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The Taj 'n All

You know when you were a kid and you went on a family vacation and stayed in the first hotel with a pool? Remember that giddy feeling of excitement and trouble-rousin adrenalin that flowed through your veins? Now multiply that by one hundred children and place it on an overnight bus with our lone white guy. I'll get to that in a second.

Last I wrote I had just arrived to India and hadn't really been out much. Sure I had seen enough to know this was going to be a cultural kick to the face, but that can easily be determined from the guest house walk to the internet cafe. It is safe to say I have "gotten out" by this point. My first day I spent in cafes (internet and otherwise) trying to determine what my plan would be. My first step I decided was Taj Mahal, which is a 3 hour train ride from Delhi in a town called Agra.

Agra I learned is an abbreviation for Agra-vate, as in every tourist in sight. One of the first things I wrote was how thankful I was that in this new and different culture people spoke English. I take it all back. I now realize there was a lot of power in the dumb "I don't speaka yer language" routine. That doesn't work in India. Because they speaka your language and speaka to you all over town trying to sell you things. If you mix China with it's bargaining aggression, with the feel of Mexico, the energy of Rome, and loads of cows, let that simmer for a few thousand years, you might pull out something a little bit like India.

One fellow traveler advised I may not want to stay in Agra, just see the Taj and leave. Based on that token, I decided the first thing I would do when I arrived is see if there were some overnight travel options to my next destination. The people are veeeerry "helpful" especially the taxi drivers who are anxious to take you somewhere they are going to receive a commission. And despite the plainest, most clear English I could use, I ended up spending the entire morning and early afternoon going from place to place, rickshaw (sp?) to rickshaw, travel agent to bus station, until FINALLY I found a place that was selling overnight bus tickets.

By this point, having seen the Taj from the distance, I was not super excited for anything other than leaving the lovely Agra. Since my bus did not leave until 9 pm, I had a few hours to kill. First I beat through some street vendors to get to an old fort/mosk. It was nice. The fort was just ok but combined with a vendor-free oasis, overall it was nice. From there I was just one rickshaw and two thousand "No!'s" from the Taj Mahal.

As I mentioned, having seen it from afar, I was kind of prepared for a partial let down for this "Man-Made Wonder of the World". It was amazing.

The Taj was built as a memorial to a man's wife who died. As tradition has it the man's hair turned white overnight out of grief and construction on this wonder began within the year of his wife's passing. Let me tell you this guy must have REALLY loved this girl, not just because the Taj is serenely wonderful, but I also heard he had something like 500 concubines, so he must have thought this one was special. Oh and another fun fact is that he supposedly cut off the hands of all the workers who constructed the Taj so they would never replicate anything as beautiful. The monument is breathtaking, enormous, and made of marble that couldn't have been much cleaner at the time it was constructed. Within a few simple hours, I had almost forgotten the world I just came from. But within a few more hours I would remember.

I got to the bus after getting worked over from a rickshaw driver who increased the price suddenly because it was "night". The bus contained both sleeper cubbies and seats. Naturally, I'm kind of a high roller so I sported the sleeper. With no place for luggage I nestled into a 9 hour spoon session with my backpack. I thought it was tight quarters for me until I started to look around to find entire families packed into a single cubby. All in all I think there were just under 400 passengers on this bus. Alright that's probably an exaggeration, maybe 350. And everyone seemed to get a good laugh out of the lone white guy.

At 8 this morning I arrived to Pushkar and was greeted by the sight of monkeys procreating. Yeah, that Taj was somethin, but eventually we all have to go back to reality. This monkey-loving reality.

posted by Travelin' D @ 9:37 PM