Our first trip to India.

Some of you will know we recently went to India to go and visit a new factory and set up production over there. It’s a really exciting opportunity to work with a lovely fair trade factory, which puts a whole lot more than simply employing women who normally wouldn’t be employed in India, back into the community. We’re going to tell you more about them later down in the line in another video. This is more of a general experience video…which mostly involved driving around town in tuktuk’s and rickshaws and freaking the ruck out until we got to grips with the way traffic works in India.
Essentially, you can take everything you learnt about driving in the West and flip it! You know how when you approach a round-about you give way to traffic already on the round-about? No, that’s not how it works in India……it’s the car’s coming towards you responsibility NOT TO HIT YOU……What?!? There were times when we came out of a junction into oncoming traffic. And this was normal. Driving past bikes and scooters with not just someone on the back, whole families with small children (babies) squeezed in. Again. Normal. To cross the road, you just walk slowly, with purpose and the cars drive around you! Apparently this is in part due to the idea that you have a day to die, and when that day comes, it’s your day. So what you do in the lead up to that day sort of doesn’t matter.

During the trip we went to areas of Delhi that aren’t on the tourist trail, so we were a real sideshow, western, white, and bleach blonde. Not to mention reasonably tall. Staring isn’t considered rude over there, so no one felt the need to hide their curiosity, or taking pictures of us.

But that said, we did our fair share of staring. It was amazing seeing 5 people wedged onto a bike, watching someone cycle and deliver huge parcels of newly made clothing across town on their rickshaw, driving around with no seatbelt thinking we might just die.

Here’s an overexcited video of what we got up to and some pictures of the weird and wild things we saw.

LKLx   

 Crazy traffic which makes no sense yet sort of does by the end of your time there.

 Beautiful details on the architecture

 Outside our hotel on the main bazaar, all lit up and making me thing of Vegas

 Yep, that is laundry drying by the side of the road, loads of towels, from a hotel, probably washed in the river, which is super dirty and full of sewage. We prayed it wasn't our hotels towels.

 Delhi is dusty, and smoggy but there's some really lovely bits, despite being so crowed and hectic, there's something so free about it.