Travel Tips: Know Where You're Staying

I know it sounds obvious, but I had to learn it the hard way.

A day that started with waking up in the middle of the night to end up getting conned, surviving the most dangerous car ride of my life and seeing the Taj Mahal ended with my learning the hard way to always take a business card or at least write down the address of the place you left your luggage.
(The swastika, by the way, is very common in India and has nothing to do with Nazis.)

At four-something in the morning, when our cabbie told us he would be available to pick us up at the train station at the end of the day to take us back to our hotel, we got his cell number and thought we were good. We knew we were staying at the Hotel Solitaire Plaza in the Lajpat Nagar area of New Delhi. We thought this information was more than enough to get us back home.

We were wrong.

About 20 hours later, after being on the road for most of the day, we were pulling into the traffic mess that is New Delhi, the driver who had taken us to the Taj Mahal (who wasn't our cabbie from earlier in thed day) having assured us he knew where our hotel was.

Except he didn't.

"Hotel Solitaire Plaza, in Lajpat Nagar," I said in response to his question. I expected him to say somehting like, "Oh, yeah. That one."

He didn't. I still wasn't worried. It's not like the hotel had gone anywhere. I pulled out my cell phone and dialed our cabbie's number. It was late, and he didn't answer.

I suggested we stop at a tourism office. We finally found one that was open after about 30 minutes of driving, and the man behind the counter wanted money to let me look at his poster. I told him I would pay for Internet access instead, but, for the life of me, I could not find the hotel online. I talked the guy into checking for the address, but he didn't have it.

Still not overly concerned, we got back in the car, and I dialed our cabbie again. No luck.

"Just drive to Lajpat Nagar, and we'll ask someone," I said. Believe it or not, this is the best way to get directions in India. My first hotel in Mumbai had the address listed as "Near Gateway of India, Apollo Bunder." I don't like the words "near," "sort of," "close to," or "maybe" in an address, but that's just how it is.

My plan would have worked, I'm sure, except our driver didn't know where Lajpat Nagar was.

I couldn't believe it and tried calling the cabbie again. By this time, we'd been looking for our hotel for two hours. Yes, two hours. All four of us - the driver and my two friends - just wanted it to be done.

The cabbie answered, so I handed the phone to the driver, who pulled over to talk.

In a country where running a red light is 400 rupees ($10) and speeding is 200 rupees, talking on the phone while driving is a 1,600 rupee fine.

The driver hung up, and it was like a lightbulb had come on.

"Laj Putnugger," he said. I frowned, handed him a paper, and asked him to write it. He wrote it as "Lajpat Nagar." I was too tired to argue the intricacies of pronunciation with him.

As it turned out, we were just a few minutes from our hotel.

When we stopped, our driver jumped out and gave us all big hugs, thanking one of the estimated 3,000 gods in the Hindu religion repeatedly. We tipped him and staggered up to our room which, despite its lacking in some areas (like lightbulbs, as Deon proves in the picture below), was the only place I wanted to be.

For the rest of my life, no matter how obvious the place I'm staying is, I will make sure I have the address and phone number of my hotel.

Misadventures: Getting Conned

At only one point in my life have I overtly threatened someone with physical harm and meant it. Unfortunately for the two Indians sitting across the counter from me, they were the target of my anger.

What brought me to that point started the night before, when my two friends and I purchased train tickets to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. In a country where most people we'd spoken to had a basic command of English, we thought buying train tickets would be fairly simple.

It wasn't. Everyone had forgotten to speak English, and we couldn't even guess at the destinations, since the train schedules all looked like the picture below. Add to that the fact that once we got to the ticket window, after cleverly avoiding a pair of pickpockets and pointing them out to everyone in the station, it turned out that only Indian citizens could buy from it.

The window we had to go to was in a separate building half a mile away. Even when we'd paid for our tickets and gotten the receipt, I had no idea if we were actually going to end up in Agra. For all I knew, our ticket was for Srinagar.

About eight hours after purchasing our ticket, my alarm was buzzing and I rolled out of bed. I don't mind being awake at 4 a.m. if I haven't gone to bed yet, but to actually wake up that early really gets to me.

We were at the train station by 5:15 to catch our 6 a.m. train to Agra, having been amazed that, yes, there is a time of the day when New Delhi's streets aren't gridlocked.

Squinting to read the ticket, I saw we were supposed to go to platform one. All I saw were platforms 6-12. I asked a local, and he started to point me in the right direction, but then another guy showed up and took over after a few seconds of rapid-fire Hindi whizzed past my uncomprehending face.

The second guy, pointed at the tickets and told us we didn't have the tourist stamp. Had my brain been working even a little bit, I would have seen through this obvious and time-tested scam, but I, along with my friends, followed the guy we thought was helping us to a tourism office where he said we could get our tickets stamped.

