India Continued: Agra & the Taj Majal

Friday early afternoon two cars worth of us left for Agra – home of the Taj Majal. If you ask any Indian how long it takes to get from Delhi to Agra, all will say “3 hours”. If you press them however, you will find that none have actually done it in less than 5. This is always due to some factor behond their control – “there happened to be a street bazaar when I went, but ‘normally’ it takes 3 hours.” The only problem is that this is India – there is always some crap going on in the road – all the time. Agra is only 200km from Delhi, but it took us the ‘standard’ 5 hours to get there. It’s tough when you have to share the same highway with camels, trucks, rickshaws, cows and every other transportation mode imaginable. Combine this with major intersections having no lights or traffic police and you get an exciting journey.

Josh had made reservations at the Hilton in Agra – of course we didn’t know this until we got there. Most of the week’s information was on a “need to know” basis. I rarely knew what was going on more than about 12 hours or less in advance – even the wedding events. And, it seemed to me, this was because no one knew what was going on with anything until about 12 hours before any event. Once we arrived at the Hilton there was some controversy because our whole group was given the Indian rate, but now we showed up with a bunch of white people who were expected to pay more than double. One of Josh’s friends worked at another Hilton in India and was able to negotiate us back down to the Indian rate $40 (as opposed to $99 for other whiteys). The hotel was nice, but the pool was closed for renovation which sucked. After a quick nap we headed to another hotel – the nicest in Agra ($600/night) – for dinner. We just ordered a bunch of dishes and shared them around the table. After dinner we spent a few minutes admiring the beautiful hotel grounds before heading back to our (now not so illustrious) Hilton. We made plans to meet at the hotel lobby at 8:30am sharp to start our tour of the Taj Majal. As usual, the white people were up at 8:30am but no Indians were to be found. We all took our time eating the free breakfast buffet – still without any of the Indians appearing. Eventually we found out through Liz that Josh had hired someone to give us a tour (this was obviously need-to-know for us only about 3 minutes before we left). The white people all left for the tour while the Indians slept.

Because of pollution concerns, no gas-burning vehicles are allowed near the Taj Majal. This being the case, we pulled into a parking lot away from the Taj and took an electric bus to the Taj entrance. As soon as we arrived in the parking lot and left our van we were accosted by droves of Indians selling various souvenirs of the cheap, crappy variety. The electric bus dropped us off at the one of the entrances to the Taj Majal where we went through a metal detector and were frisked before entering. The Taj Majal is actually part of a relatively large complex consisting of multiple buildings besides just the famous white Taj Majal mausoleum. Our tour guide gave us a good history of the Taj (which you can read about here) and took some pictures of us in front of the building. On the white stone of the Taj itself you are not allowed to wear shoes so we all donned booties to cover our shoes. We wandered around for a bit and took some more pictures. Although there were a lot of tourists there, it didn’t really seem that crowded because the complex was so big. We had no wait to get inside the dome and walk around the tomb.

Next we stopped at a tourist shop where we saw how Indian rugs were woven (and they tried to sell us some). The store also had a couple floors of various clothes and trinkets. The girls bought some stuff, but I had already spent my allotted India budget on suits.

After the store we went a few kilometers up to Agra Fort. The fort was a couple km upriver (downriver?) from the Taj so provided some good views from afar in addition to being an impressive site itself. We were limited in time so we flew through the expansive fort pretty quickly.

We got back to the Hilton early afternoon and we all got back in the vans for the trip back to Delhi. At this point Scott, Michelle and Geno split off from the rest of us to head to Jaipur – another well known town. I needed to head back to Delhi mainly because I needed to pick up my suits the next day as the store was not open on Monday (and I was leaving at 2am Tuesday morning). This was fine as one of Josh’s undergrad friends, Robert, had yet to see any of Delhi (he didn’t arrive until after our Delhi tour) so I said I’d poke around the city with him.

On the way back we stopped at a roadside McDonalds. The McDonalds was actually on the opposite side of a divided highway, but our driver didn’t seem to have too much trouble going down a ways to find a U-turn point and driving on the wrong side of the highway to get back to the McDonalds. I hate to say it, but McDonalds in India are really good! Since cows in India are sacred, McDonalds don’t serve any beef. However, they have a great Paneer Salsa Wrap, a great Veggie burger and several other tasty vegetarian dishes. I would live to see some of those dishes outside of India rather than the same burger fare that has existed forever. Some of the other guys were still sick from the reception two nights previous and had problems eating, but I had no problems at all chowing down both my food and their leftovers.

After another 5 ½ hour drive back we finally made it back to Josh’s place just as the sun was setting (which happens pretty early in Delhi – 7pm or so).

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