3 days in Delhi: learning to survive India the hard way

One recurring thing that we kept reading while planning for our trip, was that nothing can really prepare you for India. Everyone says that “they were not ready”. Of course, I was intrigued. Why exactly would I not be ready? I’ve traveled to places like China, Mongolia, Africa, Southeast Asia… I have seen poverty and chaos, I have dwelled in heatwaves and I have had to figure out my way in countries where no English is spoken. Surely India would not be that overwhelming for me, I thought, rather pretentiously. Little did I know just how wrong I was.

Arriving in Delhi

It was the evening of our first day in India. D. and I were sitting on the big bed of a rather upscale room in New Delhi, not the one we had booked beforehand but another one arranged for us the very same day by somebody that we thought we trusted, when it started dawning on us that we had been scammed. It was a bitter end to an already rather difficult day. Yet, it hadn’t started out so bad.

It was early afternoon when we walked out of the international Delhi airport, tired yet excited. Tired, not only from the direct flight that we had taken from Paris, but also from the days leading up to our departure, in which we’d had to empty and clean our entire apartment, which had made for a logistical nightmare, leaving us mentally and physically exhausted. We were looking forward to really unwinding and relaxing now that our trip was starting.

We carefully followed the instructions provided by our hostel on which taxi company to use so that we would not get scammed, which is apparently a common occurrence with airport taxis in Delhi. Soon, we were in a decrepit car but on our way to the hostel. So far, it was all easy enough.

The airport being 14 km away from the city center, it took us a while to get to our destination.
“No traffic rules here,” I giggled to D. while we were still on the highway where cars were not always sticking to a specific lane. But once we had left the highway and got sucked up into the Delhi city traffic, I was not giggling anymore. Everybody was honking and cutting each other off, whether it was a car, a tuktuk, a bus or a motorcycle. Our driver had to brake very abruptly on several occasions. I was rather relieved to get out of the taxi and onto the dirty street.

But once we had left the highway and got sucked up into the Delhi city traffic, I was not giggling anymore.

We were received by friendly Indians at the hostel reception and shown to our room. Just before reaching the door, a very chemical paint odor pierced through the hallway.
“We are busy with renovations,” the hostel clerk explained, pointing at the painting works being performed in the nearby outdoor lounge area. Once we were alone in our room, we sighed in relief at having arrived at a place where we could rest. But what was this weird smell coming from the airconditioning? Soon, we realized that the chemical paint smell from outside had pervaded the entire room. That can’t be healthy to sleep in, we thought.
“Let’s let some fresh air in,” D. suggested and he opened the door to the little balcony. Immediately, polluted air thick with car exhaust blasted into the room, coming from the busy road that ran right next to the building. We were quick to close the door again: back to the chemical paint smell, then. When we had originally booked this room, we thought it would be the ideal spot to get some really good rest and recharge, something we badly needed. Clearly, this was not going to be the case here. No, we definitely needed to find a different accommodation spot for the night.

The quest for sim cards and new accommodation

We should go and get Indian sim cards first, we reasoned, and then come back and try to book a room somewhere else. At the reception, they told us to go to the nearby Airtel store and mention the name of the hostel as a reference. Armed with this information, we set out on our quest. We walked into an animated alley where so much was happening at once, that it was impossible to process it all: little street food stalls, people on bikes, rickshaws or scooters, stray dogs roaming around, heaps of trash attracting buzzing flies…

“Nice beard!” a young guy in white kurta and trousers said to D. while he passed by us.
“You have a nice beard yourself, man!” D. replied jovially, as he usually does. (I am often jealous of the carelessness with which he can talk to strangers in the street, which is not something that is recommended most of the time for a solo female traveler.) The affable Indian started telling us about himself: he was studying English and as we told him where we are from, it turned out that he knew somebody who lives in Brussels. It was nice to see a friendly face in these busy streets that otherwise seemed so alien to us. He had been walking along and talking to us for a while when we told him we were actually on our way to get sim cards.
“You should not get them here,” he advised us cordially, “this is actually a dangerous part of town and they will charge you much more here. It will be better that you get them through the official government tourist office in the center. There, they will help you with sim cards, make sure to charge you a lot less and provide you with a lot of free touristic information as well.” It sounded like very sound and helpful advice. While we were processing this, he hailed one of the many tuktuks that were rushing through the street, informed the driver of where we needed to go and the driver told him his price: “150 rupees”.
“No, 100,” our guy told him in a determined way.
“Ok,” the driver acquiesced. It was nice that this friendly Indian was sticking up for us. We had no idea how naive we were at this point.

