Saturday, 26th October 2019 – Delhi

We started to get our bearings a bit today. There’s Old Delhi and there’s New Delhi with New Delhi actually being quite stylish and dating back to the British colonial era of the 20s and 30s and Old Delhi being something else.

We paid a visit to the famous Red Fort in Old Delhi which is, well a big red fort really, and then we tried to visit the Mosque across the road which can hold 25,000 people at a time. The visit to the fort was strange go start with. If you want to pay by card or via an online method, you can go directly to the entrance. If you want to pay by cash, you have to walk around a kilometre to the other end of the site to buy a ticket and then walk all the way back again to the main entrance.

It’s almost as though they are trying to tell you something, except they are aren’t because there are no signs about this anywhere. So it comes down to the kindness of strangers to work out what you’re meant to do.

Then when it comes to getting in to the place men and women have to go through different entry points. It’s not a gender issue as such but more because every public space seems to have security checks. The entry points for men have men doing the checks and the entry points for women have women doing the checks.  That’s all very reasonable and sensible but it later dawned on us that travel on the metro is very definitely male orientated with something like 95% of the travellers being men. There’s also a strong bias towards it being men on the streets.

Anyway, back to the fort. Think Warwick Castle in red stone, minus the walk along ramparts and you get the idea. It was built when the then King decided to move the capital of India from Agra (home of the Taj Mahal) to Delhi. His daughter subsequently decided to build a pool between there and the mosque so that she could see the moon reflected in it from the fort. Utterly charming I’m sure until the British turned up and tore it apart.

I’ve never been to a mosque before so the idea of visiting India’s largest was quite exciting. I’ve still not been to a mosque. There’s an incredibly busy road that runs between the fort and the mosque and you take your life in your hands trying to get across. There was a zebra crossing where we needed to be but in India it turns out that just marks you down as fair game. Not only do the vehicles not stop for people, the motorbikes coming the other way think it’s fun to come down the wrong side of the road to try and score a few extra points.

The mantra we’ve been given elsewhere for roads like this is ‘be brave, keep walking, don’t go back’. The Delhi version is ‘be brave, stop gibbering, be prepared to stop, scream leap out of the way, and keep praying’. Not as pithy but a lifesaver.

As for the mosque itself, once we got across the road, we ended up heading down an increasingly dodgy back street immediately behind the site. People were pushing and shoving and it just didn’t feel safe. In the end we bailed out. If God wants to see me, he can pay me a visit on the Isle of Wight. At least it’s easier to get across the roads.

We decided to treat the rest of the day as an acclimatisation period. That’s code for go back to the hotel, sit by the pool and drink cocktails. And watch the red kites.  There’s a family of them that fly around the hotel and dive bomb the pool area for food. It’s an impressive sight seeing a bird of prey flying off into a tree with a crockery plate.