Log
Martyn Pickup & Heike Richter
Mon 5 Dec 2016 14:36

Delhi 5th December 2016

 

An interesting development from the sari wearing by H yesterday. On taking the new blouse off she had large parts of her stained blue. Looked like a Smurf. I was amused anyway.

 

Got a flight from Mumbai to Delhi today leaving the memsahib to take the big ship south to Goa.

 

Money changing is turning out to be a problem. A tour guide taking ship people to Agra tried to arrange something for me with a friend of his but this friend didn’t turn up. There were massive lines at all ATM’s in the airport and it turns out there are massive lines all over India with people trying to get notes that are not 500 or 1000 rupees. The only legal stuff now seems to be 100 rupees which is worth a bit over a euro and 2000 rupees worth about 30 euros.

 

I got a scary pre-paid taxi from the airport to the hotel at Connaught Place. Honking the horn continuously while trying to run other cars off the road and dodging monkeys and pigs seems to be the way it is done. Much like it is in Karachi except there are no pigs there. The driver couldn’t find the hotel which was not surprising as the hotel was a walk-up to the 2nd floor of a scruffy building with no signage on it. I tracked it down eventually on foot. It’s a very dilapidated hotel with a broken door lock and dangerous looking electrical arrangements but it has WiFi