December 1 to 3 – Delhi

We have some down time before the next leg of our travels so we are going to Delhi where we can find internet.

On Monday we worked on photos and the blog and spent time reading and on Facebook and generally catching up with the news (generally very depressing).  We headed out after lunch to a nearby “shopping center”, a street with lots of small shops.  

We found a couple of shops that carried Nature Valley bars and we stocked up.  Apparently, we are going very remote in northeastern India and there won’t be internet (and at times no electricity).  Tara also said that restaurants are also few and far between so we needed to bring snacks.  It was good to find familiar snack bars.

One of the shops was a Baskin Robbins so we each had an ice cream.  What a treat.

On Tuesday it was more of the same.  The little B&B we are staying at (Evergreen) has a kitchen and a rather extensive menu, so we have been eating here.  The food is actually pretty good although a bit slow.  They make everything from scratch…nothing is pre-prepared. 

Evergreen has been our base in Delhi and since we keep coming back here we are able to leave half of our luggage in storage with them.  Makes it a lot easier to get around on the tours.  

Driving in India is not for the faint of heart or the distracted. You almost never see traffic lights (there are a lot of round-abouts in the cities) and you almost never see lane lines. If there are lane lines they are generally ignored...for two lane traffic one is likely to see vehicles three or more abreast with foot traffic and bicycles along the road edges and motorcycles weaving between cars. Crazy. The horns are used constantly to let others know you are here. And at night half the vehicles seem to lacking some or all lights, front and back.

And the swarms of traffic. Have you ever watched a large school of fish (maybe on a National Geographic special). They swarm and swarm and there are a million of them. They swirl around coral formations or divers or larger fish out to eat them. They never seem to touch or be touched by anything.

Well, that is traffic in India. There are well over a billion people on this subcontinent and it seems as though they all drive a bus or truck or car or tuk-tuk (little open air taxi's) or motorcycle or bicycle or cattle or horse drawn carts. Plus there are pedestrians everywhere as well as dogs and cows.

And they all share the road just like those schools of fish with the traffic ebbing and flowing and swirling around the other vehicles sharing the road.

As a note: According to Tara the reason you see cows in the road all the time is that the cows have discovered that all the fumes and exhaust from the vehicles help keep the insects away, hence the cows are always in the roads adding to the exotic drama.