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The following pictures were all taken during travels in India in January 2006. |
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| On our first day in New Delhi, we went to the Red Fort and wandered through the streets of Old Delhi. The next day we headed south to the center of goverment and toured the area surrounding the Central Secretariat. |
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We had scheduled this trip especially to be able to stay at the Imperial Hotel, a venue I had haunted with some frequency (viz., especially the bar) on my prior visits to New Delhi. Our initial five day stay went off without incident and the service was commensurate with the five star European prices we were obliged to pay. Upon our return for a layover in New Delhi en route from Udaipur to Shimla, the situation was less pleasant. Depsite confirmed reservations, the hotel informed us (using an airport driver whose English was extremely marginal) that we were being assigned to another hotel (the location and quality were never made clear) because the hotel was oversold. I insisted upon our return to the Imperial since we had left luggage there from our previous stay. The airport driver then falsely (in the manner so characteristics of Indians when faced with any unpleasantness) assured us that everything was o.k. Upon our arrival it quickly became clear that the hotel had no intention of honoring our reservation and were anxious to remove us from the property. It was late, we were tired and we had a very early train the next morning. Not only did the hotel never clarify where they were going to send us (the airport driver had made an imcomplete reference to a lower quality hotel by the airport) but they never offered to pay for the substitute room. We summoned a hotel marketing agent who had sat down with us at dinner the previous Tuesday. At the time she had fawned over us telling us how lovely it was that we were staying in the hotel and offering us discounts and amenities we had no need for. The marketing agent was helpless and hopeless: all her promises from the preceding week had been hollow marketing blather. And so we stood our ground in the crowded lobby. I began to expound in my best Ciceronian diction on the several thousand dollars we had spent during our visit less than a week earlier, how we had confirmed reservations and how we would most assuredly report back to our friends and colleagues on this most inhospitable treatment. Faced with a raving travel weary American excoriating the hotel in the center of their lobby, management acted quickly and decisively to confirm our reservation and give us the room we had reserved. The marketing agent looked on in impotent silence. The Imperial may be a lovely hotel, but I have never before encountered a situation where the hotel staff was so pro-actively anxious to tell me how much they appreciated my business and how anxious they were to make my stay more enjoyable and simultaneously so utterly impotent in addressing a real and dire problem of the hotel's own making. Suffice it to say, all who would venture there are now forewarned. |
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| The air in Agra, like New Delhi, is extremely dirty. These scenes from the rooftop of the Sheraton at sunset nicely capture the contrast between the dirt of the city and the impeccable beauty of the Taj Mahal. |
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| Udaipur was a lovely oasis and the Lake Palace Hotel was exquisite. Happily, the lake (which has dried up on occasion in recent years) was full to capacity. The pictures show the lake, the hotel, the surrounding town and the etherial Monsoon Palace just outside of town. The Monsoon Palace, which has been abandoned for some time, sits atop a mountain in the midst of what is now a game preserve. |
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We left Delhi early on a Wednesday morning to take the train to Kalka and then on to Shimla. Upon our arrival in Shimla, we spent five nights and four days at the Cecil Oberoi near the heart of the town. The hotel was quite pleasant and largely uncroweded. The weather during the day was mild and excellent for hiking and walking. The air, at least when compared with New Delhi and Agra, was reasonably clean. The photographs show various pictures around town, including the majestic (although somewhat decrepit) former viceroy's palace atop one of the town's hills. The snow capped mountains are barely visible in the distance through the haze. |
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| Our third day in Shimla, we hired a car and driver for the two hour, fifty kilometer, trip north to Tattapani, a local resort with a small natural hot spring. There was a festival going on along the river bank which is recorded in our photos. The road was treacherous and every oncoming bus brought an unfulfilled promise of a premature trip to glory. En route, we descended from an elevation of close to 7,000 feet at Shimla to only about 2,000 feet at Tattapani. In a couple of the photographs you can see the a new concrete bridge over the river Sutlej which is currently under construction. On the way back, we stopped for tea at the Oberoi Wildflower resort on the outskirts of Shimla. |
