Back to the capital

Flying back to Delhi

Today we fly back from Amritsar to Delhi to join up with Kim’s family.  We woke at 0630 and made our way to the airport soon after, for the 0915 flight.

Litter near our hotel.

Like in Mumbai, each airline does their own security checks.  Amritsar airport doesn’t handle many international flights and has a combined international and domestic departure gate with domestic passengers being guided through separately.

We had a snacky breakfast airside of mushroom-filled bread and a vegetable burger that had been crumbed.

Our Kingfisher Airlines ATR arrived half an hour earlier.  I was glad that we had checked in 1h45 prior to departure, for this propeller flight, which gave us a spare 30 mins before boarding.  Otherwise it would have been stressful.  We boarded very early and departed 30 mins before the scheduled departure time, which was at the official check-in closing time.

On board, there were many Israelis.  They do like to travel in India.  I guess this is the closest country to their east that they can enter.

Our flight time to Delhi took longer than the 1h25 that had been scheduled due to congestion, but we still arrived 20 mins ahead of the scheduled time of 1040.

Exiting the Delhi airport arrival hall with our luggage, no one checked our baggage tag numbers against the receipt.  There must be increasing trust as a society.  Or maybe the airport authority is cutting back on staffing?

Paharganj area

We took a prepaid taxi to Star Paradise in the Paharganj area.  The area was closed to cars and we had to walk in with our luggage.  Apart from that, we loved the area!  It is like the backpacker district with lots of local vibe plus backpacker cafes.   Our hotel was in an alleyway so we had all then noise and colour within a minute’s walk but without having it in our rooms.

Once settled, we took an auto-rickshaw to the YMCA to meet up with Kim’s parents Pat and Fiona.  This time they had a refurbished room at the YMCA without air-con.  We took them to our hotel at Paharganj and to our surprise the taxi was able to enter the main bazaar and drop us very near our hotel.

We showed them the delights of the backpacker culture by eating at Everest Café.  The café offered a good choice of western fare like spinach pie, Nepali food and Tibetan momos.  Sadly Jo didn’t join us.

We also tried to highlight to Fiona her folly staying at the YMCA.  Elderly people are hard to convince.  The Star Paradise is about a quarter the price of the YMCA in a location that we preferred much more.  While the YMCA did come with meals included, a typical meal in Paharganj cost only about NZD1.50pp.

Text continues after this gallery.

After a good exploration of Paharganj, Pat & Fiona returned to the YMCA.  We couriered a memory stick of photos to Nandini.  After that I did a dry run of my walk to the Delhi railway station.  That’s where I need to be in a couple of days and despite being quite close, on needs to find the overpass to cross the tracks.  And once inside the station there are lots of platforms.  I also went upstairs to the special foreigners office to check that my electronic ticket would be OK for travel.

Railways staff were helpful.  Customer service has come a long way since my first trip to India in 1994!

We took dinner at Everest Café again.  We took a Thai theme tonight with Pad Thai (which mistakenly used bean threads rather than kwayteow), tom yum vege and some Tibetan momos.