Japamalas and Bindis
We encounter some unexpected international travel issues at the Hanoi airport, which is especially annoying considering we are entitled Americans with the 6th most powerful passport in the world and unaccustomed to restricted movement.
Even though I’ve printed off what feel like a thousand copies of all of our itinerary papers from our travel agent, all collated in their respective chronological orders, we’re told at check-in that we don’t have the appropriate separate copies of our visa in order to be able to travel to India.
I show our ticketing agent our visas and she’s not technically wrong: Somehow I’ve managed to print out copies of our visa application and not our visa approval. I show her the emails we received with our approval (and notice that they link only to the application itself, not to any approval forms) and she motions to a print station back towards the entrance that we can go to to print out the approvals. Despite the fact that the approvals are available right here on our phones. We exit the line and walk towards the printing station, hoping we can find a WiFi connection.
Luckily there is WiFi, and I’m able to log into our (approved, thank you very much) visa applications and send a meek little ‘Approve please’-titled email to the printing desk. They print our visas in grainy, incompletely laser-printed lines that don’t end up mattering… We are able to return back and cut the ticketing counter line, and we arrive back at our friendly ticketing agent, who waves us through with little issue as she hands us our boarding passes that she has already printed out.
Our flight is uneventful with the exception of being possibly the nicest flight either of us has ever taken (with a potential exception being my Qatar Airways flight back from Tanzania, but it’s entirely possible I’m just a sucker for free soft slipper socks). It’s on Cathay Airways, and the seats are commodious, the cabin is tidy, and the media selection is unrivalled. I listen to Janelle Monaé just for the sheer novelty of it. We watch new releases on the flight. Would recommend.
Even though I feel like we’re just jaunting over to India from Vietnam, our connection through Hong Kong makes it so that when we arrive in Delhi, we’ve been on a flight for as long as we would have been if we were going from the East Coast to Europe (where part of me wishes we were now—I could really use a cone of frites and a beer).
Instead I need a mask to breathe, which we don after exiting the airport. The smog here is so thick we can feel it in our eyes, something close to the dry feeling you get after waking up having slept with contacts in and getting something small and irritating in your eye. I don’t want it in my lungs, especially after developing a dry cough from the Hanoi air—an order of magnitude less hazardous than Delhi, yet still unhealthy.
India is not immune to horrendous airport car share pick up situations, and we have one cancellation and a few phone calls with our driver before we identify his license plate. The walkway to the car pickup area and the area itself aren’t well lit. One of the most foundational things you can do to prevent violence against women is light areas at night.
We sit with our luggage on our laps in the car because the trunk…just sort of isn’t. I guess the Suzuki is technically a hatchback, and it opens onto the back of the back seat. We bounce along and I tell myself that all the drivers are like this, loosely interpreting lanes; swerving around other cars, mopeds, and tuktuks; occasionally swerving into oncoming traffic.
We round what feels like a series of endless rotaries before arriving at…the side of the road. There is an orange metal fence with ads on it for our hotel and an adjacent restaurant, but it is decidedly not our hotel. After a few minutes of pantomime and patience, we assume that we’ll be able to figure it out before dragging ourselves and our luggage out of the car and into a dark alleyway. We walk along; Google directions on Matthias’s phone are telling us that it’s a two minute walk, and a car certainly could not squeeze down this Old Delhi alleyway. They call them gulleys here.
We enter a door and notice pairs of sandals, and I look up at Matthias to ask with my eyes whether he thinks we should take our shoes off. We thought we left that in Vietnam. Someone comes to greet us and we quickly realise this is not where we are supposed to be. Casual breaking and entering.
Back in the gulley and around a corner, we find our hotel. Travel-weary, we sit for check in and receive beads and bindis as a welcome. We order beer, and then food, and end up closing down the restaurant around 11PM after a meal of fantastic chaat, paneer, breads, and a surprise Delhi puri after I ask whether pani puri is something we have to try here in Delhi.
Full and tired, we go upstairs to our suite, turn on the AC, and set alarms for the morning so we can make breakfast before 10AM.
