Tuesday, March 22, 2011

India Adventure Begins

Greetings Everyone ! It has been a long time since I last used this blog, but I will be starting if up again as I have just begun my travels throughout India and China with my girlfriend Lisa. I hope to update this blog as much as possible throughout the trip, but as wifi access in rural India may be hard to receive amongst the cows and elephants I will try my best. Also I am writing this post on my iPod touch so if some crazy word come up on the auto spell please disregard or regard them.

The trip began on sat march 19 leaving JFK airport at 830 pm heading to London. We had a 14 hour layover in London so we took advantage of the time and saw all the major tourist sites in London. Overall london was awesome with an amazing metro system , decent food, semi blue skies, and 7 dollar coffees ( given we did have High Te at the ultra lux boutique dept store Fortnum and Mason. London was clean, easy to navigate, and expensive, all attributes which we do not expect Delhi, India to have.... we made it at night back to the airport to catch our ten pm flight to Delhi.

After 8 mrs hours by plane and a total 9.5 hour time difference to the US we made it to Delhi . I was expecting complete mayhem at the airport but in reality it was overall very smooth. Delhi airport has been recently renovated for the Commonwealth games and the Airport overall is super modern. we had our driver waiting for us in the arrivals area and he took us to our hotel in a sleepy resident village in southern Delhi . we then ordered India food to the hotel had lunch then woke up then had leftovers for dinner then passed out again.

Today we gathered all our confidence and hit the streets of Delhi. in the morning we went to humayans tomb, basically a tranquil garden palace which served as an inspiration to the designers of the Taj Mahal. We then took the Metro to old Delhi. By the way the metro system here in Delhi is AMAZING. The best I have ever riden in my life. Super clean stations, security pat down and bag check as you enter the station, cheap fares 15 rupees or 30 cents each way, seperae male and female only rail cars and security everywhere. I was expecting the worst but in turn I got the best. Anyways back to old Delhi . So old Delhi is EXACTLY what you think of when you imagine the Crazy hussle and hussle of an Indian city. beggars with missing limbs, street children, garbage everywhere, stray dogs everywhere, cars auto/cycle rickshaws honking nonstop fighting for road space with cars people animals and people sleeping literally on the street. Lisa and decided we were going to visit the red fort but after walking in the wrong direction for 20 minutes we ended up hiring a cycle rickshaw driver to show us around old Delhi. A cycle Rick shaw is basicall a three welled bike was two wheels in the back holding a platform for the riders to sit on. He drove us all over the place meandering through thick traffic barely crashing into people animals and all different forms of transportation on wheels. We drove thrift this one narrow back alley where they were cleaning out the septic tank ..... by hand. There were literally huge piles of rotting human feces in the middle of the street. One guy pulled the short straw and had to scoop out buckets of human feces by hand he del he had the best angle of achieving this by literally jumping into the sewer and scooping it out. people devised there own way of dealing withthe feces all over the place and put cardboard over the piles.... We just drove over it with our rickshaw.

After our rickshaw tour we went to the red fort. This was huge red for built for the rules 200 years ago to live in and perform different ceremonies and what not In. It was pretty impressive.

Overall india has been great so far . Tomorrow we will start our 8 day trip with our hired driver through the rajastan area. Very excited to get out of the big cities and see areas with less than 17 million people packed into a small area.

Anyways that is the latest for now. Pictures will come soon don't worry ! Thanks for reading and look forward to reading more crazy adventures from Rudy and lisas tiger vs dragon expedition 2k11!!!!!

TUANIS or shall I say NAMASTE !!!!

1 comment:

Andrew Becker said...

Great stuff Rude! Great to see the return of the Tuanis Times. Very classic. I'll be sure to tune in every time you post. Enjoy yourself out there!