It was nice that this friendly Indian was sticking up for us. We had no idea how naive we were at this point.

Very soon, we were in the midst of the craziest and scariest traffic I have ever come across in all of my travels. I’m not sure whether this might be affected by recency bias, but that tuktuk ride was truly terrifying, a lot worse even than what we had witnessed coming from the airport. The number of times I thought we were actually going to be hit by a bus, a car, a motorcycle or another tuktuk, were more than I could keep track of and than I felt safe with. The piercing honking around us was constant. It was a long ride, too, about half an hour. The driver was very nice and entertaining though, which made up for the scariness just a tiny bit. Eventually, he dropped us off on the side of a road and pointed at the tourist office.

It was such an anassuming front window in what seemed a rather unlikely spot, that D. and I immediately exchanged glances, thinking the tuktuk driver must have gotten it all wrong.
“This is the government tourist office?” we asked him skeptically. He assured us it was and pointed at a sign which said “Govt of India”. It was one of those lit up signs with red letters that will spell out anything you would like. It still looked very strange to me, but the driver was adamant and D. now seemed convinced as well. Eventually I thought: well, what do I really know? Most of this city has looked rather poor and shabby so far, confusing me in my frame of reference. This might just be how things are over here. I was also happy to get out of that tuktuk and the traffic altogether.

The person at the tourist office took out a lot of time to help us: trying to figure out an itinerary through India that would make sense, getting us the sim card memberships, even suggesting to help us out with new accommodation for the two nights that we were to spend in Delhi. Sumit* was his name and everybody else in the office seemed to be raving about him: “oh yes, Sumit is very good”. They even served us some delicious chai tea in cute cups as we waited for the sim cards to be ready. I looked around me at the wooden framework on the wall and the flashy blue couch behind us. How different this tourist office is to what I’ve gotten used to in Belgium, I mused. Finally, Sumit even arranged a driver to get us from his office to our hostel by car, pick up our bags and go to the new hotel, which he had booked for us. I was extremely relieved not to have to travel all the way back through that crazy traffic by tuktuk again.

“There are three rules in Indian traffic,” our driver told us in the car: “Honk, brake and… luck.”

“There are three rules in Indian traffic,” our driver told us in the car: “Honk, brake and… luck.” He laughed. When he dropped us off at our new hotel after we picked up our bags at the hostel, we asked him how much we owed him.
“Just ask Sumit,” he answered.

We checked in at the reception and asked for the price. We had told Sumit that our budget was maximum 5000 rupees (€60) for the two nights altogether. However, the receptionist would not tell us the price for the stay.
“Talk to Sumit,” was all that he had to say. This was starting to get weird. What was going on here?

*Sumit is a fictitious name.

An uncomfortable realization

“This room is $100 a night!” D. exclaimed after checking online once we were in our room, “this is completely out of our budget.”
“Have we been scammed?” I suddenly wondered. It seemed so unlikely; the tourist office had been recommended by somebody who had nothing to do with it. Or so we thought. The outrageous room rate had made us feel suspicious and so we decided to check the price for the sim card memberships: they had charged us more than double the actual cost for those! We started doing some research online and soon we found that we had fallen for a textbook scam here in India: somebody will send you to a fake so-called government tourist office in town, where the employees will try to sell you as many services as they can, without mentioning any prices, only to present you with an extremely high bill at the end of the ride. Indeed, Sumit had also tried to sell us train tickets and an extensive package tour in Rajasthan, which we had kindly declined. However, we were already on the hook for the taxi driver and the two nights at the hotel. Suddenly, all the puzzle pieces started falling together and in hindsight, we could barely believe that we had fallen for all of this. Yet, how unlikely it had seemed that all of these people were involved in this one big scam against us? Especially when everybody had been so friendly along the way? To have been deceived and lied to by all these smiling, seemingly friendly people who were pretending to help us out, was an extremely disappointing and frustrating feeling and I had a rather hard time enjoying the tasty food that room service had brought up a bit earlier.