Two elderly Indians pretended to look at a computer screen and told us all the tourist seats were full, and we were out of luck. I argued with them for about half an hour, telling them there was no reason we couldn't ride second class with all the locals, but he made up some lies about laws to protect local passenger seating or something.

Playing the ever-helpful TI staffer, he was able to get us a car to take us to Agra - for the princely sum of $135 each (our train ticket for three people had been $50).

By this point, we'd missed our train, but I remembered reading something in the Lonely Planet guide six months earlier.

"Let me see your credentials," I said.

"We don't have to show them to you," the man said with an air of superiority.

"Lonely Planet says you do. It's a law."

"Let me see this Lonely Planet."

"No. Show me your credentials."

At this, the man turned to his cohort, who was maybe old enough to have met some British colonists when they first came to India, and produced a book full of blank pages with the India Tourism Office seal on them.

"Here you are, sir. You see? We like Americans. We are authorized."

"No. You're a scam artist," I said, mad at myself as much as at him. "Since we can't use the train ticket, you will refund us the money for it."

"I cannot do this," he replied.

"Yes, you can." I sat back and folded my arms, knowing I wasn't all that much of a threat, but the two guys with me, who had jest returned from 15 months in Iraq, might give him pause.

"I can give you half."

"You will give me all of it."

"This I cannot do."

I leaned forward. "You will give me all of it, or I will step over this counter, take every last rupee in your cash register, and if you stand in my way, you're going to get hurt."

The man's eyes flitted between me and my friends before he said something in Hindi and the amount of our train fare magically appeared on the counter.

It was a small victory, but at least it was something.

Back in the hotel room 20 hours later, one of my friends picked up the Lonely Planet guide.

"If you are told you need a tourist stamp on your ticket," he said, paraphrasing a paragraph in the book, "it is a popular scam. There are no tourist stamps. You will be taken to a nonofficial tourism office and pay exorbitant fees for transportation. The good thing to remember is that there is very little threat of physical harm."

"For tourists," I thought.

Photo of the Week: The Taj Mahal

One corner of the Taj Mahal, which is every bit as beautiful as people say. I wrote about it at length here.

The Perilous Road to Agra

It was on the road to the Taj Mahal that I thought I would die.

If you get nervous passing on the wrong side of the road, do not ride in a car on India’s highways – take a train. Over there, it is not enough to pass the odd camel cart, autorickshaw, elephant or truck. A driver must also pass a car passing a slower vehicle (or animal) if possible. What that works out to is being three-abreast on a two-lane highway.

And the other side is doing the same thing.

My friends Deon and Peter were sharing my experience, but being Iraq War vets, they were taking it better. I eventually settled down as we screamed past fields so thick with the smoke from cooking fires that the trees at their far edges appeared as specters.

I was smack in the middle of third-world nowhere. I found it ironic that to get to one of the most beautiful buildings in the world, I had to pass through ugly poverty, where farmers in filthy clothes with leathery skin sharpened their axes by grinding them on the pavement and camel carts were almost as common as private cars.

But this was one of the reasons I had come to India. It is unlike going to Europe, which is like going to an American city where the inhabitants speak a different language. I wanted to get completely out of my comfort zone, and I did.

Our driver pulled to the side of the road for food. Even out there, Mountain Dew and Doritos were available. We had some of the delicious “ready-made” tea (loaded with cream and sugar), and got back into the SUV.

Unlike most of the vehicles I rode in in India, this one had seatbelts, and I was very thankful for that. Our driver also had an illuminated plastic statue of some god or other on his dashboard, which is a common practice. Maybe it had something to do with my survival.

Deon asked our driver to put on some music, and I cringed at the thought of hearing high-pitched, screeching noises, but it was actually very nice, a mix of current pop music and Punjabi folk music.

We had to stop at a toll booth, and while our driver was paying, a man wearing a beanie, a shawl and a shotgun slung over his back walked up to my window. He stared at me, unblinking, and I wondered if he wanted a bribe. Then his face broke out in a toothy grin and he waved at me. So I smiled and waved back. Light-skinned, blonde-haired people are very uncommon out there, and I wondered if I might be the first one he’d seen up close.

Just after the checkpoint, our side of the road was closed. In the States, that would be cause for a signalman stopping one direction until the other had passed. Not so in India. In India, it’s a free-for-all. And the best part is that there were no signs to warn the other drivers.

Fortunately their trucks are painted bright colors and heavily decorated. They can’t be missed.

Wondering how American drivers would handle that situation, I turned around and saw a bus behind us. The word “Panicker's” was painted on the windshield, and a banner reading, “Welcome” was hung underneath that. I thought it fitting.

We eventually reached the Taj Mahal. It was absolutely worth the trip there and back, especially since I still had a pulse at the end.

(For my experience at the Taj Mahal, keep checking back. It will be up in a few weeks.)