delhi

inside the Red Fort in Old Delhi - very popular with the locals on Sundays - they have a thing for colour coordination!

+++ more pics at www.picturetrail.com/k-e-i-t-h-m

I'm here!

I was slightly apprehensive about hassle but it's been a dream. Maybe 3am is the right time to arrive at Delhi airport, but I sailed through, easily found a taxi and was at the hotel in Karol Bagh in an hour on quiet roads (did I say quiet? apart from all the honking trucks).
I'm staying at what you would have to describe as a basic, even shabby, hotel, but these days that's what you get for the price. The rooms are at least clean, with basic A/C and a good shower, so it's fine.
Karol Bagh is a very lively area. I quite like it. Faded art deco town houses around little squares of park, and the main street hums during the day and evening, full of market stalls and hawkers who are fairly insistent but friendly. If you treat it as a game and smile a lot they are fine.
On Saturday night there was a huge racket outside the hotel. A wedding party went by, the groom on a white horse, with hundreds of family supporters, and three bands of drummers banging their hearts out. Portable electric chandeliers linked by dodgy cabling illuminated the whole thing, all linked to a generator on a wheelbarrow bringing up the rear (with a spare white horse just in case). Much more fun than a sombre English wedding. And then there were fireworks.
As soon as I got up on the first morning I was taken to a travel agent and within 20mins had everything booked for my trips in India, before and after Nepal, including trains, hotels and the rest. Later entries to the blog will fill in the details.
They also threw in a car to take me round Delhi for 2 days so it's all been amazingly easy.
It's been foggy - or smoggy - most of the time I've been here, especially Sunday, so reasonably cool, but the long imperialist vistas of Lutyens' administrative centre have been invisible. However, seeing the vast dome of the Presidential palace looming through the mist has its own rewards.
The Red Fort was spectacular and very full of locals on a weekend outing, most of whom wanted me to take their picture - not sure why as they will never see them, but good for my portfolio of local colour. The site was badly mangled by the Raj but you get the feeling of how it would have worked under the Moghul Emperors. You pass through line after line of gates and walls until you reach the inner sanctum of the Audience Chamber, where the Emperor on high dispensed daily justice; then beyond the purely private pleasure grounds, harem and hammam. Similar to Topkapi and other Islamic capitals.
The best sites for me were Humayun's Tomb, beautifully restored with gardens full of running rills, around the grand mausoleum with its cool, austere interiors. This form of grandiose memorial seems to ahve been invented here by the Emperoro's widow, and was copied at ther Taj Mahal 100 years later. Then there is the tower Qutb Minar, which seems an almost impossible feat of engineering for its time, and in design terms almost alien in its appearance, like something out of Lord of the Rings. It was designed to show off the power of the conqueror, the first major centre of the Moghuls in Delhi. The adjoining mosque has an outer courtyard built from the wreckage of 27 Hindu and Jain temples, a metaphorical boot on the head of the vanquished.
I couldn't help feeling that the Lutyens development had much the same purpose, with the Governor's Palace and civil service given far more prominence than the sidelined Parliament building, and there is a rather dodgy message over the Administration buildings' main doors about freedom being earned by a people, not handed down.

+++ More pics at www.picturetrail.com/k-e-i-t-h-m