Suddenly, all the puzzle pieces started falling together and in hindsight, we could barely believe that we had fallen for all of this.

When the room service bill arrived, D. thoroughly checked it. We were heavily on guard now. We did not know whether to even be surprised when we found that the total did not match the prices of what we ordered on the menu: the hotel employee was trying to charge us a lot more! We made him correct the bill so that we could pay the fair price.

“We really can’t trust anybody,” we realized bitterly once the guy was gone. D. texted Sumit, insisting that he tell us the price of the room right away. Fortunately, it was a lot less than $100 but still 3000 rupees per night, 500 more than the maximum budget we had communicated. We figured that it had been a good move on our part to insist, because if we had waited longer, we may have ended up a lot deeper into Sumit’s net, having to pay a much higher price in the end. We immediately canceled the second night while remaining very friendly and declining his other offers for a car and for train tickets. Surprisingly, he accepted. Still, we would only really believe to be free of any surprise bills after checking out. We spent the rest of the night checking out Karl Rock’s India Survival Guide (recommended!) and his YouTube channel, getting a bewildering idea of just how full of scams India really is.

Getting out of the scam

In the morning, D. went out early to retrieve the cash we needed for the hotel bill from a nearby ATM, which proved to be a difficult task, being called out to by several Indians trying to lure him away to a different spot, most likely for yet other scams. Many malnourished beggars, some carrying babies, pulled at his arms, asking for money, extremely insistently. Sweaty and exasperated, D. finally arrived back at the hotel with the cash in his wallet, only to run into an unexpected familiar face: the original guy in white who had complimented D. on his “nice beard” and subsequently got us into this whole ordeal! This could not be a coincidence in a city with almost 20 million inhabitants. D. made eye contact with him and as opposed to the previous day, the guy now had absolutely nothing to say. No, definitely not a coincidence at all.

Many malnourished beggars, some carrying babies, pulled at his arms, asking for money, insistingly.

Luckily, we got out of the scam rather smoothly by paying the 3000 rupees and nothing more. Sumit had not charged us for the driver either, so in total we had paid only €16 more for accommodation and sim card memberships than what we had originally budgeted. That amount is worth more in India than in Belgium, but we were nevertheless very relieved to have succesfully escaped the scammer’s net.

A new approach

Determined not to get scammed again, we ventured into the city once more with our backpacks, looking for new accommodation. Motorcycles and cars raced by, honking insistently, while the sun was beating down on us with a 40° C heat. To the locals, we were like magnets: every 5 meters, somebody would accost us.
“Where are you going?” “Do you want a room?” “You need a tuktuk?” They followed us around, repeating their questions, trying to deceive us with wrong information about where we should go, out to get our money. We ignored them as well as we could and eventually made it to the nearby metro stop. I was now constantly on my guard and had taken on a confident ‘don’t mess with me, I’m an experienced traveler’ attitude. We had to live by the rules of the jungle out here. How much had changed in just 24 hours, we thought. Even at the subway station, I was on my guard when a man who worked there, genuinely tried to help us at the ticket vending machine. It was not a nice feeling to be going against my normal nature where I generally trust most people, but it was obvious that that would not be the safest choice here.

Taking the subway felt like such a victory: it was cheap, efficient, fast and it felt very safe. The Main Bazaar road in the neighborhood Paharganj, where many hotels and hostels were situated (many tourists like to stay here, near Old Delhi), had a quainter vibe than what we had seen so far. Still, the poverty and dirtyness were a bit overwhelming sometimes. We ended up in a hostel in a back alley where we found a room that was as decent as we could expect in this poor neighborhood.

