Arrival

Our Emirates A380-800 aircraft

The journey

We are finally in India. After more than a year of waiting, what felt like endless planning, and a gap of 30 years since my last visit, the moment has arrived.

The journey itself deserves a brief mention, if only because it genuinely felt as though it took days, which, in truth, it did. We left home around lunchtime on Sunday and reached our hotel in Delhi at lunchtime on Tuesday. An overnight stay at an airport hotel helped break the journey and spared us the rush of Monday morning traffic, allowing us to arrive feeling relatively human.

The flights via Dubai were calm and largely uneventful, though still quietly exciting for us in our anticipation of what is to come. We were seated in front of the only crying child on both flights, an oddly consistent piece of misfortune, but both times the tears faded soon after take-off, and the cabin settled back into its familiar rhythm.  

Our entry via Delhi airport was both time-consuming and a little nerve-racking. The queue was long and slow, and we were very aware of the need to have all the paperwork completed in exactly the right way.

Spotting a quicker-moving queue paid dividends and we were eventually through, although some of our party were still stuck in the long, slow line. It was another thirty minutes before we were finally all together and able to get onto our coach, a moment when some of our earlier concerns about travelling as part of a tour group briefly resurfaced.

By then it was 11am, the time we had joked we would be safely in our hotel rooms, ready for bed.

Traffic in Delhi

A flock of feeding Black Kites

Little did we know that we still had a ninety-minute drive ahead of us, crossing the city from west to east. The usual Delhi traffic chaos was made worse by a high-profile AI conference taking place in the city, bringing added security, diversions and road closures. Nearly two more hours later, at around 1pm, we finally reached our hotel.

With the evening ahead of us, we limited ourselves to ninety minutes’ sleep, wary that anything longer might make it impossible to sleep properly later on.

An introduction

Later, we ventured out for a short walk to a nearby mall in search of an ATM. Stepping onto the streets of Delhi for the first time was, unsurprisingly, a little anxiety-inducing, particularly with rubble and rubbish lining the verges and pavements. The mall itself turned out not to have an ATM after all, but it did have a McDonald’s, so we settled for a coffee which, as it happened, wasn’t at all bad, and cost about 60p each.

We decided to head back, pausing on the way to watch someone feeding a flock of black kites, swooping down for scraps in the early twilight.

Satisfied with our mini adventure, we returned in time for the group briefing, followed by a perfectly reasonable buffet dinner at the hotel.

Reflection

It had been a long, slightly disorientating day, shaped as much by waiting and movement as by arrival. In the traffic, the streets, and the brief stillness of watching the kites at dusk, we had our first introduction with India. For now, that was enough.