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Published: January 9th 2008
(Matt)
We were scheduled to arrive in Agra on Thursday evening and planned to see the Taj Mahal at sunrise on the Friday. The slight problem with this plan was that the Taj (as the locals call it) is closed on Fridays. Thank goodness Catherine spotted this a few days earlier and we managed a manic bit of re-planning. If it was down to me we would have been standing outside the closed doors at 6am on the Friday!
The 'Taj' is exactly as you would imagine it and have seen on TV and in pictures. There is no doubt that it is a beautiful building. Here are some fast facts: It is identical on all four sides, it costs about 12 pounds to get in (25p if you're Indian!) and you have to take your shoes off to walk up to the main building. I overlooked this last point when I was rushing to take photos at 6am, I wondered why Catherine kept waving at me from a distance!
On day two we arranged to go to The Agra Bear Sanctuary which is dedicated to the rescue and rehabillitation of suffering bears. If someone had said 'dancing bear'
to me before we'd been to Agra I would have said 'bring it on'! Now I wouldn't.
Dancing Sloth bears have for generations been used by Kalander Nomads to make money (from tourists and locals), the problem with this is that the bear cubs are torn from their mothers (the mother is often killed) and the poached bear is then subjected to a lifetime of pain and fear in order to be taught how to dance.
After about five phone calls and lots of arranging with taxi drivers and Vets, the two of us finally arrived in the middle of a national park at the gates to the Bear Sanctuary. We were greeted by about four army types with guns guarding a huge pair of sliding gates. After completing the endless forms and paperwork the chief guard said the almost cinematic line:
'the Doctor is on his way to collect you'. We spent a few hours seeing and learning about the work that goes on at the Sanctuary and meeting the passionate staff who work there. It really is an amazing project, that actually seems to be working. We will definitely be giving a donation to help continue
the work. More details can be found here:
http://www.wildlifesos.org/index.htm
(Catherine)
After Agra we took another overnight train to Varanasi to see the ghats on the Ganges. Apparently you can't visit without taking a dawn boat trip along the river so on our first morning we were up at 5.30am to do just that. Typically things got a lot more interesting a little bit later when the sun came up so we could have had an extra hour in bed!
Seeing the daily routines that take place along that stretch of the Ganges was fascinating. There were people washing their hair, doing laundry, swimming and cleaning their teeth - the river is so sacred to Indians they don't seem to mind the fact it's so polluted it's actually septic! We both dipped a hand into the water so we can say we've touched it, but we made sure we used lots of antibacterial handwash afterwards!
We were only supposed to stay in Varanasi for two days but unfortunately Matt got really bad food poisoning on our last day so we ended up checking into a decent hotel while he recovered! Instead of spending New Year's Eve
in Kathmandu as we had planned, we were both tucked up in bed by 9.30am wearing earplugs to drown out the noise coming from the hotel's NYE party! We've used our extensive detective skills to trace the culprit back to some eggs we'd had for breakfast. Matt had two fried eggs so was very ill, very quickly and I had French toast so was only a little bit ill, a little bit later! After three days of water and plain food, we were both well enough to make the two-day overland journey to Kathmandu, Nepal.
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