Vince Comes to India – October 2004

Vincent Arrives!

My brother arrived a couple of days after us. For over two years, we had planned on meeting him in India, and here we were finally together! We couldn’t have been happier!

I was sick the first day, but it was to be expected after the first couple of days in India, and it only lasted for 24 hours. The following day, we ran all over Delhi. We shopped at the main bazaar in Old Delhi, we visited the Jama Masjid – India’s largest mosque, and we visited the Tomb of Humayun, a World Heritage site whose interest lies principally in its formal ties with the Taj Mahal. (To read more about the Humayun Tomb, please visit the section entitled “UNESCO sites” by clicking on the Indian flag.). The tomb was located in New Delhi, and wow! What a change of worlds! It was a different city. The streets were wide, clean and quiet, bordered by embassies, officers’ mess halls, country clubs, and mansions and elegant hotels behind guarded gates.

Old Delhi was a different story. It was there that we boarded our first auto-rickshaw. What an experience! It took 20 minutes just to cross the first intersection! Cars, auto and bicycle rickshaws – even cows – stood literally bumper-to-bumper. It gave the term “bumper-to-bumper traffic” a whole new meaning. With everything touching, even the pedestrians were unable to cross the street! I watched two people take 10 minutes just to cross one street. They were stuck in the middle, with nowhere to turn; it was incredible! Vehicles bump into each other, scratch the paint, hit the mirrors; here, no one even notices. Vince said it was better than an amusement park! And it was! It was absolutely crazy. We laughed a lot, took some photos, then did it all over again in the evening.

The pollution matches the traffic. There is a permanent fog over Delhi. The number of cars has tripled since 1990 and the level of carbon oxides at intersections is as much as 50 times higher than the standard level set by the WHO. Smoking in public was banned in 1997, but just the simple act of breathing in the city is the equivalent of smoking 20 cigarettes per day (40 in heavy traffic). Forty percent of the population suffers from respiratory problems. It looks as if Delhi has earned her title as “The Most Polluted City in the World.”

Vince gets “Delhi Belly”
We kept Vince away from Indian food for the two days, as a sort of precaution, but it looks as if we should have continued to do that for his entire vacation. After his first meal in a local Indian restaurant, he fell sick. Very sick. Initially, we didn’t think it was anything too serious. He thought he’d be okay to start our planned two-week trip around Rajasthan in the car that we had hired for that purpose. But we didn’t even make it out of the city before he became violently ill. The heat, the pollution, the crowds of people standing around watching, didn’t help. We continued driving, passing buffalo, cows, camels, monkeys, and bears, and eventually stopped in the town of Mathura, where we took the first hotel that we could find.

Vince was very bad, very pale. He didn’t make it to the hotel – fell down in the middle of the street. We eventually made it to the hotel, but because of the dirt and the wildlife – the screeching monkeys, the squealing pigs, the mosquitoes and cockroaches, the deafening generators, we drove the last hour to Agra the following day. We found a hotel that had a good view over the Taj Mahal, hoping he could at least enjoy the view until he was well enough to visit it himself.

Unfortunately, what we thought would last only several days, lasted a week and he ended up in the hospital back in Delhi, without having visited the Taj. He was out after two days, but chose to leave early to recover at home and flew home the next day. We watched him leave at the airport with a terrible hole in our stomachs. Two years of high hopes and anticipations. We had planned on taking him to see the Taj Mahal, the White City, the Pink City, the Blue City. We had counted on taking him on a camel trek through the desert, camping out under the stars. It was much worse for him, of course. And with 3 flights and a 24-hour return trip, in addition. But I was depressed, anyway. It was much worse than any of the terrible illnesses I’ve dealt with over the last year. We stayed on in Delhi for a while, just reading and being depressed and not doing much of anything at all, because I didn’t feel like it.

But life moves on. Vince is back at home and well. We’ve found our motivation to travel again and have hit the road. India still has a lot more to discover, and we have a lot of miles to cover.

– – – –

And, incidentally, while we were in Agra, we visited the world-famous Taj Mahal and the renowned Red Fort, both of which are World Heritage sites. To read about these two fabulous sites, please click on the section entitled “UNESCO sites” under the Indian flag.