Our flight from Vancouver to Delhi could not have gone more smoothly. It was long – 14 hours, Delhi being 13 1/2 hours ahead of us on the West Coast – but there is no better way to travel on a long distance flight than aboard an Air Canada 787 Dreamliner.
We decided to come to India two days early, just to rest and get over jet lag before the tour gets under way on Feb. 14.
This is a smart idea. I love going travelling, but increasingly I hate the punishment on my body of the long-haul flight. However, I do know that you can recover with a good night’s sleep.
At the luggage carousel in Delhi we bumped into Vikram Vij, owner of the popular Vij’s restaurant in Vancouver, top chef and part of the popular Dragon’s Den TV show.
He was very chatty and told us how he was in Delhi to cook for Justin Trudeau and his team when they come here on a trade mission.
Our first impressions of Delhi was somewhat predictable. We knew there would be air pollution and we immediately noticed the strong smell of wood smoke in the air.
Traffic, of course, was not at all like in Vancouver. Drivers here honk their horns a lot, mostly as a way of saying “Watch out, I’m here” rather than as an angry gesture. But they also like to drive in between lanes, so lane discipline is clearly not a priority.
We started out at the Pride Plaza hotel in Aerocity for one night because it was much easier to get to given the time of day and gridlocked roads and our state of exhaustion, but the next morning we transferred to our mainstay hotel, Claridges, a beautiful hotel in the embassy district.
We were each presented with a lovely necklace of fragrant marigolds.
Here we continued our de-compression, relaxing in the pool and on the lawn under white umbrellas next to beautiful waterfalls while we were served refreshment by Claridges’s well-dress bar staff.
Some of the group went for a tuk-tuk/ auto-rickshaw ride to the Old Delhi quarter, but most of us stayed around the beautiful Claridges hotel, enjoying all they had to offer. The food, of course, is already sensational, so we feel we have landed on our feet.
We will be delving deeper into Delhi over the next few days, so there will be more photos to come.
swhysall@hotmail.com
