Today we make our second attempt to visit the Red Fort and once more brave the < ?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /?>
Delhi traffic by auto-rickshaw. The traffic seems to become heavier as the week progresses. The ubiquitous scruffy yellow and green rickshaws are everywhere. Battered buses which look long overdue for the scrap heap paradoxically run on clean fuel hurtle along with people hanging out of the doors and even sitting on the roof. People ride on the footplates at the back of commercial people carriers or are crammed into the back of trucks. A cow trundles along unhurried and completely oblivious to the commotion all around.
The massive 2km long red sandstone walls of the Red Fort loom 33m high at the eastern end of Chandhi Chowk in Old Delhi, the area which was one the city of Shahjahanabad. Built between 1638 and 1648 by Shah Jahan the the Red Fort is still in remarkably good shape. Inside are the beautiful white marble buildings of Shah Jahan’s palace; the Diwan-i-Am (Hall of Public Audiences), the Diwan-i-Khas (the Hall of Private Audiences) are all beautifully ornamented with carvings and delicately inlaid with semi precious stones and the Shahi Burj (a three-storey octagonal tower which was Shah Jahan’s private working area) all linked by a channel which once flowed with water. Unfortunately some of the buildings in the complex including the Pearl Mosque and the hammam are not open to the public, which is a shame as the interior of the hammam glimpsed through the dust-covered windows looks incredibly beautiful.
Early evening rush-hour pushes Dehli traffic chaos to new heights. Grid-locked, fume laden and unbelievably noisy. An auto-rickshaw wallah is quick to seize the opportunity of a good fair from two tourists and we are quickly seated but have to wait whilst impromptu repairs are undertaken to get the thing going. It’s quickly obvious that the rickshaw is also low on petrol, but it seems that rickshaws can only fill up at certain petrol stations – those with queues snaking pack along the road for sever 100 feet, and he is turned away from one without a queue. So we spend the journey back to the B&B on tenterhooks, wondering if we are going to come to a spluttering standstill on the dual carriageway. But we needn’t have worried we make it all the way back to the B&B without any hitch.
We are discovering that India is prone to frequent, albeit short-lived power cuts and most places such as restaurants, hotels and so on have generators that provide back-up power for lighting, fans but usually not air conditioning. We experienced our first power cut very soon after arriving and from time to time there have been brief black outs before the generator kicks in.