India Gate, New Delhi

Originally uploaded by neilmadhvani.

We’re staying in the heart of the city, New Delhi, just a few minutes walk from Connaught Place. The Connaught area has a very intereting design – it’s made up of Connaught Place at the centre, then an inner ring (Rajiv Chowk), a middle ring and then an outer ring (Connaught Circus or Indira Chowk). The area is an architecturally uniform series of colonnaded buildings mainly devoted to shops, banks, restaurants, state tourist offices, airline offices and travel agencies.

One of the main differences between Delhi and Mumbai/Bangalore is that here it doesn’t feel so safe to walk around at night in a lot of areas. We’ve spoken to a number of locals and they have advised us against venturing out after 10pm. There are tourist police vans dotted around the city now, but one still needs to be aware of personal safety – probably no worse than London though!

We were really fortunate to be able to visit the Mughal Gardens within Rashtrapati Bhavan (the President’s Estate). These beautiful gardens are only open for one month every year and contain hundreds of different flowers and herb plants. Unfortunately, as with a lot of things in Delhi, photography was strictly forbidden and we had to leave our bags, mobile phones etc at the entrance. In fact, I’m really shocked at how much security there is here. There are armed guards at all of the main metro stations, and all passengers have to go through a security screen which typically involves a bag check too. They are really worried about terrorism here.

The recently-opened Delhi Metro system is really incredible – there are currently only three lines, but new construction is taking place all the time and the entire system should be ready by 2010. It’s very similar to the subway systems in Hong Kong and Singapore – very spacious stations and air conditioned trains. It’s a joy to take the metro and avoid the traffic!

I am pleasantly surprised by the pollution levels here – compared to Mumbai and Bangalore the air is really clean here, mainly due to the fact that the city is now using compressed natural gas (CNG) for autorickshaws and a lot of buses. I think this has made an enormous difference compared to the horrible emissions from old petrol/diesel engines.

It’s time to grab some breakfast now – more later!

This entry was posted on Friday, February 24th, 2006 at 4:04 am and is filed under Travel, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.