The Krauts were up with the sun and rolling joints. We got up a little later and wandered down to the Delhicacy for breakfast. No porridge was the start of a bad do which was worsened by surly service and the usual poor arithmetical wrangling and a reluctance to give change.
We wandered up to the student travel office in the Imperial Hotel to enquire about the prices of various flight options. We went on to the Post Office opposite and Martin sent some scrappy perfunctory postcards home. Arrived safely, wish you were here.
We got a cuppa in a local dive in Connaught Lane and George and Martin had their tattered native shoulder bags patched up in sewing machine hut nearby. We returned to the Student Travel Office but it was closed for lunch.
We headed back to the Madras Coffee House for lunch and Martin invested in some sandals to replace the plimsols which were giving him blisters. We polished off the 7 Indian Rupee vegetarian meal and waddled back to the Travel Agents. We ended up booking a flight from Madras to Kuala Lumpar, which cost the same as the flight to Singapore, 2,628 Indian Rupees or £177 Sterling.
We waited for our tickets to be hand-written out but the clerk was continually side-tracked by other customers and phone calls so we eventually left. We had to return tomorrow in any case. George was pursued by a lad selling jointed wooden cobras as we walked back to Connaught Place. The lad was asking 70/- but George offered him 15/-. The boy went down in price, but George decided that he could live without a wooden snake.
We got to the Northern Railway Reservation Office and discovered the usual slow queues and a Bombay Express train that was fully booked until 19th December 1983. We went on to the Tourist Information Office to enquire about buses and discovered that international tourists could jump the queue by going to the Tourist Guide at Baroda House, where they had a tourist quota reserved on each train.
Baroda House was the residence of the Maharaja of Baroda in Delhi. It is located on Kasturba Gandhi Marg, next to Faridkot House. It was designed by the architect of New Delhi, Sir Edwin Lutyens. He designed the house on a train from Bombay in 1921 and it took 15 years to complete in 1936. It was being used as the Zonal Headquarters Office of Northern Railways.
We left the Tourist Information Office with thanks for this most useful information and returned to the Sunny Guest House. All the other guests were there as usual, puffing on enormous roll-ups and gazing into space. The air was rich with the scent of cannabis and some were “getting into religion” or finding their true selves by meditation, while others preferred the more materialistic comforts provided by their Sony Walkman personal cassette players.
Martin accidentally tipped a pot of coffee over a bloke’s aerogrammes and we fled upstairs to the roof. The dormitory was filling nicely with marijuana combustion products, so we cleared out. We had a quick sortie into the underground bazaar below Connaught Place, polished off a couple of hard-boiled eggs (only 85 paise) and settled in the Madras Coffee House for our evening recreation.
We tried our hand at writing poetry with some good results from Martin (joke)! I wrote some Christmas Greeting aerogrammes back home as we put away the expresso coffees. Back at the Sunny Guest House (you’ve guessed it!) the Krauts were still hammering the “blow”. Wreathed in cannabis smoke they crouched in their pits as they had for all the time they had been resident at Sunny’s. We read our books for a while downstairs before turning in for the night.
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