Delhi round 3

July 24^th – 25^th

We took an overnight bus from Pushkar to Delhi so that we arrived around 6am near the train station. Our first order of business was to go to the train station and book tickets from Delhi to Patna for the following day so that I could go see me parents. This is very popular train so my only hope of getting tickets (without the help of Uncle Jack) would be to utilize the foreigner's quota that seemed to be available.

When we got to the train station, I started looking around for the tourist office where I knew I could get the tickets. A man approached me and told me to get in the general quota line but I told him I actually needed foreigner's quota. Because I brought the subject up, I had my guard totally down for scams but boy was I wrong. He told me I needed to go to the International Tourist Beauro Building which was just down the street. He wrote the name of the building down and even walked us outside to grab an auto. The auto driver accepted a small fee for taking us there (should have been a red flag) and we drove for a while and ended up outside a building that said tourist information office. I figured this was the place so we went upstairs. The guy up there invited us to sit and I told him what we wanted. He was using the regular Indian National Railways website and looked up my train and said it was full. I said “obviously, please look up foreigner quota tickets, that's what we came for” and then we went into this spiel about how they were going to be $40 and the booking didn't open until 10am. I was pretty certain this wasn't true but I thought that we were at the government tourism office so I was just confused. Eventually he brought up the kicker of “you could always buy a flight”. I told him “no” and then he asked us where we were staying. We said the Mustache hostel and he immediately shook his head and asked “do you know who owns that?” we said no. He typed a name into google, something like omar burket, and brought up an old news article that said that two Indian men had kidnapped and raped these two tourists and that one had been caught but a man with the same name had escaped. I asked him, that if this was true why didn't he tell the police. He said “corruption” and I said “you are aiding and abetting a criminal” we left shortly after basically just scratching our heads.

Down the street we stopped to eat some food and gather our thoughts. That's when we were approached by a well-dressed man who spoke good English. He asked us what we were up to and we told him. He told us (thankfully) that the place we had been was a private tourist office which scams tourists into buying expensive flights and gets commission off it. He said he could show us where the “real” tourist office is. I was skeptical but we decided to follow him because we were out of options. We arrived at a similar looking building to the first one, but by the time we got near it, another white guy came up to us and said “it's a scam, don't go in”. We dismissed our guide and sat down with the guidebook to figure it all out. I found a real tourist information spot near us on the map and just as I did, a rickshaw driver came up to us and asked where we wanted to go. We showed him on the map and he said he would take us there for a nominal fee. We were still skeptical but we knew where were supposed to be going so we could make sure not to get swindled. He did not take us to the tourism office. We took us to another one of these seemingly infinite, private scam offices. We went in even though we were pretty sure we were in the wrong place, exchanged a few words with the guy in there and left certain they were the same thing. Eventually we decided to walk and found the real tourist information center on our own. They had 15 minutes before opening so we sat on the curb and waited while still being harassed by rickshaw drivers telling us they could take us to the “real” office. Eventually the place opened and we went in and waited another 15 minutes to get help as the two employees watched a tv show. Once we were helped we found out that the place we wanted was an office at the train station to begin with and that we had to go back to where we came.

Feeling like we were armed with truthful information for once, we headed out and tried to get a rickshaw. Unfortunately, all the ones who were near were part of this elaborate scam and we couldn't trust them. Eventually we talked to one guy and showed him on the map where we wanted to go and told him a bunch of times “New Delhi Train Station”. We also told him that if he took us anywhere else he would not get paid. We hopped in his auto and five minutes later I was shouting “go make an honest living somewhere you dick!”.

After a long walk and another (real) rickshaw ride later, we arrived at the train station. After asking a security guard (they have no reason to lie) we learned that the office we wanted was on platform , across the tracks, and we went over there hurriedly. When we finally entered the office it was like an oasis. It was air-conditioned, clean, and full of white people getting helped by polite, English-speaking Indians. Within 10 minutes I had my tickets for no extra charge and we walked away with only about 3 hours of our lives wasted.

The rest of the day we napped and in the evening we went out to Connaught place (very near to where all this scamming happened) and enjoyed happy hour at an air-conditioned pub that was playing western music. We had a couple beers and then did the most shameful American thing ever and indulged in some dominoes right after. It was our last night together so we thought we should do it American-style with beer and pizza. It was a great night.

The next day, Leslie began socializing with some other people in the hostel, knowing that she was about to be on her own for a couple days and wanted some adventure companions to go see the Taj Mahal or do other fun things around Delhi. I mostly worked on my computer and got ready to travel to Patna. We went out to lunch with these two German guys who had just arrived. It was fun hearing them talk because they had all the same excitement and energy that Leslie and I felt at the beginning of our trip. We were able to impart what little advice we had, knowing that they too would probably be exhausted after a month's travel around this country. That afternoon, we took one of the German guys with us to the train station so he could see where there real ticket office was, and Leslie inquired about tickets to Agra. I had to depart on my train so we said our goodbyes.

 I hopped on the Rajdhani Express, one of the nicer trains in India, and walked into nice air conditioned coach and was served loads of food before I finally slept, to wake up in Patna once again.