The Wandering Chocoholic

New Delhi, India

Greetings from New Delhi, where the money is scarce. the horns don’t stop honking, and the food is delicious.

Cash crisis, day 2

We woke up this morning to the news that the ATMs had not opened overnight as promised. Re-stocking so many machines across the country with new cash is a logistical nightmare, and we were told that it could be days or even weeks before machines started dispensing cash again.

The ongoing currency crisis has brought the country to a standstill. Businesses were mostly shut today, as people spent all day lining up at banks rather than going to work. Everywhere we walked, anytime we saw a crowded queue of people, we knew there was a bank branch ahead. People line up here stuck together glued back to front, pressed into packs, for hours in the hot sun. And they cut in line shamelessly, but angry mobs also set upon anyone who seems to be jumping the queue. As the crisis wears on each day, you can tell that people are getting more and more desperate, and the anger level is rising.

It occurred to me that if this had happened in Canada, it probably wouldn’t have been that big a deal. I mean, most of us live our daily lives with plastic; we rarely spend cash, and can survive for a long time without it. A credit or debit card system outage would wreak a lot more havoc than a cash shortage. But India is different; a good percentage of this country’s 1.2 billion people rely exclusively on cash for their lives and livelihoods. And in one fell swoop, the country cut off access to anything bigger than an 100-rupee note, which is worth about a toonie. The situation is dire, so I understand the stress levels we’re seeing everywhere. It’s useful to keep some perspective that this is merely an inconvenience for us tourists, albeit a fairly big one, but it’s much more serious for most of the people standing in those lines.

Regardless, we needed to sort something out for cash. Our tour company still hadn’t sent any representatives to help out, so we asked for advice from the rep of another tour company who had been in the hotel lobby a lot. He suggested that we take the small amount of rupees that Chris had in old notes to the bank along with our passports and completed exchange forms, and queue up. So we set out early, around 8am, to try to secure a spot near the front of the line. The bank, we were told, would be opening around 9:30. We got a space maybe thirty people from the front, and stood there holding the place as best we can.

As time wore on, it got more and more crowded, and the anger levels started to rise. At one point an employee came out to distribute some exchange forms (we’d gotten ours in the hotel) and he was mobbed by a crowd. We asked a woman behind us to translate; she said there was a shortage of forms! Yep, only in India. Eventually around 10am, a bank employee came out to the front steps and said something, and I tried to approach to hear what was going on. Bad timing, because apparently what he’d said was that the bank didn’t have any cash today. The crowd chose that moment to rush forward to mob the employee in anger, and I got somewhat crushed in the mass. I got out by screaming loudly enough to scare people (angry western chick, stay back) and Chris and I hightailed it out of there, still cashless and somewhat shaken.

As it turned out, if we’d stuck it out another half hour in line, we would’ve been able to exchange some money. We found this out later from a couple of Australian girls from another tour who’d been in line with us. Really frustrating. But as it was, we headed back to the hotel, defeated a second day in a row.

Finally seeing some sights

With only a half-day remaining in Delhi out of our initial two days, we all felt like it would be a shame to waste it. Without any money to go sightseeing, we worked out a plan. The other tour company was able to organize guided half-day tours, which could be paid for by credit card online through their international website. We arranged for a guided tour of Old Delhi, the markets and bazaars. It was quite a bit more expensive than we would’ve paid to do it locally, but honestly? Totally worth it! Not only was the guide fantastic, taking us to all sorts of places we would never have found on our own, but he also paid for all our cash expenses along the way on our behalf.

We got on the crowded metro and headed up to Chandi Chowk, in the Old City. The metro is modern and efficient, and the crowds weren’t terrible today — probably because so many people weren’t working due to the currency crisis. We visited the Chai Bazaar, the various food markets, the Jama Masjid Mosque, the Sikh Temple, the silk market, and spice market. We sampled about twelve different kinds of snacks, we took a rickshaw, and we even saw monkeys. Yeah, okay, they’re trained thief monkeys, but still.

So I didn’t get to see as much in Delhi as I might have liked. But all of us were feeling in much better spirits after that afternoon. It was great to finally be sightseeing as opposed to simply trying to work out logistics or sitting around the hotel complaining about the money situation. I finally felt like I was truly travelling.

Official start to the tour

The seven of us got back to the hotel around 6ish, just in time for our welcome meeting. We met our guide and the rest of the members of the tour, reviewed the itinerary, and tried to talk through the cash problem. The upshot is: Nobody can get cash, not even the tour leader. But we’re going to try to make the best of it. Where possible, they’ll take us to places that accept credit, which will invariably be more expensive but who cares, as long as we can eat? And the tour leader promised to do his best to scare up enough cash to get us into the main sights and attractions. One way or the other, I’m going to see the Taj Mahal on this trip.

We went for dinner at a nearby restaurant to wind down the evening. Tomorrow is an early morning departure for Jaipur. Will we make it without cash? Stay tuned for the next installment.