Trying to get to the Red Fort

We decided to go and visit the Red Fort, the main tourist attraction in Delhi, to finally start the touristic part of our trip. According to our map, all we had to do was walk to the other side of the railway station and cross Old Delhi. What the map did not tell us, was just how many more potential scammers we would meet on the way.
Near the station, we came across another clever attempt at a scam by someone claiming to work for the government (the credentials card that he flashed at us was probably fake), wanting to ‘help’ us. He tried to convince us to walk 5 minutes to the metro station and to go to the government tourist office nearby. That sounded a lot like something I had heard before and I decided to check what he was saying on Google Maps: “It’s not 5 minutes, it’s a 15 minutes walk,” I corrected him. He blurted out an inconsequent reply claiming that it was 5 minutes nevertheless. We ended up ditching him, which made him angry (“I don’t want your money, I’m trying to help you”) but we kept walking away regardless, ignoring him. It was the only way to put an end to the interaction.

After crossing the bridge over the train tracks, I was mentally and physically exhausted and all I wanted in that moment, was to sit down at a nice little café and have a cool drink and rest. But when I looked around, all I saw were extremely shabby and poor looking buildings, heaps of trash and a lot of raggedly dressed people roaming the streets, sometimes even barefooted. In the midst of all that was one of the craziest crossroads traffic I had ever come across, involving honking cars, motorcycles, rickshaws and buses all cutting each other off. The last thing I would find here, was a nice little café. Everything kind of hit me in that moment. I felt a bit dizzy and mentally disoriented. This was not easy, to say the least.

We ended up hailing a tuktuk to the Red Fort, because we had given up on walking through Old Delhi. Once we arrived at our destination, we laid eyes on the beautiful, huge monument made from red bricks, the towers contrasting against the hazy sky. The moment was short-lived however, since we had to navigate even more harassing while we tried to make our way towards the entrance. Potential scams lured everywhere, why else would everybody be so extremely persistent? “No, the entrance is not here, it’s this way,” was one of the many lies we would hear. Eventually, we managed to get inside. There, a new and unexpected challenge awaited.

Titanic

“Can we have a selfie with you?” a young Indian girl asked us while we were sitting down right before the entry to the bazaar inside the fort to rest and check out what our Lonely Planet had to say. We agreed and smiled to her phone camera while she and her family were posing next to us. But as soon as we had done that, another young Indian came up to us with the same question. Before we knew it, a queue had formed of young people wanting selfies with us. It heavily reminded me of my experiences in China five years ago. We put an end to the selfie requests, so that we could at least get on with our visit, only to see the next teenage girl in line disappointingly walk away, making us feel slightly guilty about it.

Throughout our entire visit of the Red Fort however, we continued to receive one selfie request after another, which we subsequently declined. It is a strange, uncomfortable feeling when people are only interested in your image and nothing else. This is also why it is so important as a traveler to be mindful when making portraits of locals. Asking permission is of course imperative, but even better is to try to get to know the person a little bit first, which makes for a much more human experience.
“Why me?” I asked one youngster at some point and I added, laughing: “I’m not famous!”
“You look like the woman in that movie,” he replied, “Titanic. I love that movie. Kate Winslet! You look like her.”

D. and I tried to enjoy the rest of our visit to the Red Fort, which was actually beautiful, but we were both feeling a little bit defeated about how overwhelming and difficult everything had been so far. We hated to admit it, but it was true: we had not been ready for this.

A New Delhi slice of heaven

It was not until the next day that we finally found a better way to tackle Delhi: we took the subway to a newer part of town, around Khan Market, where we hung out in an area with some nice shops and where we could drink an iced coffee before visiting the refreshing and stunning Lodi Gardens with their magnificent tombs. We immediately felt revived: this was exactly what we had needed all this time. Had we known this earlier, we would have stayed in this part of town from the start. However, we were ultimately still glad that we’d had the opportunity to witness the colorful, bustling and fascinating Old Delhi in our lifetime, something we won’t likely ever forget.