Agra and Khajuraho

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In Delhi now but were going to split the blogs up so this one will be "Agra and Khajuraho" written by me (Jamie), and I'll get Laura to write on Varanasi and our return to Delhi, which to keep you in suspense has the worlds best apple pie, a hair raising tale of running through the small streets of Varanasi past lots of guards with machine guns and a rickshaw driver that almost killed half the population of Varanasi to get us to the station.

Went to Agra, where we saw the Taj Mahal among other things. It was alot like seeing a celebrity because it's such an iconic image. We were worried that it might have been a disappointment because its talked up so much, but it was actually very impressive; worth getting up for sunrise to see it in the best light and without the crowds! In Agra we had a great south indian dish called a 'dosa' which is a rice pancake with different fillings, which was a nice change from the wetter north indian dishes.

We then made our way to Khajuraho to see some ancient Hindu temples famous for their design and their "tantric" sculptures, there weren't many but we found a man being overly friendly with a horse very funny. We had to stay in a town called Jhansi which had nothing in it except the connecting station and ended up paying too much for what was pretty unclean room and run by a creepy man.

We took a 7am train from Jhansi to Khajuraho. The train journey had some great views going through the countryside; the roofs of shacks changed from corrugated iron to a more earthly alloy of stacked discs of sun-dried cow poo and mud mixed. Khajuraho was a nice place, but apart from the very impressive temple complex there wasn't much going for it other than meeting a Swedish girl called Ida and a German couple that we would respectively say goodbye to on at least 4 occasions only to see them in Varanasi train station and later our hostel and then out in Varanasi.

In the train station waiting for the sleeper train from Khajuraho to Varanasi, Ida and ourselves got talking to a man who was from London but had moved to Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam), and from his stories of Vietnam became know to us as "angry man". His stories about how the Vietnamese treat each other (which resulted in an honesty campaign by the govenment with the slogan 'be honest with each other; gouge the foreigners instead"), and some of their more 'insane' habits such as road gridlocks quickly descended into stories such as: the time he punch a mechanic for cutting a hole in his tire; the time he threw a coke can at a lorry for causing a grid lock, and then last but not least the time he may or may not have killed a man in a motor-cycle accident and being told to drive away by the police. Bring on Vietnam? haha.

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