Friday 25th October 2019 – Delhi

There’s a really useful tip to remember when you first arrive in a new country – the first day is always the most expensive.

It’s difficult and pricey to buy rupees outside of India so we arrived last night without any cash. The first job today then was to find an ATM machine.

We’d decided to treat ourselves to somewhere nice to stay for the start of our holiday so when we asked the concierge where the nearest ATM was, he decided he was going to show us the way. We hadn’t reckoned on the fact that, because it’s the start of Diwali, the service tills would all be out of cash. Four machines later and we were in luck, with luck being a negotiable concept given the dodgy looking building we were in and the fact that our genial host felt the need to cover our backs while we used the machine.   

Then what to do? Delhi is a huge city and without any real sense of where we were we jumped into a tuk-tuk and asked for the local shopping area. It’s possible that there were cousins and brothers of the driver involved but somehow we ended up in a store that claimed to be a ‘temporary place’ for a nationally sponsored centre shopping centre helping tribal families in remote areas.

I’ve no idea if that’s true – but they did have very nice carpets.

Actually I was blown away. I had no idea that traditionally, carpets are made by hand one knot at a time. The best have a double back, last for two to three hundred years (which will probably see me out) and look better and better with use.

What was really special was that because of the way the knots are tied and trimmed they lie down at around 45 degrees. That means that when you turn the carpet from end to end, the colours change in quite a dramatic fashion. And the guys in the store were really very good at rotating 3m rugs around to show the effect.

In case you’re wondering, we didn’t succumb. But it was close.