On December 2008, I started a six months trip: two months in India and four South America. Almost two years later, I’m still coping with the amount of pictures I shot during that time, all the notes I took and the drawings I did in my notebooks. Someday I’ll probably be able to make a sense of all of it, in the meanwhile I thought that I could start publishing text and photos over here.
It’s nice to look back at the experiences, and see how memories, photos and travel notes integrate in a complementary way. This is the start, I got notes, photos and drawings for every day of the trip, but I won’t make a post a day, so there will be stuff to read and see for the next year or more.
Delhi, India, 2007
I arrive in Delhi early in the morning, from the airplane it’s possible to see the fog that covers the plains around the city. There’s a strange sign at the customs, that goes something like “Pleasure for quality, pleasure for compliance”, the typical language of Indian bureaucracy.
The road from the airport to Pahar Ganj is packed with cars, the sun barely pierces the layer of dust. I didn’t remember that Delhi was so dusty, probably because I always came during the monsoon. I took a windowless room at the Metropolis hotel, to avoid hearing too much noise from the road. I slept the whole day.
“Tourist India” is a completely different place than the one that is lived by the locals, not only from an economical standpoint, there’s something in the mentality: there are no gurus or saints in Delhi, but bureaucrats and shop keepers sitting behind dusty desks, who yawn while talking on the phone or playing solitaire on their PC. The same people, minutes later, light some incense sticks in their shops and start praying: utterly fascinating.