On my second day in New Delhi I decided to go out and see the Lotus Temple. It’s located in South Delhi and so I decided to take the metro. This involved me changing metro lines, which was a long walk but was all done inside the metro station and was pretty painless.
You can see that it appears to be a popular attraction
Bahá’í house of worship
So the Lotus Temple is named because of its shape – but in fact it is called the Bahá’í house of worship. There is apparently one on each continent. Bahá’í is a relatively new religion, about 200 years old I was told. There is a quite informative information centre once you enter the ground and you can ask any questions you have.
The visitor centre was very quiet and relaxing. I would say most people head straight for the temple. It’s hard to find calm in New Delhi so I really enjoyed chatting with the staff in the visitor centre and appreciating the peace and quiet.
Hauz Khas Village
I took a slight detour to get here to go into Hauz Khas Village. It’s a small part of South Delhi that is more upscale and it’s a bit more quiet and less crazy that other areas. To get to it you can get off at the metro stop and walk through the rose garden.
Yes, this too is in New Delhi
As you can see this area is pretty quiet. It’s a scenic walk, but unfortunately beside the path is quite a lot of garbage. People seem to discard their rubbish into the bushes.
Hauz Khas was formed around a reservoir. Apparently it used to be a lot larger, but still there is a nice lake that you can walk around.
Traffic
When I got back to the metro station I decided to take a picture of traffic. This station is elevated and so it made it easy to walk across the overpass and take a photo.
So after a nice flight from Munich I arrived in Delhi airport late last night. Even arriving at the late hour of just after midnight immigration was very slow. It took me just over 45 minutes to get through immigration and customs, even though I already had the ETA.
In fact – the line for people with ETA / eVISA was much longer than the line for people that had already got their VISAs in advance. It may be something to consider when you think about how you want to get your VISA. But – all in all – it was a fairly painless process once I got to the immigration officer.
Local Transportation
From the airport I had the hotel pick me up. This is because of the late arrival time and I did not want to have to deal with any touts trying to scam me by telling me that my hotel was closed or abducted by aliens at that late hour. The hotel pickup worked very well and the driver was waiting for me inside the terminal. The only downside is the price.
So today after breakfast I decided to see things that were close to me as I am staying in Connaught Place. I decided to take the metro. You can buy a smart card (similar to Presto in Ontario, Oyster in London, etc) and use this instead of having to line up to buy a token each time. Train are clean and efficient but the stations are quite far apart from each other. This means that at either end you are stuck with walking or taking a rickshaw / taxi / uber.
As you can see, the metro signs seem to be based on the London Underground
The Tomb
Humayun’s Tomb is thought to have inspired the creation of the Taj Mahal (in Agra) and was constructed in the mid-16th century. It has nice gardens around it and you can also walk along the walls of the structure. Its quite relaxing inside, away from the hustle and bustle of the street.
Uber
I decided to take Uber back. For one reason I wanted to try it with a foreign phone number to see if there were any difficulties. For another reason it was just slightly above $1US to get back to the hotel so although it is slightly more than the metro there is not a great deal of difference.
Traffic in New Delhi is chaotic and nobody seems to follow any kind of traffic laws. But that aside it was quite efficient to get back to the hotel.
Roundabouts seem to be quite problematic. There are lanes but drivers seem to think the best place to drive is on top of the white lines.
eVisa …. the easier way to get to India (sort of) Image courtesy of the Government of India
When I first started thinking about a trip to India I started reading quite a bit on the trip advisor forums and other peoples blogs. One thing that came across loud and clear, especially in the past, was how difficult some people were finding it to obtain a VISA.
Who needs a VISA to get into India
Basically everybody is required to have a VISA to enter India. As of October 2019 only 2 countries are allowed to obtain a VISA upon arrival – citizens of Japan and Korea. All other nationalities require a VISA in advance. Some of these citizens need to apply at an India embassy, however many countries can now apply online for an eVISA.
You can apply for an eVISA from 120 days up until 4 days from your expected date of arrival. I can only speak from other posts I have read where people claim they were rejected for applying too early (around the 120 days mark). I consider 4 days to be much too late (although I do tend to be a planner rather than a last minute kind of person) so I decided 60 days seemed to make sense.
Payment
Payment is made in US dollars and they accept VISA and Mastercard. As far as I could tell they do not accept American Express. The actual process of paying with a foreign card was really smooth and I had no issues at all.
The process
Before we start, I want to also give a bit of a warning. I am learning that things change frequently in relation to VISAs in India (and probably most other bureaucratic processes) so this information is valid as of October 2019.
VISAs are supposed to take up to 72 hours to process. VISAs issued online are valid from the time the application is approved. This means if you apply for a one year VISA on November 1st 2019 and it is approved on November 2nd 2019 it will be valid until November 2nd 2020. This is different than some VISAs that are only activated once you first enter the country. For this reason – especially if applying for a 30 days VISA – do not apply too early.
You will need a picture of yourself and a copy of your passport. The picture needs to be in JPG (most camera phones will give you this) and be a maximum of 1MB. This means you may need to use some software on your computer to crop and compress it or the website will not allow you to upload it. The copy of your passport must be in PDF format (most scanners will give you this) and can only be a maximum of 300kb. I find this size to be quite small and you may need to adjust the quality setting on your scanner software to get this to work. I found that my Macbook has a nice tool to compress a PDF (once you find it).
Other than the size constraints, the only other issue I had was the fact that the application asked for all the countries visited in the last 10 years. If you have traveled a lot the form maxes out after 20 countries. I am not sure about the official way to solve this, but I entered the 20 most recent countries.
Conclusion
Overall, except for the interesting maximum sizes of documents, the process is fairly painless and the response seems to be fast – mine was approved within 24 hours.
