The first impression of Delhi, the capital of India, when you arrive is that it is a hectic city with almost 10 million people continuously moving, provoking constant traffic jams in the main roads. When you arrive there, you may be prone to get immersed into the city, and decide to walk to the closest spot from your hotel. We did that too, and those were the worst 2 km that I have walked in a long time. My first recommendation would be to avoid doing that: Delhi (and in general, India) is not thought to have people walking long distances. Instead, take its wonderful subway, you will be pleased with its modern network, and its tidiness.
If you happen to stay near the diplomatic area, your first stop is the Gate of India. It reminded me to the Puerta de Alcalá, but in a nicer promenade made to emphasise the presence of the Parliament. If you are there after the sunset, you will find a hectic environment: local tourists taking themselves selfies with the monument (hard with the light conditions), and some others offering all kind of services (pictures, water selling, sweets, …). The building might not impress you much, but the leisure atmosphere is a nice beginning.
From there, you can would head to Connaught Place, another particular spot of the city: well known brand (and expensive) shops, tons of restaurants and bars, bazaars in the street, and mostly young people make it the top destination for evenings out, and some decent -but expensive- shopping.
The real visit to Delhi starts with Old Delhi, and there the main attraction is the Red Fort: the first fort in India was also one of the biggest in the country, and if you started your trip now, you will enjoy this kind of palaces (after a few more, you may be looking for something else): a fort is a sort of palace with military defences. Forts are a good way to understand the aesthetic taste at different ages in the history of India, and you can imagine the rulers having their receptions or living there, walking like we can do now in their vast and well preserved gardens.
When you go out of the fort, crossing a busy bazaar, you will arrive the the Jama Masjid, an impressive mosque, able to host up to 25000 people. If like me, you find mosques captivating with their vast open spaces, you can enjoy its atmosphere of retreat, so needed even if it is only the first day in Delhi. You might be luckier than we were, and have a successful visit to the nearby bazaar and the spice market… We did not enjoy it much. Either we did not go to the right place, or my expectations were not the right ones. Bazaar and spice markets bring me to two places in this world: Istanbul and Marrakech, and that was not what we saw there.
To complete the day, you can visit two wonderful monuments; both of them are memorials of different rulers. The first one is the Safdarjang’s Tomb, and as it is not in the centre, it is not crowded, and its visit becomes a relaxing experience, where you can even take a short siesta to recover from the jetlag. The second one was the Humayan’s tomb, which is almost as crowded as the Fort. This memorial inspired the Taj Mahal in Agra, and it is a huge red marble building with several tombs inside. Taj Mahal is a clear must, but visiting Humayan’s tomb boosts the appetite to arrive to Agra.
Before the sunset, you can still be convinced by a crazy tuk tuk driver to go to the Lotus Temple, a modern building in the outskirts of Delhi, which hosts the Bahai House of Worship, aiming to close the gap between different religions… Not that interesting inside (a few minutes to reflect, pray, etc.), but really nice from the outside.
A great farewell from Delhi can be the Loddhi Park and buy some curry and tea. The park atmosphere was very similar to the one you can see in any big park in the world: my dear Retiro park in Madrid, Englischer Garten in München, Central Park in New York, with only minor differences (like the remains of a mosque inside): people jogging, couples, friends, and even BBQ’s… Life in megacities are the same in any place in the world: we are not that different in the end.
India is synonym of chaos. Although they manage to keep the airport calm by not letting in anyone not travelling, once you get out of there, your survival instinct makes you observe of all details of the intense and diverse traffic.
There are old and new cars, decorated trucks, thousands of motorbikes (some of them with up to 4 people), the tuk-tuk’s or rickshaws which will soon become your favorite mean of transportation, the tough cycle rickshaw… You realize soon there is more life than pedestrians and vehicles…
Animals are also all around: not only dogs and cats, but also cows, goats, donkeys and porks are present in the streets, playing their role in this organised chaos. This diversity is in constant movement in flexible paths, where right, left, forward and backward become elastic concepts, as lanes are just recommendations. After a few days, you will not remember, that your first minutes you were constantly wondering why everybody is using their horn all the time.
Your focus will also turn towards those animals that walk free: pigs, dogs and even monkeys can be found in any corner of a city like Delhi. You see goats carried on rickshaws and motorbikes by their owners, and sacred cows with a not very healthy aspect, anywhere you can think of.
You even see cows walking on the railroad in a train station.
The sacred condition of the cows make them especially popular in the streets, and vehicles respect them completely, and you think that would not happen back home. A driver will explain you why they are seldom crashed by a vehicle: in such a case, driver would have to pay for any damage, and as it is an important sin, he would need to go to the Ganges to get purified, he would need to pay the brahmins (priests) for some prays, and most importantly: your family would belong from that moment to the lowest caste. Too high price.
Caste system is still present and alive in India, and it does not seem about to change in the short term. This makes some extreme poverty be present, especially in big cities. There are people begging in the streets, and the health standards are way below those you are lucky enough to have at home. The presence of animals living freely in the streets, garbage in any unexpected place, water not being potable makes the living conditions not the most adequate ones. Development is not equal throughout the country, and rural areas still show women walking several kilometres to the nearest source of water, to carry it back home.
