New Delhi, India

When we stepped off the plane in New Delhi onto one of those plane-to-tarmac ladders that make you feel like The Beatles, we immediately celebrated the temperature outside. Hell yes!! This is an environment suitable to human life! Finally! Since I’d left the cold of Zurich, I basically hadn’t ever been not sweaty. New Delhi felt like Los Angeles in spring, it was incredible.

To add compliment to comfort (see what I did there… it’s the opposite of insult to injury… No, but do you get it?), the New Delhi airport and metro system were the most impressive infrastructure I have seen in this entire country.  We got on an air-conditioned, ultra-modern subway train that took us to the city center where we were staying.

(The New Delhi Tourism Board is fist-pumping right now after reading these last two paragraphs. You’re welcome.)

We arrived at New Delhi Station, wandering across to the other side of the Rail Station to the Paharganj Main Bazaar where we’d been given a hotel recommendation from our buddy Drew in Kochi. We emerged into what has been dubbed “The Backpacker Ghetto.” Paharganj is an area centered around a main street that is crowded, dirty, teeming with vendors and hustlers, and intersected by dozens of tiny alley-streets. You literally can’t ask anyone for any sort of directions without inviting yourself into some sort of swindle or scam (sorry friends at the Tourism Board, you probably should’ve stopped reading).

We made it to Drew’s old stomping grounds, Gold Inn, where we posted up for the next few days for $4 a day each. It was a solid room for a couple of guys with very simple needs. But it came with an unexpected and insanity-inducing amenity: someone dropped an electronic birthday card down the little alley-shaft-corridor that our window opened up into, and for literally our entire five day stay we could hear a high-pitched, electronic birthday melody on repeat all day and all night. Thank Jah for those earplugs I brought, eh? (Oh, you didn’t read my gear list???)

As it was our last stop in India, we kind of put it in cruise-control in Delhi and enjoyed ourselves. We walked around, ate at the Aman Hotel rooftop restaurant a lot (really good and cheap), saw a movie in Hindi (pretty bad, but hilarious), ate MacDonalds once (whatever, judge us), took the subway everywhere (awesome), and took some awesome photos (see below).