DELHI -- The city's overstretched power grid keeps cutting out spoartically this afternoon, so I will keep this entry brief to increase the odds it won't disappear in a crash.
This morning I saw India for the first time in the light and it was everything I expected it to be and so, so much more: women in colorful saris, mostached men hollering for me to by sweet treats, counterfit books and jewelry, and very sad cripples looking for a rupee or two. After a mile on foot, I switched to auto-ricksaw, an enlarged motorcycle that is more and less what's called a tuk-tuk in Thailand. On the road I looked to my side rather than right in front of my face and saw even more. Cream white bulls taller than a man served as obstacles even the most audicious auto-ricksaw driver swerves to avoid. Most seem to spend their days snacking on large piles of roadside refuse, although a few pull wagonfulls of scrap materials from bazar to bazar.
Every new region requires a different parameter, rules that will guide the traveler as he goes from attraction to attraction. I am feeling out India's now, and making plenty of mistakes as I go. After clearing customs in the early-morning hours yesterday, I steered our group of three to the pre-paid taxi meter. There a middle-aged man with a crescent-shaped faced wrote down on the back side of a reicipt that it would cost 545 rupees to town, around $14. Split between three people that seemed reasonable, but the man checking us in the at Anoop Hotel told us we'd paid more than double the price. I'm not sure whether to trust him because as he filled out a lengthy entry in the hotel's registar (as Indian businesses seem to do) he appeared to charge us 50 rupees more than a comparable party of Germans.
This morning I capped things off by giving 80 rupees to that auto-ricksaw driver and then giving another man 45 for the same journey at a government pre-paid stand. The government ricksaw left the meter on for the five kilometer jaunt. The cost: 21 rupees.
And so I will need to have my eyes in front of me on the person trying to rip off and my eyes to side to the wonders wizzing by, as a search for a new way to look at this completly new place.
