When I flew into New Delhi it was midafternoon and it took some time for all of us to get our luggage and our belongings together. I was there about eight years ago as a participant in a University of California extension class. It was an odd collection of people that went on this excursion. I was there as part of a class for my doctoral studies, and some of the other people there were there as students as well, but some of the participants were just tourist who signed up for an interesting “authentic” trip trekking through the Himalayas. Little did they know how treacherous the trip would actually be.
I have been to a lot of developing countries (Third World countries) before, so I had kind of an idea of what to expect as we got the minibus and loaded up our backpacking gear into a second vehicle. I was not necessarily caught unaware as we drove through New Delhi and saw it for the first time. Like many developing nations, India is in the state of constant disrepair. The curbs along the main thoroughfares were broken down or incomplete, the warning sawhorses set up on the broken down curbs were also broken down and had obviously not been touched in years. Most of the traffic lights were in working order but some of them were not, and there was a fine layer of dust over everything. Of course the place was crowded, and hectic, and it was stiflingly hot.
This was significantly different than Thailand, another developing nation that I had just been traveling through before flying on to India. Bangkok and New Delhi are comparable as large metropolitan cities, but Bangkok was clean, well-kept, and the people there industrious – always cleaning their shops, sweeping the streets, picking up trash, etc. India of course was a completely different story. Dilapidation, lack of maintenance, dirt and poverty were everywhere.
We made our way through the city to the University of New Delhi, the most important of the universities in India. Our trip would be a joint trip with students from this university and led by both my dissertation advisor and a geology professor out of the University of New Delhi. When we got to the “guest quarters” of this prestigious university we were ushered into the lobby to get room assignments. It was obvious from looking around the lobby that it hadn’t been cleaned in, say 150 years, or since the furniture and carpet were first placed in the building, whichever came first. It was mid-September and it was hot. The summer monsoon were just ending, the evening temperature in New Delhi was about 95°F, and the humidity was intense. This temperature stayed about the same all night long, and in the evening the outside air was loaded with mosquitoes. The building that we were lodging in did not have air-conditioning and so it was significantly hotter and stuff inside than outside. When we got a room assignments it turns out that the individual rooms did have air-conditioning, and out of the 10 or so rooms that we used, two air-conditioners worked.
Let me tell you a little bit about my room. The toilet didn’t work, not that it didn’t have water, it just did not mechanically flush. Now I’m not a plumber but I can fix a broken toilet – unless it’s in India. When a toilet is broken in India, it’s a goner. So my roommate and I use the restroom until we left the next morning without flushing the toilet. Apparently several of the other rooms were in the same condition. The shower consisted of a pipe that stuck out of the wall about 3 feet high – no nozzle, no sprayer, just the end of a pipe sticking out of the wall. Handles were down below the shower pipe, and as you would expect the hot water did not work. The shower was a square cubicle with a drain. There was no shower curtain, the shower was just half the room and the toilet was the other half. There was no sink. There was a bucket provided by the shower pipe, and I vaguely remember a scrub brush of some kind in the bucket. I don’t recall if there was soap provided or not, but we were on a camping trip so we had our own soap.
In the main room not only did the air conditioner at the window not work, the rest of the window was broken out so there was no way to close it. Not that we didn’t want some fresh air, we did, however with the fresh air came a host of mosquitoes. So that night in the stifling heat I slept on a dirty bed in my sleeping bag. Thankfully I had thought to bring a mosquito hat net which I wore when I slept so I didn’t have to put my head inside my bag, however most of the participants in the trip weren’t so lucky.
Did I mention that the rooms were dirty? If I did I used the wrong word, I should’ve said filthy. The carpet had not only never been cleaned, but from my bed and from my roommate’s bed there was a track leading to the restroom. The carpet along this track was so worn that it was completely gone. Yes, gone. The carpet was completely worn away. We walked on bare concrete to the bathroom, and somehow the concrete seemed cleaner than the rest of the carpet in the room so maybe that wasn’t bad.
I was so exhausted from the flight into India from the states that I actually slept pretty well – in my sleeping bag at 95°F. It would have been expected that this first night would portend the rest of the trip, but living conditions throughout India were variable. Some of the places we stayed in were just as bad, while others were noticeably better. And of course, we were actually on a trip to backpack into the Himalayas to do research, so when we finally did get into the mountains my living conditions vastly improved. I had my tent, my sleeping bag, and my water purifier, and I was in some of the world’s most spectacular scenery so the view from my room was pretty good. And there aren’t any mosquitoes at 10,000 feet – but there are leeches. I hated the leeches.
Next week: traveling through northern India