Today we saw the good and the bad of India.
The bad came first.
We decided to go the New Delhi station to book all our train
tickets. However on getting there we run
into the touts and we get the run around as all sorts of lies are told to us in
order to get us to go to fake tour shops.
Our hotel gave us the hard sell, but at least they didn’t lie to
us. No matter where we went there was
someone looking to scam us, either for tours, or the rickshaw guys trying to
take us shopping. Getting past these
guys into the train station is a challenge, so we eventually get the idea of
getting the metro into the station, and finding our way from the inside. It’s longer, but we make it and book most of
our tickets (one of our trains is booked out, so it will have to be a bus).
The metro is part of the good of India, it works really well
and wasn’t too crowded, although there still is some pushing at the doors. The security checks getting on do make it a
bit of a drag at crowded stations, but it only really affected us once. We get the metro South to the Qutab Minar
complex on the outskirts. This is a
pretty cool old city, built around a tower which is quite good. But the best thing is that we are not being
hassled once inside (by the way we used a rickshaw to get there from the metro,
we do like using them – when we want to, not at the behest of some guy).
We spend a couple of hours looking around the complex, which
surprises us as it is a lot more than just the tower as we thought, again its
good India. However we note that the
local tourists, who outnumber the western tourists, are spending their time
trying to surreptitiously take photos of us.
I have to say it dampened our enjoyment of what would have been an
incredible Indian sight. The rudeness of
the Indians also manifests itself in their inability to queue, and their
inconsiderate nature when they deliberately stand in front of you taking a
photo (yet they chastise you if you wander into theirs accidentally). I have to say this is the bad part of India,
the people.
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