Here are two simple, unarguable travel truths.  If you want to know a city, walk.  If you want to have an encounter with a city and its people, walk without a purpose or a destination. (This latter truth is my re-working of Lao Tzu’s well-known dictum “Meandering leads to perfection“).  Some of my most memorable travel experiences have come from simply wandering around, walking from one street to the next, turning one corner after another, with no goal in mind other than seeing where they lead me.  I think I learned this first from my father who liked to take me along on Saturday walks in London that seemed to have little purpose other than exercise and a delight in unfamiliar streets.

A city is so much more than a list of sights.  Unless you’re very short of time, forget those websites and guidebooks that point you to the “Top 10 Things To See in …”  Leave the maps and GPS behind.  Lose the guides.  Get out and walk.  Look, listen, taste, and smell.  A city you breathe, ingest, digest, and absorb becomes part of you, unforgettable.  It changes you.  That’s true for every city and perhaps especially so for a place such as Delhi.

Exploring Delhi’s streets on foot isn’t always easy and it’s rarely comfortable.  Crossing from one sidewalk to another demands patience and nerves of steel.  This isn’t the place for the fainthearted.  You have to summon all your courage and dive in.  No one driving a car or rickshaw, or riding a motorbike, would ever consider stopping for you on a walkway.  Forget all the rules and the etiquette you learned elsewhere; this is a competitive sport in which the bravest and fittest prevail.  Drivers apparently determined to speed you to your next cycle of reincarnation are only the beginning of your problems.  There’s the crumbling, garbage-strewn pavements, the constant obstacles, the over-curious, bug-ridden street dogs (not to mention the occasional cow), the crowds, the calls of the rickshaw drivers and street vendors, and the endless stares of the locals (“Why is that white guy walking when he can afford a taxi?”).

Why, indeed?  Why bother?  Simply because the rewards far outweigh the mostly minor hassles.  I walked a couple of miles there recently.  The early morning sun was fighting to make itself felt through the dust, mist and smog, but Lodi Gardens looked gorgeous, no different from how they looked nearly forty years ago when I first saw them. I had a friendly chat with a very impressive-looking Sikh rickshaw driver keen to complain about the government and the recent demonetization policies. I had a mug of steaming hot chai in one of the scores of casual street cafes that have sprung up in recent years, enduring the stares and enjoying the questions of office workers, delivery boys, and taxi drivers, keen to know where I lived, what I thought of India, why I was awake so early, and much more.  A special couple of hours that added to my trove of India memories and deepened even further my affection for that amazing country and its people.