Domestic Flight

After breakfast we checked out of the hotel with only the clothes on our backs and what few toiletries we carried in our knapsacks. We boarded an alternate bus (with really bad shocks!) and drove back into the New Delhi government area to visit the house where Mahatma Gandhi spent his 144 final days. The house belonged to a wealthy Indian industrialist, and Gandhi and his wife used only two rooms, but it was "neutral ground" where both Hindu and Muslim leaders felt comfortable conferring with the great man, and the large formal gardens offered an area where hundreds could gather to see him. The path he walked, from his room toward a prayer shelter in the garden, is marked by raised concrete sandal prints, ending at the point where he was assassinated. A stone stele marks the spot where he fell. The rest of the spacious house has been turned into a Gandhi museum, focusing primarily on artwork related to Gandhi's life and teachings. The guide spent quite a bit of time here lecturing on Indian independence. He urged us to go home and watch the movie Gandhi, with Ben Kingsly, but we've already seen it more than once. It was a pretty powerful place, though.

From the Gandhi museum we went to an early lunch at a place called "Barbeque Nation." This was a rather strange place. They put a pot of hot coals into a hole in the middle of the table, then heated skewers of kebab meats over the coals until done. But there was also a buffet, so we got Indian sauces off the buffet to put on the meat that cooked on our tables. It was a hurried lunch, as we had to get to the airport.

The plane to Jaipur was a turboprop that probably seated 70-80 people. There weren't even half those seats filled. After all sorts of dire warnings about flight delays, we departed early and arrived in only 45 minutes or so (had we flown a day later we probably wouldn't have even gotten off the ground, as we heard that Delhi was socked in with dense fog). Our regular bus and driver picked us up at the airport and took us to our very nice hotel. We took a brisk walk around the neighborhood because we'd had a long time sitting in the airport and on the plane. This is a residential area with some very lovely homes. It's difficult to tell if they are large homes for a single family, if extended families live there, or if parts of them are rentals. We saw "room to let" signs in some places, as well as indications that some were BnB hosts, but there were many that couldn't be deciphered. We were "on our own" for dinner, but since we had had such a big lunch, we really didn't feel like eating again. We made use of the hotel's free wi-fi, instead, to make our first contacts with home.