I was lucky to get a bowl of porridge from the reluctant bolshie (of a person or attitude) deliberately combative or uncooperative) cook at the Sunny Guest House before most people were up. He only had one gas ring operating so later risers were out of luck, and this included George and Martin, who left in disgust for the Madras Coffee House.
I bought a new ballpoint pen as another one had run out (Indian quality meant a short working life for pens) and joined them for a coffee. A lack of adventure in Martin’s case gave him cause to make his travel log a work of fiction. Task number one for the day was a trip to Baroda House to book our train tickets to Bombay. A short walk down from Escorts Corner we found the impressive headquarters of Indian Northern Railways. We negotiated the gatehouse paperwork and walked past the floral clock to the office of the Tourist Guide.
Here we discovered a much more civilized way to do business, rather than the free-for-all melee at the railway station ticket offices. With a minimum of fuss we secured three 2nd class sleepers on the Bombay Express leaving tomorrow at 16:40 hrs. This cost us 97.5 Indian Rupees. Martin also tried to book his return trip from Madras to New Dehli, but was told that this was “not possible”.
We returned to the Sunny Guest House to find the Krauts well into another day on “Cloud Nine”. The term “cloud nine” is typically used to refer to a state of happiness and euphoria, though it can instead be used to refer to intoxication or feelings of light-headedness. This term’s exact origins are fairly difficult to discern, though one particularly popular, and almost universally dismissed, explanation relates to a numerical system said to have been used at one time by the Weather Bureau in the US for designating the height of clouds. Regardless of its origins, most people use the phrase “being on cloud nine” to indicate extreme happiness or satisfaction with life.
We left quickly for Dehli Zoo, which housed the rare white tiger, crossing again the hexagonal roundabout South East of Connaught Place where Baroda House is situated. We took a few photos by India Gate and passed by the old fort (Purana Qila, Hindustani for Old Fort also formerly called Shergarh & Sher Fort is one of the oldest forts in Delhi) and into the zoo. The India Gate (originally the All India War Memorial) is a war memorial located astride the Rajpath, on the eastern edge of the "ceremonial axis" of New Delhi, formerly called Kingsway. It stands as a memorial to 70,000 soldiers of the British Indian Army who died in between 1914–1921 in the First World War, in France, Flanders, Mesopotamia, Persia, East Africa, Gallipoli and elsewhere in the Near and the Far East, and the third Anglo-Afghan War.
Entrance to the zoo cost 50 paise. The zoo gardens were spacious and well laid out with roomy pens for the animals. We were disgusted by the Indians who thought that it was fun to throw stones at the animals and poke them with sticks.
I spent a while trying to get a textbook photo of an Indian rhinoceros to supplement our Chitwan yarns and eventually got a reasonable shot. We had a cuppa in the zoo restaurant and headed back to the Travel Agent at 15:30 hrs. to pick up our plane tickets. This we did, although they hadn’t confirmed them (in those days you had to confirm your flights a few days before departure).
In the zoo we had been allowed in to see the white tigers rend and tear up their raw meat lunch in their eating cages. We ate, ourselves, in the Anand Restaurant. Our favourite dish, an egg curry, went down a treat. We returned to the Sunny Guest House to pay for tonight’s stay and stared agape at the Germans from our dormitory. They were fully dressed and set to go out into the wide world!
As they trickled out, with a look of hatred towards us from the harlot, we raced up to the dormitory for a period of rest, free from guttural barking and pungent fumes. It was short-lived however, as they must have just popped out to restock on “blow” because they were back in about twenty minutes, coughing and hacking as they struggled to get another generous “joint” going.
They hadn’t been out for food as the cups, saucers and left-overs littering the floor bore testimony to them having in-house meals brought to their drug den. We left them to it as usual, and following a short exploratory tour, we ended up in the Madras Coffee House and, as usual, expressos all round.
My ink flow begins to falter on my diary page and it looks like another poxy pen is going “up the Swanee”, (Well, this is a bizarre expression, isn't it? When we say something's "up the Swanee" we mean that it's been lost or knackered in some way. "I'm sure that horse has a wooden leg; that's another tenner up the Swanee"). I’ve been stitched up again, sold a pup, hoodwinked into buying an Indian “Number One Kwality” product!
At 21:00 hrs. the Madras Coffee House was empty apart from us and the manager was making impatient noises. We moved out but were reluctant to return to the fragrant fog of the dormitory. We tarried a while with some strong sweet tea and hard-boiled eggs in a lean-to café by the Harley Davidson Rickshaw Park on Connaught Place.
We finally turned in to the sound of the Kraut tart coughing her heart out, pausing to sooth her tortured lungs with further lugs on a scented reefer (a cannabis cigarette or spliff).
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