Delhi -> Nawalgarh – At 100 km/h there are new astonished eyes

5. January 2026

 

 

I used one day in Delhi to look at hotels. I don’t really like doing that, and it’s genuinely hard to find something good. On another day I went to visit friends who live very far away, yet still well within the boundaries of Delhi. That really makes you aware of the sheer size of the city once again. I covered three stretches by motorbike taxi. That’s practical because it’s much easier to weave through the traffic, so it’s faster and also cheaper than a car taxi. But it was cold. Brrrrrr!

 

In between, I also walked quite a bit – at least while looking at hotels. And I hardly took any photos at all.

 

 

And then I had cheesecake in a nice little café that a man had opened after spending a long time abroad, and during another meal food was being distributed outside. I don’t know, though, whether it was for people in need or for people working nearby as day laborers or something like that.

 

 

 

I quite like traveling by train in India – and for a few years now there has been the new super-duper Vande Bharat train, which I still hadn’t experienced. Some people praised it as “just like in Germany,” others found it overrated. It doesn’t run on all routes, so I chose one in Rajasthan that I hadn’t visited very often: Shekhawati.

 

We started from Delhi Cantt, a railway station completely under renovation. The next one, Gurgaon, was also a construction site. India clearly seems to be aiming for a whole new level of railway stations.

 

 

I entered with other people.

 

 

The train was fully booked and turned out to be a real surprise: seats like back home (just arranged differently), quite clean, and a toilet with vacuum flushing.

 

 

 

 

We left Delhi via Gurgaon, and there was quite a lot to see along the way:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can clearly see where India wants to go. But it seems to me that it often gets in its own way. When we travelled to Agra, we took the Gatimaan Express—which, some time ago, was “the latest thing” in rail travel—and today it feels just as run-down as most other trains. So my first Vande Bharat experience was definitely positive, but I also noticed that I felt a bit sceptical about the future.

 

At least we were often travelling at around 100 km/h and the ride was quite smooth. Then it got dark, and after 4.5 hours I arrived in Churu with a 10-minute delay. It’s a larger town in the Shekhawati region, but I couldn’t find any decent accommodation to book in advance. So I kept looking and eventually found something in Nawalgarh.

 

A taxi driver picked me up at the station, and it wasn’t all that easy to find each other because this station, too, was undergoing major reconstruction. As part of that, traffic was being diverted all over the place and the road wasn’t new at all but the bumpiest track of my trip so far. Luckily it didn’t last long. Then we drove through the night and I arrived — and realised that it was even colder than in Delhi. Damn! I’d packed wrong; my down jacket would have been perfect…..

 

 

 

I hadn’t been to Nawalgarh for a long time — in fact, only once on my own to explore and once with a group. And I didn’t know the surrounding area at all. So I stayed for a few days, froze, and saw new things that, among other things, really surprised me.