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Other entries in Delhi Paharganj

making our move!

So we caught the train from Jaipur back to Delhi, thankful that we only had this one stop before we could drop all of our shopping back into a box and ship it off.  Before we started touring around India we had sent back one box already.  It's quite the fiasco, really.  The first post office we went to pretty much ignored our questions about how much shipping would cost us so we went to the "better" tourist district in Connaught Place and had no problem there.  The post office insists that you have your parcel "stitched" before sending.  This means you need a "parcel stitcher" to literally take a piece of cloth, wrap the box and stitch this makeshift bag shut!  This is one of the weirdest things we have seen, but a parcel stitcher is always easy to find just hanging out on a small space on the post office floor and he generally charges about 100 Rupies to have it done ($2.50).  Everytime we go to the post office, we spend about 2 hours there.  Just hanging out at the counter waiting for someone to measure our box to make sure it's an ok size, then transporting the box to the "parcel stitcher", then waiting for him to do his thing which includes gluing, yes gluing the customs form to the outside of the cloth and sewing the other copy to one corner of the box!  Absolute meyhem!  No one cares what shape the parcel is, just its overall dimensions.  The cloth is said to help out when the package gets wet, that way the box doesn't fall apart with all your things laying about.........but why is my box getting wet??

After the guy sews up the box, we have to wait at the counter again to have the thing weighed by one person, who then walks over to another person, tells him the weight, then we pay the other guy according to the list.  And the guy at the post office has done the same thing to us both times we have been there - he always tries to pocket a 100 note.  We always repeat the price and what money we gave him, we show him the receipt he just passed to us and we get our 100 note back......The first time he did this it could have been a mistake, but happening twice with the same guy just isn't a coincidence in our book!

The part we love the most about traveling is when you return to a place you've already been to.  There's no trying to figure out where you're going while touts from everywhere surround you and try and point you in some direction or other.  And considering that our train was arriving quite late in Delhi, it was just a great feeling to know where to go in the crowds....our wonderful hotel - Cottage Yes Please (850 Rupies ~$20) was just a short walk away!

As soon as we arrived back in Delhi we got started on getting our Tanzania visas.  Unfortunately, the embassy area is outside central Delhi and makes getting there pretty inconvenient, no metros and rickshaws would be a very bumpy and loud ride as well as $$.  So we ended up renting a car for a half day (4hrs) fee of $10 just to drive us the 45 minutes away.  The Tanzania Embassy requires a bank draft payment only for visas - no cash.  So we spent the previous day going to the banks to get one.  Union Bank of India, ICICI bank, Thomas Cook, Scotia Bank and Standard Chartered all refused us this service saying that if we do not have an account, they cannot issue us a bank draft.  After the first 3 banks, this excuse seemed to lose all it's humour, so we asked how we could open an account so that we could put our money in that account so that they could issue us a bank draft from that account .......that process would take 6 months to clear us an account!!!  AhhhhhhhH!!!  FINALLY, the State Bank of India, a government bank, said no problem to the bank draft.....but now that we had spent 4 hours traveling around the city we had to wait another day to make it to the embassy.  But in the end it all worked out and we got our visas!!  We know, why not wait to get it on arrival you say?  We always get the visas beforehand and it has saved us much time at customs and lineups, this just happened to be the exception!

We decided that it would be a good idea to get USD to take with us to Tanzania as many tour operators for safaris and Mt. Kili climbs want this payment and credit cards are rarely accepted.  So the other thing we requested from all of the banks mentioned above, was that we wanted to buy US dollars.  Easy, you say?  Well, unless you're an Indian national, you cannot get US dollars!  Reason being quote "why would you want US dollars to travel around India?"  We tell them that we are getting ready to leave India and need USD as converting our Rupies elsewhere will be a hassle.  They say to do it at the airport and again we tell them about the inconvenience of doing this with our baggage and we want to save time (apparently the only place you can buy USD is at the airport).  Completely useless conversation! Not happening!  Then we made up a story about how we are traveling overland into Nepal where there is no airport if you're traveling overland just to saee what they would say, what excuse would they have then........pretty much a blank stare and no comments is what we got.  We let them know that this is a really poor setup for travelers and that we aren't happy, but again a usless conversation.  Who do we think we're kidding trying to make them understand our situation?!

On a better note, the situation with the flies got better.  We noticed when we arrived in Jaipur that there weren't flies everywhere and this observation continued for the remainder of our time here.  Maybe this fly thing had something to do with the monsoon weather, their breeding seasons, who knows, but that definitely got better.  And we don't think it's because we just got used to it.  So that's a good thing.

And to top it all off, we got sick, really sick as soon as we got back to Delhi and couldn't leave our hotel room for 5 days!  It was aweful!  Now that we've got our second wind and we have our plane tickets in our hands, we are on cloud 9!  We leave tomorrow, the 18th, and fly into Kilimanjaro airport.  There are a couple of layovers and we fly out tonight at 2:45am, so we'll be exhausted but we are SO excited!  After buying our tickets, we celebrated with 2 HUMUNGOUS margheritas at TGI Fridays!!  We have the travel bug again and the excitement to continue on.  We have booked a climb up the highest mountain in Africa - Mt. Kilimanjaro which stands at 5800m!  There will be safaris in the Serengeti and Ngorongoro crater and then onto Egypt!  It's hard to contain ourselves and we have to remember that we're not out of here yet.  I think India has something more for us.......heard and read about horror stories of the International airport here - lost luggage, missing items.........that happens everywhere though.  I have a bet with Andre that we'll see a cow inside the airport.......and I doubled up on seeing one on the tarmac!  I'll let you know who wins that bet!

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