Delhi and a whole lot of toilets

 

 

Delhi, India (Apr.2-5)
Despite at one point, having my entire head out the bus window, I managed to make it to Delhi without throwing up out the side of the bus. I would soon learn that that was only half the battle.

I encountered the usual onslaught of tuk tuk drivers: none of whom knew where my hostel was or would attempt to read the map, but all of whom insisted that, wherever it was, I should be paying 500 rupees to get there, which is at least 3 times the actual price.

I managed to find someone who appeared to know where he was going and bargained him down to 350 rupees. It was still way overpriced, but considering my physical state I wasn't really in the mood for the fight I would need to put up.

"Appeared" is the key word here, because he didn't really have any clue where he was going either. I sat myself up and tried to figure out where we were on the map, while he stopped every two metres to ask someone if they knew the Youth Hostel. The majority of people had no idea, but even when someone gave him directions, he would start asking again around the next corner. I was getting frustrated when we finally found someone who spoke english and appeared to honestly know where the hostel was. After some directions, my driver was about to drive away when I asked him if he was sure he knew where he was going. He asked them again and they repeated the directions. Two corners later, he started asking again.

We finally made it to the hostel and I happily walked in, excited to finally be able to lie down, but they had some conference and they were fully booked. I wanted to cry, but I stood up and headed out to look for the next place. After some wrong turns, some directions to take the bus, and a police officer telling me it was dangerous to be walking around by myself, I accepted a ride from him. I know it was stupid, but he showed me his badge, I got a good vibe from him, and I just couldn`t stomach another ride with a useless tuk tuk driver. I walked into the dilapidated YWCA expecting at least good prices, but they said their cheapest rooms were 2,000 rupees and the dorms were 4,000 for groups of 6 only. I tried to explain the idiocy of leaving a room empty to wait for a group of exactly 6, but he had no mind to discuss it. There was no way I was paying $40 to stay in that crappy place, so I walked down the street to YMCA. They managed to find me a room without a bathroom for 1,500 rupees. It wasn`t cheap, but a nice room with AC and a TV was probably exactly what I needed.

I slept pretty much the entire next day other than a trip to the All-American Diner for dinner. It was a strange place to find myself in India, but I needed a serious break from Indian food.

The next day I still felt horrible, but I didn`t want to spend the entire day in the hostel so I braved the market with Nathalie, a German girl I met in my dorm. When we got back to the hostel in the afternoon, we met a girl named Carolyn who had plans to meet her Indian friend and some German models at a fancy place downtown. I still wasn`t missing the fancy bar scene, but I didn`t really have anything else to do that night.

It looked like every other fancy place in Toronto and was exactly what I expected. They let Carolyn jump behind the bar and mix a drink, but other than that I thought it was pretty boring so I left after a couple hours. There are just so many more interesting places in India.

The next morning, Carolyn and I had breakfast at the hostel and set out to find the Sulabh Toilet Museum. I didn`t know much about it, but it sounded like a fun place to check out.

In front of the museum, was a row of washrooms and a man met us at the entrance and brought us to a building at the back of the complex. It was called a toilet museum, but that was really only a small part of it.

Sulabh is a company doing work in sustainable waste management and they are installing toilets all over India and trying to convince people to use them. I felt like I was at a TED conference as they started describing the ways they use the waste, first by removing the methane to burn as fuel or convert to electricity, then cleaning the water with ultraviolet lights, and then using the remaining natural and odorless waste as a fertilizer or a building material. The burning of the methane actually produces less harmful greenhouse gases than the natural release of the methane would. They provide free washroom facilities to their neighbourhood, which they use to power their facility.

They also explained their work with a plant called duckweed, which grows in lakes and feeds on pollution. It is also really healthy for fish and makes them grow faster than traditional food sources. They are using polluted lakes to produce the duckweed, which they feed to fish, while the duckweed cleans the lake in the process. SO COOOOOL.

It was so interesting how they convert something we see as a burden to entirely useful materials. It's use would solve so many of the world's problems at the same time. I got that feeling I get everytime I watch a TED conference on environmental research: WHY ISN`T EVERYONE DOING THIS?

Despite our many plans for the day, Carolyn and I ended up spending basically the entire day at the toilet museum.

The next day, we went out in search of a place we heard had amazing butter chicken. It looked like a dump and may have been a bit risky considering my recent experience with the street food, but it was actually so amazing. Totally worth it.

I did a quick visit to the Lotus Temple, which is the Bahai temple in India, and then went back to the hostel to grab my bags for the train. I said a sad goodbye to Carolyn and a not-so-sad goodbye to Delhi and headed for my train to Pushkar.

I didn't get much sleep before Amir, my friend I met on the train woke me up and told me we had arrived. Thank god I convinced him to try and stay on the train all the way to Pushkar rather than get off in Jaipur like his ticket said. Who knows where I would have ended up?