Pahar Ganj : The Place to Head to in New Delhi

So guys, if you’re thinking of going to New Delhi for the first time and you have no shit of idea where to head to, you may want to consider going to Pahar Ganj.

Centrally located in the middle of the city, it is more like the place where most of the actions are. Very much located within the walking distance from the New Delhi Railway Station, it is a place of choice by most backpackers to stay in before catching the early morning Bhopal Shatabdi train to Agra on the next day. But I believe that is just a tiny bit of geographical co-incidence if compared to what Pahar Ganj has to offer to its visitors.

Dashing across the area is the famous Main Bazaar Road. Quite true to its name, I actually can’t think of any better place to spend my rupees away in New Delhi other than the Main Bazaar Road. I’m not much of a shopper but Main Bazaar Road was fast to turn me into one. Jeez. It is one of those rare places where you can see beautiful pieces of clothes being hung 3 floors up and covering (almost) the entire building.

And of course the kind of places that you wouldn’t want to bring your wife to. You’ll just have to be thankful that most – if not all – of the shops don’t seem to accept credit card so you’re actually safe from any possibility of getting a heart attack when you next bill comes. Heh.

Being one of the most visited areas in New Delhi, Pahar Ganj is so vibrant with people of all colors and characters I could just stay there and do absolutely nothing while watching the people go by hour after hour after hour without getting bored AT ALL. There’s always something to be amused over.

I remember walking past a Caucasian guy so shabby with overgrown beard and uncombed long hair when I went to George Town of Penang last year. He walked barefooted in one of those hippy-ish clothes and if not for the fact that he was a mat salleh, I could have easily mistaken him for a beggar or something.

My Aussie travel companion at that time who had spent 6 months backpacking all over India told me that the guy must have spent quite a bit of time in India and eventually got too carried away by all the air of ‘spirituality’ that surrounded India.

“He’s got some loose nuts in his head”, I remember her saying in between her chuckles.

Oh well, if she was true then there was definitely a lot of loose nuts in Pahar Ganj because I could see a lot of those kinds in the Main Bazaar Road. My travel buddy Audrey called them ‘spiritual people’. 😀

Alright people, you might want to read this carefully and thoroughly. If you don’t already know, New Delhi is the capital city of India so being the capital city of the second most populous country in the world, New Delhi surely know how to cater to the needs of its visitors that come from all corners of the globe EACH AND EVERY YEAR.

The Pahar Ganj alone has more than enough hotels (hostels are rare here) so unless there is something going on in New Delhi that draws an extraordinary number of visitors to this mega city, I can’t imagine there’d be time when all of the hotels are fully occupied.

Except for the first night when we arrived from Malaysia, we didn’t book any hotel for any of the nights that we’d be spending in New Delhi after covering the Agra and Jaipur part of the Golden Triangle. I came to find out that it was actually a good idea. There was an abundance of hotels in Pahar Ganj all eager to have you as their guests even on a walk-in basis.

Of course with the air of competitiveness hanging all around, the hotel proprietors wouldn’t just sit on their asses and expect people to come to their unknown crooks and corners of Pahar Ganj. They’d be people ‘standing guard’ on the main street and eyeing every new face that comes in and offering the best of deals although there was is way of telling how best is best. LOL.

Oh well, unless you are interested to find out. We were and we didn’t like how the things worked. It was easy to read the business. Those self-declared ‘hotel agents’ would mark up the price so that they could scoop in some commission off the deal. Of course the best thing to do is to go directly to the hotel and avoid the mark-up and you might save some of your hard-earned money.

And that was what we did. We checked out one hotel after another and that was when we found HARI PIORKO Hotel.

Priced at INR1400 per room per night, it was probably the first ‘real’ hotel that we found ever since we set foot in India about four nights ago.

So – after unloading everything and doing a little bit of washing up, it was time to hit into the streets FOR REAL. Of course it wayyyy past dinner time so our stomachs were already making noises in protest.

We actually followed our instinct by walking towards New Delhi Railway Station. Oh well, talking about a little discovery here, we had come to find out that the BETTER place to have dinner could be found just across the road from the railway station.

Unless the word EWWWW has never been registered in your gastronomic dictionary what-so-ever, it is quite advisable to go against any idea of going to the backstreet where you’d see how things are being operated around the kitchen. Believe me; you wouldn’t want to do that.

In a country like India, I’ve come to find out that the term ‘What you don’t know doesn’t really hurt you’ can be so useful – even VITAL to your survival at some points. LOL!

Oh well, I gotta tell you that being in India is all about being less compromising to your throat and stomach. If you come to India expecting to see arrays of eateries just down the street from where you’re staying, I’m afraid you might die of hunger before you can even find one.

OK, that was more like an understatement. Of course they have eateries where it matters. You’ve only got to accept the fact that they have their own way of cooking things so yeah – being less compromising to your stomach  is certainly a YES YES thing. Again my double thumbs up to my travel buddy Audrey. While I was struggling to force my first bite, she was going so well with the food I really thought she must have been born an Indian in her past life. 😀

But then, being in India made me think how thankful I am for having spent the last 30 years or so in Malaysia where curry is such a common thing in many of its local delicacies. And I have always loved curry. I just couldn’t help but questioning how they had been prepared. 😀

We actually returned to the same place for our very next dinner and this time we put more variety to the table. I had to admit after awhile that food in New Delhi is not really that bad after all. You’ll just need to know where to eat and most importantly what to order. It’s VERY LIKELY that you’d be stuck when making your order because you are so unfamiliar with the foods on the menu.

Then you’ll know how restaurants with pictures on the menus are very much of an advantage. You can’t expect the foods to come exactly the same as they are on the pictures but at least you get a little bit of idea as to how they are gonna look like in real.

So guys, once again – Think New Delhi, think Pahar Ganj. It is certainly the place to be in New Delhi.