Advertisement
Published: December 30th 2007
Our friend Genevieve (Gen) is visiting from Portland, Oregon, USA, for Christmas and the New Year.
On Saturday the three of us headed south about 120 miles for our first visit to the Taj Mahal. We hired a driver from a travel agent since our driver Sonu is in Punjab for his cousin's wedding this weekend. It took 5 hours to travel 120 miles, because the roads are crazy! Well the roads are actually okay, but the drivers are crazy.
As I have mentioned before, nobody drives inside their lane, so I am not sure why they paint lines in the roads. Instead of driving inside their lanes they use their horns constantly to announce their presence to each other. If you hear a horn on your right rear flank, you better not turn right quickly or you will run into another car that may be inches from your right rear fender. In that case, it is okay to slowly move right since they can see you within their field of vision. As they see you moving over slowly, they have time to break as you slide in, in front of them.
So as you drive down the
road, you have cars, buses, trucks, motorcycles, and tuktuks all around you; each inches away from you and honking their horns announcing their presence. As you drive down the freeway at 50 miles per hour, each is honking and sliding around slowly giving others time to break before they run into them. Then, every few minutes, a few cows, a few sheep, or a few pigs wonder out onto the freeway, and everyone slams on the breaks until the animals get out of the way.
Sometimes you find yourself surrounded by 20 or thirty animals traveling at 2 miles per hour. The honking and breaking is scary when you first arrive in India. But, after 10 months living here, we actually fall asleep on long drives. We slept most of the way there. Make fun of the driving here if you like, but you will see more car wrecks in the USA.
The Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal in honor of his third wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died during the birth of their fourteenth child, Gauhara Begum. She had fourteen children in 11 years and then died giving birth to the 14th. Jeez Jahan, give a girl a
rest. Soon after the Taj Mahal's completion in about 1643, the Shah Jahan's son Aurangzeb deposed Jahan and put him under house arrest at the nearby Agra Fort. Jahan spent the remainder of his days locked away gazing at the Taj from three windows in his prison cell, until he died. His son buried him in the Taj Mahal next to his wife Mumtaz. Historians call it a great love story, but it sounds like screwing your wife to death and then being locked-up by your son, if you ask me. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taj_Mahal)
Legend holds that Jahan had the worker's hands cut off after the Taj was complete so it could not be duplicated. This is according to my driver Sonu who insists that this is undisputed. But the guide at the Taj said that this legend is well known, but simply not true.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.046s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 10; qc: 19; dbt: 0.0234s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
kuldip singh
non-member comment
our driver sonu
hi i also used to be driver in delhi and manali.my nickname also sonu and i think i know this driver sonu.is this driver sonu whose face has burnt?