Liar Aversion

Our first experience in buying Indian railway tickets this morning turned out well, although it could have just as easily been a rip off of a nightmare. We headed down to the train station after breakfast, and knew right where we were going: to the International Tourist Bureau inside the train station. They specialize in helping out people like us I think (although when we finally got there, we saw that a some Indian people made use of these chaos-free conveniences too). When just outside the train station, we made the mistake of stopping to read a huge chart of trains departing from Delhi, just to see what options we had. It didn't take long (about 3 seconds to be exact) for a person to approach us and offer his help. He claimed to be employed by the Indian Railways, and made some small talk with us to start, i.e. where are you from, where are you going, how long in India etc. etc. (Oddly enough, we learned that his brothers live in Santa Clarita, California--where Kel grew up--and they own Singh Mechanics on Soledad Canyon Road. He showed us the business cards--we were astounded at the smallness of the world).

This helpful man tried to tell us that the International Tourist Bureau was not a good place to go, and we should go to a different place. "It will only cost 10 rupees, not far from here" he assured us. He claimed that at the ITB, we couldn't pay in Indian rupees, we couldn't book same-day train tickets, we had to pay for our train schedule book, the lines were long and tedious, and that they were not helpful. Of course we were polite, listened to him but then said we were still going to check out the ITB for ourselves first. He began to 'usher' us to a rickshaw (by 'usher' I mean gently push) and it took everything we had to insist that we still wanted to check out the ITB for ourselves. "That's fine, you see for yourselves. I am not lying. Please believe me, I am an honest man. I work for the railways."

We practically ran away from him, went to the ITB (after dodging a few other people trying to lure us away) and arrived at the haven that is this office. Everything that man said turned out to be a lie. We had no problems paying in rupees or buying a same-day ticket, NO ONE gets the train schedule book for free, and the office was cool, cleanish, and no lines! We bought our 'Trains at a Glance' book, quickly made sense of the maze of charts inside, figured out the train we wanted, filled out the proper forms, handed them to a man at the counter, and had our tickets to Amritsar within 10 minutes of walking in the door.

Happy at our success (both in booking the tickets and not being suckered into that 'helpful' man's assistance), the rest of the day was ours. We went to New Delhi, or Central Delhi, and first stopped at the India Gate. This is another Arc de Triomphe looking structure and bears the name of 85,000 Indian army soldiers who died fighting in WWI and during the 1919 Afghan fiasco (where the British army fired into a crowd of protesters in Punjab, killing over 1000). It was here that we experienced our first snake charmer. He appeared from nowhere, put down his basket lifted the lid, tapped the cobra on the head to wake it up and started playing his flute thing. Nige being the courteous gentleman he is, let the lady go first. Kel stood next to the charmer and cobra as it swayed around a bit in its attack mode. Of course after taking a photo he wanted 100 Rupees, we settled for 30. We then walked west along the Rajpath. This is a street flanked by large parks with fountains and ponds. The shade of the trees was nice, but none of the ponds or fountains had any water in them. At the other end of Rajpath, opposite the India Gate is Rashtrapati Bhavan, the official residence of the President of India. On either side are the north and south Secretariat Buildings, housing the ministries of finance and external affairs. These buildings all appear European to us, especially in that they're topped by domes. Just nearby is Sansad Bhavan, or Parliament House. This is a beautiful yet strange building, oddly resembling a modern coliseum.

Later in the afternoon, we headed back to our hotel to pack up our bags. As we were trying to figure out where we would head to after Amritsar, we discovered that our Lonely Planet book was missing about 30 pages. And, as luck would have it, they were pages we needed. After searching around for a cheap copy (which we didn't find) we went into a travel agent office to get some information, and there was an L.P. book sitting on the desk. It belonged to a man using the internet nearby, and Nigel asked to borrow it. He ran down the street, paid about 10 rupees to photocopy the pages and happily returned the book to its owner. We got our bags from the hotel and wound our way through the crowded streets to the train station. We were had an overnight train to Amritsar, about 430 kilometers northwest of Delhi near the Pakistan border.