I had my doubts about Delhi. I hadn’t seen as much urban character here as in the other cities we’ve been to, but my eyes were open for anything. Our day today started off with a tour of the Red Fort which, according to the guide books, is a Delhi must see. I have to say, unfortunately, that I wasn’t all that impressed with it, it was just a bunch of pagodas set amongst some walls and other buildings. One cool thing though was the museum inside that housed a bunch of artifacts, the most interesting being a letter from a British colonel written in the 1800’s that requested orders for future troop movements. It essentially asked for more men and also if the commander required the regiment to either take their time toward their destination or to “make haste” and double time it although their llamas where tired. Other than that, I’d say skip it unless you have a bunch of days here. Sorry Red Fort.
After the Red Fort we crossed the street to the Jama Masjid mosque to climb the minarets but decided to pass on it after deciding we weren’t into taking our shoes off and getting our precious last few clean pairs of socks dirty on the Delhi ground. We started walking off to find the spice market but about 25 feet from the bottom of the mosque steps an older gentleman struck up a conversation with me and before we knew it we were on a walking tour of the back roads and alleys of Old Delhi.I am now an expert at repelling street hawkers and touts but some are just too good for my powers. The walking tour gentleman pretty much didn’t stop talking and pointing out things that were interesting and the tours of old havelis and secret/non-touristy areas of the spice market that he described actually caught my attention as something that might be cool so I decided that even though I was already on the tour I would actually willingly take part. It was now official or at least I wouldn’t be running away when the time came to discuss payment.
In the interest of condensing a four hour walking tour down to a few paragraphs I’ll just say that the price of the tour was well worth the things that we saw because most everything was down such narrow paths and up such dark stairwells that we as outsiders would never have dared to have explored them on our own. My opinion of Delhi has been redeemed! There were two parts to the tour. The first encompassed walking down the narrow streets of the Old Delhi neighborhood and stopping at a handful, maybe two handfuls of old havelis which are large 500 year old courtyarded houses built by rich merchants and spice traders back in the day. We saw some great ones with intricately carved teak and sandstone entranceways, with gods and elephants worked into the design. One of the best parts of this, besides the history which I really liked, was that we actually got to open the haveli doors and go into the courtyards. In India people have a general trust of those around them, so no one had a problem letting us look around. I also imagine or hope that they got a little kick down from the guide for being so friendly. Walking into these places and looking at the ancient stone and wood work and trying to imagining all of the history that is held within the courtyard walls was amazing. All of them are still inhabited to this day. One of the interesting facts that our guide told us about was that in Old Delhi you can tell how old the houses are by how high off of the streets the haveli entrance ways are. A 500 year old Haveli will have steps leading five or six feet up off of the street to the main door to accommodate the flooding that was once a problem before there was any municipal drainage systems implemented. Now that the floods are not an issue the doorways are situated much lower to street level.
About halfway into the tour we stopped at a Jain temple that is known for its intricate artwork inside portraying the life of one of their 24 or so gods. Great stuff, very old and very detailed and colorful. The atmosphere inside was immeasurably peaceful.
From there we moved on to the spice market which is the largest such wholesale spice market in all of Asia. Seeing the market along with the havelis is what made Delhi amazing for me. We started on the sugar street which was made up of many small storefronts selling piles and piles of sugar, all set out in the open in large basket type containers. According to our guide there were no less than sixteen different types of sugar sold there, all made exclusively from sugarcane. Our guide was grabbing samples of sugar left and right for us and we tasted most of everything, also something that we wouldn’t have experienced on our own. There were dark amber balls of molasses tasting sugar, pinches of sweet refined cane, golden chunks of fibrous sweet sugar that melted in your mouth instantly and even a white jello like form of the stuff. The latter was very moist and slightly disconcerting at first but super sweet. All very awesome.
We moved down the street to the chili market wholesale place in a huge haveli filled with spice dealers. To get to it we traveled down dungeon-like corridors, squeezed by men carrying huge burlap sacks on their backs and stepped over shopkeepers' displays of cardamom and every other spice that you can imagine. Once inside the red chili market my nose started to burn from the pungent and very intense aroma of tons and tons of huge bags of chilies surrounding us. This was definitely a place that we would never have found without a guide because of the labyrinth of corridors, nor would we have been comfortable barging into such a back roads location alone even though everyone inside was friendly and for the most part didn’t even pay much attention to us.
Our guide showed us toward a dark stairwell with a very potent overpowering aroma of 400 years of chili ground into the cement by 400 years of millions of feet stepping upon them. It is a smell that you can feel on your skin and that clears your sinuses instantly. The stairway led three stories up to a rooftop balcony that overlooked the entire spice district and the Red Fort about two miles off in the distance where we started our tour. The beauty of the crowded streets with people moving around in the hazy afternoon light was a fitting climax to a great day.
After admiring the beauty of the city at sunset we made our way down to the main area of the spice district and saw as well as tasted masses of tamarind, masala, saffron, every type of curry, dates, nuts, and on and on. Beautiful colors and an olfactory experience like I have never had. The cost of the tour wasn’t cheap and I’ll refrain from quoting it here mostly out of embarrassment, especially considering that we sort of just fell into it but it was very much worth the price none the less. One word of advice on touring India that I can give is to not tell people the truth about what you do for employment because once they hear you say something like finance and television they charge accordingly. It's all good though because in India the have’s support the have-nots as there is no welfare system. Even though I am not rich by American standards I have much more than most in here. I probably fed our guide, whose name was Anil by the way, and his family for at least a week.
Alright, that’s it for now. It’s pretty cold in Delhi so Kevin and I are planning on going out and looking for some terrible sweaters, the uglier the better. Today is our last complete day in India.
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