Once you start getting used to the chaos, you will look at the people and find out the interesting mix in way of dressing that you find, mainly driven by the several religions present in India. Most of them belong to the Hinduism, muslims follow them (although the most muslim areas in the region are now independent from India -Bangladesh and Pakistan), and then the sikhs with their colourful turbans make them very visible.
When you start getting hungry, you start the challenging task of identifying in the menu, those dishes that you will like the most. A wrong choice can make your mouth be on fire for hours, as they like veggie and specially spicyfood. You take special care with the drinks, always choosing something bottled, and decide not to pay attention to the non observance of some hygiene procedures that are standard at home.
Prices will make you remember why India is one of the main manufacturing countries in the world: they are lower than anywhere else that you have been before. In any case, they recognise the tourists easily and offer them higher prices -still affordable-, and even the government has “prices for foreigners”. You will soon realize that you are an easy target for all kind of scams, even if you try to your eyes wide open: the most popular one is that any transport you take will make you stop in a shop/restaurant where they get a certain commission from any spend you have.
You have an overall idea of India. Ready to live it?
During the traditional summer BBQ organised by my friend Javi, we agreed that the time for a new visit to Toulouse had arrived. This time it would include a new ingredient that the previous ones did not have: flying with him as a pilot. I like Toulouse, I like its food, several friends are also there, and flying for the first time in a small aircraft added an extra dose of adrenaline to the cocktail.
The adventure started a few days before my arrival to Toulouse. Javier sent me an e-mail with some options, with a message: “You will need to choose what to fly over, if the meteo allows it”. Inside, several options with pros and cons. We finally decided to go for a route he already made several times: flying to Auch, where we would have lunch, and then flying back. The main drivers for selecting this was obviously that taking a plane to go for lunch is quite a cool statement, plus it included the possibility to fly over Toulouse-Blagnac airport, and at least two take-offs and landings. It is important to remind here that Toulouse is home of the Headquarters of Airbus, as well, as the Final Assembly Line (FAL) of several of their models…
First thing we had to do (although that was done already for the previous time) was the Flight Plan. (Note this post uses the plural as a literary resource… the truth is that most of the “we” should be Javi, i.e. the pilot). That is, tracing the route you want to follow on the chart, plus writing the different tracks in a sheet of paper for the pilot’s convenience.
Once we arrived to the aerodrome, there were a number of checklists to be completed by all pilots to ensure everything is as it should be before the next step. There is a checklist before jumping into the plane, one before starting the motor, another one before entering into the runway… These checklists were followed by Javi to the word, and it is done today in every single flight too. Safety first is more than a nice thing to say when talking about machines that fly.
After refuelling, and the several checklist had been completed, we finally took off from Lasbordes Aerodrome (1) in F-GTPK, DR44. I must admit the first couple of minutes were not easy for me. I believe the adrenaline was not flowing enough to cope with the feelings with the first turn… But these took just a three minutes, then we started navigating which was fun (and I started the GPS tracker!). We requested permission to the controllers to cross the airport… which they denied, as there was commercial traffic at that moment, so we took a detour around Toulouse to be able to arrive to Such. This was a challenging part as we had to find a new checkpoint following the controllers indications and alter the original route.
Navigation up there is quite an interesting topic. These aircrafts do not have a visual GPS software to help the pilot, but quite sophisticated, but analog instruments plus a key tool: your eyes… That is why the pilot is entitled to fly “visual”. Navigation is all about having a chart in paper, and recognising the different elements (a town, a road, a mountain, a river, …) on the ground… once you find one of them, you trace a line to your destination, decide the heading and use some analog devices to follow the desired track. This is a challenging task. It is not easy to confirm that certain small town is indeed the one you are looking for, and it takes some time flying over an area to recognise them at first sight those points.
You can imagine how useful controllers are in these situations. They can help you find your way if you do not manage to do it yourself, and they provide traffic information in your route to make it a more pleasant journey. In the end, you are moving at 200 km/h and flying for a few minutes in the wrong direction can lead to a messy situation. Controllers are in charge of different zones, and when you cross from one to another, you shall change your radio to the new station, say hi, and they normally give you a code to tune your transponder. Now they can “see” you in the radar…
Once we managed to find the new route, it did not take us long to arrive to Auch aerodrome (A). This aerodrome has no control tower, so you have to do everything by yourself… like identifying which is the most appropriate pathway to use by checking the predominant wind direction or announcing by radio our intentions. Landing was softer than I expected (although adrenaline was also there landing with us), we parked the plane, and had lunch at Jean-Philippe’s restaurant with views to the aerodrome and our plane.
After lunch, it was time to continue our route through the Gers region to sight some castles. In this case, we had a particular goal to find Lupiac (D), also known as D’Artagnan’s town, as it hosts the two castles where the real D’Artagnan was born (Castelmore) and lived (La Plagne). We succeeded thanks to Javi’s previous work in Google Maps, and in the field (he had been in Lupiac before), and started our route back to Toulouse, with the only surprise of a couple of gliding aircrafts flying at the same altitude than us. When we arrived to Toulouse-Blagned, we were denied crossing it again, this time due to some photo shooting taking place, so we surrounded it, and landed in Lasbordes again… safely.