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Published: July 23rd 2005
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Taj Mahal
This is your standard pic that everyone takes... So finally we were on the way to the main reason that we were in India - The Taj Mahal!!! It is located in Agra, a city about 3 hours south of Delhi and we landed in the early afternoon from Jaipur having caught a train very early in the morning. What is amazing about India is that there are always people sleeping everywhere... i mean - station platform floors - there will be hundreds of people stretched out and sleeping soundly on the concrete. I used to think that i had a gift for sleeping but i discovered that it was nothing compared to the general Indian population!
So Agra, again our hotel had picked us up but we were in the most popular tourist destination in India and they were going to milk it for all it was worth - so rather than it being a free service that the hotels use to make us choose their hotel, it was actually about $4 to go the 500 metres from the train station! In india that is really exorbitant!!
Anyway we had been told that the sunset was the best time to see the Taj, not only because
of the beautiful light at that time, but also because the heat of the day is over - hah!! So we slept for a couple of hours and headed out.
we have visited some incredible places on our trip but for some reason the Taj was special. We were lining up get into the Taj and i suddenly caught a glimpse of it and pinched dave ... we both gasped! it was so beautiful and the grounds just add to its beauty. It didn't really matter that there were thousands of people there... it just rose above the people and you caught a glimpse of a golden age of india with colour and riches.
We sat there for a few hours just looking at it and taking hundreds of photos just in case we hadn't got that particular angle! unlike some of the buildings we had seen in India, it is the outside that is the interesting part - the inside is very unspectacular - after all it is just a tomb! It is supposed to the be the most romantic place in the world given that the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahn had built this masterpiece as a
Yet another Taj Mahal
Although this one is by sunset :) tomb for his beloved wife. However i think it was a little too hot to feel too romantic!!
One more interesting point was that i was as big a tourist attraction as the taj for all of the indian tourists!! so many people came up and asked to take a photo of me!! It was quite bizarre!! Nobody wanted pics of Dave though...
Finally we reluctantly turned our backs on the Taj and headed out to dinner - one of the early problems with this was that we had forgotten to bring our lonely planet with us, and if you have ever travelled with them then you know how essential they become!! So we were on our own picking a place to eat! That and the fact that it was pitch black and there was only one restaurant that we could see that actually looked clean! so off we headed to it,... now there are two rules about not getting food poisoning in India - one is that you should always eat at a restaurant that the locals are eating at... and secondly that there should be lots of people in the restaurant ensuring that the food is not sitting around for ages. However as we entered the restaurant we found that neither condition was met! So we decided to only go with drinks - unfortunately dave's legendary love of food got the better of him and so he ordered dinner!! This he was later to regret!
the next day we were supposed to be off to see the agra fort and a deserted city called fatehpru sikhri however Dave's stomach was not very happy with him and so while he vomited i watched the cricket all day on ESPN... thank God for satellite TV!! and we had been doing so well at not getting sick!!
We then headed off to Delhi... for those of you who know me well... you will know that i have a morbid fear of rats and to this point i had done really well at not seeing any... I had heard them at times but it was seeing them that really did me in! Agra train station my luck broke and so i was very very pleased to get onto the train!!
Next stop Delhi...
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hardy
non-member comment
taj
heay Taj is why most of the tourists come to India.I live in delhi but havn't seen it yet. So what other places you saw in India ? Which was your best place in whole India ? what things you liked about India and what you didn't ? It's intresting when foreigners describe India. Anyway I like photography too and have a pic site at fotopic.net having 6 albums.I am going to upload seventh album of some lakes,river and mountains pics soon from a place called Manali in North India(have you been there yet ? ).And dont't forget to check out the Delhi's Winter Sun album. Soon I will put some pics from delhi worth seeing. here is the link :- http://hardsphotos.fotopic.net/ -hardy(hardrock_113@yahoo.com)