10-20-19 - Delhi - Farewell to India
/Day 126. Kyle & Leanne joint blog.
After experiencing the Taj Mahal, there’s no way today can even come close — even if we met the Prime Minster of India — to topping yesterday’s wonder!
We leave Agra early for the four hour ride back to Delhi where we will fly out tonight and bid farewell. Our friend Ajay and others warned us we needed a full month to really discover India - and while we have just scratched the surface of Mother India, at least we have a much better understanding than we did 8 days ago. We have been extremely well taken care of by the tour company (Access Asia Tours) and we will certainly miss this uber comfortable 21-seat mini-bus that the tour company arranged for us this week. The hospitality in India has been absolutely outstanding - warm and doting as if we were visiting family members that actually like us.
On the way back to Delhi, we pass through many of India’s rural communities. We are amazed how relatively provincial the farming practices are. While there are a few tractors, clearly use of machinery is less the norm. We see camels, horses, mules but mostly people working the fields. It inspires us to research more on farms in India where we learn that access to credit and low productivity makes it’s extremely difficult for farmers to do more than feed their own families.
Upon reaching Delhi, we stop at Swaminarayan Akshardham Complex, which is a Hindu temple and a spiritual-cultural campus devoted to India’s heritage. We are without a guide on the last afternoon and the bus drops us off at the entrance. Our jaws drop as there are more people on the line to get in then there were at Disneyland Paris. The security is the strictest we’ve encountered by far. Absolutely no electronic devices of any sort and pretty much a wallet is all you were allowed to bring in and even that they made you remove all the contents of the wallet.
We are just amongst a handful of Westerners visiting this center full of pink sandstone carvings, temples and statues. Turns out it’s part-Disneyland, part-religious indoctrination center. The Disneyland part, besides the insane crowds, is that there are three exhibits - an interactive exhibit that is a documentary on the life of Bhagwan Swaminarayan who is considered the human incarnation of a Hindu God, an Imax movie and a boat ride.
For the interactive exhibit, there are separate queues for English and Hindi that hold about 50 people. We enter the queue for English and there are three people waiting in front of us. The Hindi queue fills up its 50 people in about 3 minutes and they are promptly let in. The Hindi queue fills up a second and third time and they are let in. I look back and after 20 minutes of waiting, there are now a total of about 15 people in the English queue and we account for half of them. Oh crap, Kyle points out that it appears they are waiting for the English queue to fill up before letting us in which is on pace to happen… oh, 3 or 4 hours from now.
An Indian women behind us in the English line seems to figure out the same thing as the same time and is not having any of it. She storms up to the front of the line and starts screaming at the usher employee that we’ve been waiting 20 minutes and he needs to let us in next. Totally unphased, he laughs at her and says, “it’s your fault for wanting to see the Ennngggliiisssshhhhh speaking version!” As you can guess, this doesn’t go over well. Fully emboldened, she shouts at the usher, turns around and marches back to the entrance with steam coming out of her nostrils where she unleashes a further tirade on the security guard and ticket taker employee. Whatever she said worked as the usher employee is commanded from the front by security to let the English group in next which he begrudgingly does. Apparently, they concluded that going down the path that might lead to a full scale protest riot just wasn’t worth the effort.
Once in, we learn about the noble life of Bhagwan Swaminarayan who is a yogi from the late 1700s who essentially started this sect of Hinduism that numbers a few million followers today. We have to skip the Imax movie due to the wait on the first exhibit but we are able to squeeze in the 12 minute boat ride that highlighted achievements of India starting with the Vedi civilization. Kyle, the math geek, perks up when they start talking about how India invented the 0 (“zero”) and algebra and quadradic formulas. Super-cool. Leanne likens the boat ride to the Disneyland ride “It’s a Small World.”
In the interests of fitting in just one more site in India (yes you need at least a few weeks here to give this multifaceted country justice!), we head to UNESCO site of Humayun’s Tomb. It is Northern India’s first garden tomb and was built a full 100 years before Taj Mahal. The red sandstone and marble features of early Mughal architecture are not lost on is. What is lost on us that the teens are kind of done with hearing about deceased 16th& 17th century Mughals in India!
We have a dinner scheduled near the airport and someone from the Delhi office of the tour company meets us there. When we had dinner with Chet, the office manager in Nepal, it was a great opportunity to hear his perspectives on a wide range of topics (e.g. religion, politics, government, poverty). We are thinking the same thing about this dinner but the office dude answers our questions in short one sentence answers. He keeps asking when we are coming back to India as he is clearly interested in us as a repeat revenue customer. I keep responding that we’re going to need a break after traveling for a year. After asking me three times, he either doesn’t seem to get it or doesn’t like my answer, so he decides to bypass me and starts asking the kids directly when they’re going to be coming back to India. Good luck with that strategy.
With that, we wrap up an incredible week in India!
