No Agro in Agra
Trip Start
Jul 05, 2009
1
43
96
Trip End
Jul 04, 2010
Agra, Uttar Pradesh, India
Friday, November 27, 2009
Our alarms sounded at five o'clock in the AM, and I struggled to persuade Finola to get out of bed so that we could get down to the Taj Mahal in time for Sunrise. She did get up, eventually, and we queued for tickets and entry with all the other sunrise tourists, until the gates were finally opened and our entry was granted, once the sun had firmly asserted it's place in the sky.
We made our way into the palace grounds, and snapped ourselves a load of photos of what I can honestly say it is the best Mahal I've ever seen. We wondered around and looked at it from all angles, and then wondered around intside the mausoleum itself. Yessir, what a Mahal! It felt strange seeing something that we've seen a million times in books and on TVs, for real. It's incredibly iconic, as you probably know, and incredibly beautiful, but it's only a Mahal after all, and we can't say that it's the best thing we've ever seen, nor the most affecting. It was covered with busy tourists, and did much less for us than the deserted step-wells had, back in Ahmedabad, or the lonely Cenotaphs outside of Udaipur. I think we must just prefer visiting attractions when they're quiet, and it now being the beginning of high season in India, this popular Mahal was always going to be busy.
The cold morning air drove us back to our hotel room and to the warmth of our beds. We slept for a couple of hours before rushing our packing and checking out of our room. We sat in the hotel restaurant, eating their relatively expensive nosh, discussing what to do next. We had no intention of spending any time in Agra, having heard from Beth and Jon that the town itself was a dump. We were both tired and frustrated, not fully recovered from the effects of Pushkar. Two weeks in India had been two weeks of fast-paced dashing from town to city, never properly unpacking, no hot water, no time to rest and relax what with all the sites we were rushing to absorb before rushing off to absorb something else, six hours and another, rushed world away... left us feeling that we needed a holiday (again). We reevaluated our plan, and decided against the twelve-hour train/bus journey to Varanasi, electing instead to head to Delhi, where we would seek some luxury. We found the number of a five-star hotel, and booked a room, then headed to the disgusting, dirty Agra bus-station to catch a bus that would take us somewhere nice.
