This Is A Lake - A travel blog

Last day in Delhi. Last day in India! Today I took an Uber to a place I’d meant to visit last time, but which was closed: the National Museum!  The first impression isn’t great, because it occupies a rather old and ugly building -uglier still inside, white walls with green white tiles that scream “government building where you need to take a number and wait for an hour to do paperwork”. Plus, like all stations and airports and the metro and most museums, they have this stupid security system where they make you put your bag in an X-ray scanner, then go through a metal detector, and regardless of whether the metal detector beeps or not, the security guard does a patdown of every single person. It’s so inefficient!! But: the collection is absolutely worth the visit. I spent nearly two hours inside, and several galleries were closed for renovations (including, alas, the Jewelry vault -longtime readers know I like exhibits of shiny things!). The greatest asset of

It was a rough morning, y’all. I woke up still tired from yesterday, to the news that air pollution had hiked in Delhi back to severe levels (and indeed the view from the window was hazy and unappealing), as had the far right in the Spanish elections; this brought back unhappy memories of when Trump won while I was in Tokyo in 2016. I was this close to just saying to hell with it and staying in my room watching Netflix all day, but I snapped out of it and started on my initial plan: visiting Humayun’s Tomb, a historic mausoleum, and then Gurdwara Bangka Sahib, a Sikh temple. I decided to go by metro, as there’s a station right next to the hotel, and as soon as I got down the stairs two different Indian guys (first one, and then another after the first left) walked up to me out of the blue to offer advice. I was wary at first, because I assume all unsolicited contact is liable to be a scam, but I realized they weren’t trying to sell me anything and were just interested in my plans

Red Fort, Jama Masjid After a wonderful, restoring sleep, I woke up this morning to a sunny Delhi morning, and this time I could definitely notice a grayish haze in the air, even though there were no clouds. My main objective for today was to visit the Red Fort, Delhi’s main attraction, a sprawling 16th century Mughal fortress with many historical buildings inside. I decided to brave walking to the fort, as it’s supposedly less than 20 minutes from my hotel -and sure enough, geographically it’s not that far but it’s more work than it would be back home, having to navigate narrow sidewalks teeming with people, occasionally having to find a way to cross a giant six-lane road with no lights anywhere... Eventually I spotted the red walls of the fort, and from there I just followed them until Lahori Gate, the main entrance, where I found out that it’s the entrance but not where tickets are sold. What the Lonely Planet guide fails to mention is that first you have to b

At one point this summer, I said, “Would it be crazy if I up and went to India in November?” and my friends went, “...Not more than usual?” So here I am now! As usual, I’m going to travel for two weeks, and I’m going to see what’s called the Golden Triangle (Delhi, the capital; Agra, where the Taj Mahal is; and Jaipur, the Pink City of Rajasthan) plus Varanasi, which is rather far from the others but seemed really interesting for being one of the world’s oldest cities and India’s holiest, with its famous stair steps into the Ganges. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, though. Getting to Charles de Gaulle airport was problematic as always (I left home at 17:00 for a 21:00 flight and arrived at the gate in the middle of boarding!), and then there was the Air India experience. I almost always fly with Air France, but their hours for India were universally terrible so I had to branch out. The plane seemed modern enough -the windows were larger and instead of having shades, the glass