New Delhi Travel Guide
11/14/2007 at 11:05 AM
Tags: Animals, India Travel, Asia Travel (all tags)
If you want to see the world's most street-savvy monkeys, book your trip to India soon. The government of New Delhi is finally dealing with the city's primate problem, finally fed up with the thousands of critters that have taken over as urban sprawl eats up their habitat.
The catalyst for the crackdown was the late October death of the city's deputy mayor who fell from a balcony fighting off a pack of primates. Though New Delhi has tried for years to eradicate the macaque menace, lack of funds for animal control and devotion from Hindus has kept the population from shrinking. All the while, the animals have been on the attack, biting park-goers, invading hospitals and rampaging through neighborhoods, rich and poor.
So until the city can round up the primates and restore order, what's a New Delhi visitor to do? Animal rights activist Sonya Ghosh has some tips for avoiding trouble:
The only way is to ignore them. Never look a monkey in the eye, never raise your eyebrows at one: it's interpreted as a challenge.
Related Stories:
· Monkeys in The Parks, Monkeys in The Palace [NYT]
· India Travel coverage [Jaunted]
· Animals coverage [Jaunted]
[Photo: Japs - TheGypsy]
by pbb
10/03/2007 at 9:15 AM
Tags: Airplanes, Strange Things, India Travel, HOWTO (all tags)
Some of us jump on and off flights so often, it's easy to forget that plenty of people might never get the chance to set foot on a wobbly set of aircraft steps. But an enterprising retired Indian Airlines engineer named Bahadur Chand Gupta has come up with a neat solution to help spread the joy of sitting in a cramped airplane cabin eating horrible food.
Gupta bought an old Airbus 300 a few years ago and has now assembled it in a Delhi suburb. Now he, his wife and a few staff pretending to be airline stewards don their uniforms every Saturday for the flight that doesn't fly. They sell tickets for about $4 to people who want to experience life on an airplane but can't afford to get airborne.
Gupta makes pilot announcements (including turbulence warnings), his wife and friends serve airplane food and push their trolleys up and down the aisles and the plane goes nowhere. It's better that way: The aircraft's missing a wing and half its tail. But that doesn't stop the enjoyment. We're wondering if they make the experience more authentic by throwing in the odd vomiting passenger or screaming child.
Related Stories:
· Tickets Take Off, Plane Stays Put [news.com.au]
· Don't Catch a Plane, Pull It [Jaunted]
· Travel Stories in New Delhi [Jaunted]
[Photo: Keenan Pepper]
by amandak
5/03/2007 at 9:17 AM
Tags: Airports, Airport Hell, Strange Things (all tags)
We've seen it before, both in real life in Paris and on the silver screen with Tom Hanks: occasionally, people get really, truly stuck in an airport.
It's happened again, this time in New Delhi, when two Bangladeshi men without the right visas got sent back from Saudi Arabia sans passports, and India wouldn't let them back in without them. So instead of getting rich in Saudi (that was the plan), the two men spent 48 days of boredom in a Delhi airport terminal. And we can't even find any evidence of WiFi there. That's terminal boredom.
[Photo: seaview99]
Related Stories:
· Delhi Airport Hosts "Terminal Men" For 48 Days [Reuters]
· Bunnies and Airports [Jaunted]
by amandak
11/06/2006 at 9:17 AM
Tags: Celeb News, Celeb Travel, Angelina Jolie, Brangelina (all tags)
What did you do this weekend? Football with friends?
Borat? Boozing? If you're Angelina, you took time off from filming
A Mighty Heart in India, to travel to the country's refugee camps and meet refugees from Afghanistan and Burma, while simultaenously voicing your support and concern for their condition.
The superhumanitarian hottie hit up a camp in New Delhi and met India's Junior Foreign Minister Anand Sharma. Maddox accompanied mom all over, as she also met with a woman living in a one-room home who had fled Burma.
Wow, we sorta feel inadequate about our weekend right about now. Oh! And not to worry, Brad was not around, ONLY because he was forced to attend the premiere of Babel in LA. Damn movies, getting in the way of the weekend family tour of India.
No word on where mom and Maddox stayed before returning home to Le Meridien in Pune, but if Angie stuck to her habit of hitting up the best hotel in town, it had to have been the Oberoi.
Related Stories:
· Angelina Jolie and son Maddox visit Sikh Afghan, Myanmarese refugees in Indian capital [IHT]
· Angelina and Maddox Meet Refugee Children in India [Hello!]
by sedona
3/24/2006 at 10:35 AM
Tags: Restaurants (all tags)
The restaurant Bukhara, inside a business-class hotel in a heavily manicured section of Delhi, gets the sort of press that other restaurants would kill for. Fodor's says the food is "so mind-blowingly delicious that it hasn't changed in years"; the Eyewitness guide calls it "one of the finest restaurants in the city." But either the place has gone south or a recent visit found it on a really bad night -- the food and the service weren't at all worth the cost, which hovers around $40-$50 a head, booze not included.
Decorated with what Concierge.com aptly called "Flintstones-style decor, with stone walls and mock log-top tables," Bukhara is a manly place, where long rows of business guys and IT professionals can hunker down and run up a large bill. With the farcically high prices, especially for wine and cocktails, this is not hard. But if you're in a smaller group, it's likely you'll find yourself ignored for the bigger tables.
The food, modeled on typical tandoori dishes served near the Pakistan--Afghanistan border, is big, brassy and meaty, but strangely bland as well -- maybe this is what Bukhara thinks its many fans want. Vegetarians have options, but they all seems beside the point in the face of heaping plates of mutton and chicken. If you must go here, get someone else to pay.
Related Stories:·
Bukhara [site]
·
Bukhara [Chowhound]
·
Bukhara [Concierge.com]
·
Bukhara [Fodor's]
by johnrambow
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