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Delhi-
So I've decided to write a blog again. Partly to capture the memories of a totally different culture and way of life. Mostly because the journeys are long and I've got time to kill.
So...we arrived in Delhi. The flight was very comfortable, in fact one of the best long distance flights I've taken in a long long time (big up Virgin Airways). After slipping my grateful swollen feet from the confinement of my trainers to my sandals, we heading out to the 37deg heat outside to get a taxi to our hotel. And got scammed.
I say this freely now without sobbing because it's actually turned out very well. So here's what happened. Very tired and jet-lagged we decided to pick the first guy who walks up to us and offers us a taxi. I want to point out at this stage that I am equally to blame we were both naturally heading for the government approved pre-paid taxi booth as my trusted guidebook suggested. But I went with Cedric, who had been in this country before, and told myself that he knew what he was doing. Next thing I knew, we were hurtling through Delhi centre in traffic, driving with such intensity that I had rarely experienced before. What made me chuckle was the fact that we're white lines on the road, providing 4 sensible lanes to help drivers travel safely to their desired destination, but no-one took a blind bit of notice. It made me think of one of those apocalyptic zombie movie scenes, where hordes of people are jamming their way through every gap in the traffic with their families in tow, trying to flee from their grisly fate. Well Delhi's like that, but all the time. The 2 chaps who picked us up in the dilapidated rust bucket were nice and friendly, only one of them speaking English. We travelled about 40 minutes before we hit a road and the driver 'couldn't get to our hotel because of festival'. This is where the scam started. According to him, the whole area around our hotel had been closed down because of a huge festival (one I've never heard of, funny enough) where thousands of Indians flock and cram the buses and the train station and they couldn't get to it. At this point we were so tired, hot and wanting a bed, getting out to figure out where we were and walking wasn't an option. Instead they took us to a government information centre. These places we soon learned had nothing to do with the government and were as apt as scamming tourists as the rest of them. The pot- bellied guy who greeting us, who I can only presume is one of the higher mafia overlords of the whole operation, offered us a chai tea and calmly explain that we couldn't go to our hotel.I won't go into details but an hour and half later were found ourselves paying an insane amount of money (for India anyway) to have a private driver for 5days to get us to Jaipur. We were scared, tired and not knowing who or what to believe. Apparently there was no point in staying in Delhi due to the festival, all hotels and transport were fully booked, so we went with it. And to finish the scam with a little cherry on top, it meant we had to leave Delhi straight away to drive the 3 hour journey to Agra, home of the Taj Mahal. I cannot express how scared, tired and overwhelmed we were. This whole thing messed up our whole plan and we felt like complete idiots for buying into this very elaborate hoax. If I had told this story to myself 48hours before, I would have said 'you stupid gullible fool, of course it's a scam, how did you not see it!' But there it is. We are in Agra after 13hours of non-stop travelling and we were exhausted.
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