India (yes again)

The pollution, the hassles, the lies. Yes. I’m back here in India again. Why you ask? Because I love the people. I made a friend here in 2007 and we’ve kept in touch ever since then. We visited again in 2010. When I flew into Dehradun airport last night he picked me up in a taxi and took Laurie and I to our Airbnb. We would have probably never found the apartment ourselves in the dark. Then he hopped on his motorbike, went and grabbed take out from the restaurant he owns, and delivered it to us. What a guy! His name is MP and his restaurant is Flavors located in Rishikesh.

We landed in Delhi on Tuesday at midnight and spent 36 hours at the Impress Hotel trying to catch up on sleep. The smog/smoke in Delhi is so bad these days (worst on the planet) that we stayed indoors and made a few quick trip to the corer restaurant to eat.

Travel tip: You need a cell phone that will work in India (with international roaming) for the first 6 hours or so. Why? because it takes up to 6 hours after you purchase an Indian sim card for it to work. The good news is that an Indian sim card costs about $9 and gives you 1 GB of data per day for 70 days. You read that right. Verizon wireless has been screwing us folks. We’re travelling with wifi-only phones but you can’t get wifi at the Delhi airport unless you can receive an SMS on your phone. And you can’t get an SMS on your wifi-only phone unless you’re on wifi.

As usual our taxi driver lied to us about our hotel. He drove us around for 20 minutes minutes when the hotel was only 1.4km away, all the while telling us the area was closed and we could not stay there. Choose your lie here – protests, burned down, closed down, police barricades, alien invasion. When I remained firm he magically found it. The Impress Hotel by the Delhi airport was great. The Prabhu restaurant on the corner was equally as great. We had a couple meals there. When we took a taxi back to the airport heading for Dehradun it took only a few minutes.