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A crude map of my route through India "A teardrop on the face of eternity," "The embodiment of all things pure," and my personal and own-made favourite: "it's big, it's white, to see it's a delight, woo yeh." Can you guess what it is yet?
As you would expect, no amount of photos, TV shows or even replica tacky jigsaw puzzles can live up to greeting the Taj Mahal in person. It's beautiful, it's stunning, it's an architectural masterpiece and it's quite big too. As for Agra? Well, that's a different matter. It's the filthiest place I've been to in India; streets full of rubbish that's only chance of being cleared is when the monsoon rains come, someone decides to burn it, or a cow is particularly hungry, and a constant sulphurous smell of sewage lingers in the air. Extreme poverty is everywhere too - from the limbless beggars to the edge-of-city slums. Although one can find poverty everywhere in India, it's so much more obvious in the big cities and its images so much more depressing.
However, it's also a place full of life, and activities as a Westerner I'm unaccustomed to seeing, and so it was interesting and harrowing, hiring a bike for
a day, braving the bad roads, bad drivers, fumes and cows, not seeing a single Lonely Planet 'sight', but instead cycling wherever the roads took me; through bazaars and slums, and past parks and riverbanks aligned with cloth and dye factories. This was made all the more fun when my bike decided to humour me with a puncture 7km from the shop.
Obviously, it's safe to say I also visited and took just a few photos of the Taj from slightly different angles as slightly different times. For example, I found a boatman to take me across the Yamuna River, where the Taj's backside is arguably more stunning than its front. With buffalo swimming in the polluted black river, kids playing on the littered banks, and poor, hopeful fishermen dotted around to the backdrop of its majesty, these are images I won't forget in a while for their poignancy.
I went inside the gates once too, once being enough when it costs a whopping 750Rs, my daily budget, for a one-time entry ticket (unless you are Indian, in which case 20Rs will do), in time for sunset. Unfortunately, as with my entire stay in Agra, the one time
I ask for a clear sky and it's been cloudy, so the only colour I ever saw the Taj was white, whether it was sunrise, midday or sunset. I guess I'll just have to come back, won't I?
School time, so humour me: completed in 1653 with the help of 20,000 people, it's a monument simply built for love, and the largest on our Planet Earth, from Emperor Shah Jahan to his 2nd wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died giving birth to their 14th child. The marble inlay is unique and made with 1000s of semiprecious stones (yet the entire building in today's money still cost only one twentieth of the Millennium Dome - hmm), it's been built on a raised platform so the backdrop is always of the sky, and the four turrets have even been ingeniously designed to lean outwards, so in the event of an earthquake they will fall away from the Taj. Soemthing with brains as well as beauty!
Before I forget, I should briefly mention that before Agra, I stopped in my final Rajasthani town, Pushkar, arriving upper class by bus...travelling on the rooftop at night was a cool experience if I ignore the
various tree branches whacking my neck. Unlike Agra, it's a small, clean, tranquil place, but with the usual excess of touts, yet the sort of place that Lonely Planet would rave about.
Lonely Planet raves about this place, which surrounds a small holy lake with many ghats including one where Mahatma Ghandi's ashes were scattered. Once again, it was too hot to do much, so I climbed a hill, swam lots (yep, another hotel pool - you can never have too much of a good thing I say), and was blessed by a fake priest.
Sitting by the ghats, I was given a flower by a stranger, who I thanked before he walked away thinking that was the end of it. But 5 minutes later, he was back with petals, rice and enough powder paint to make Picasso jealous, painting my face with the standard red dot between the eyes, while getting me to chant hindi (badly), and throw lake water over my head. I'm under the impression I also blessed my parents, Caroline and a few friends before the man said "to bless these people, you must donate money. Most Indians give $5. What will you give?"
I think he might be telling me an itsy bitsy white lie there, so I thanked him and left, walking through the streets forgetting my face now looked like the Japanese flag.
With a sleeper bus to Agra making me feel like I'm on a rock band tour, and an empty train to Delhi which was an unexpected surprise, my intercity travel days in India have come to a harmless end. I've given myself over 4 days in Delhi, as I figure with a population of 12.5million, it's worthy of some decent exploration time - that and I have some Hollywood blockbusters to catch up on having missed cinemas for 2 months, but don't tell anyone I said that. I also ventured into an old Bollywood cinema, but the film was the worst thing ever. For a start, it wasn't Bollywood, but some cheap, tacky, appaling Spanish film, and so old, the reels (some of which, incidentally, were missing) had more lines and marks on them that they nearly hid the film beneath. Though, I think the lines were more interesting to watch than the film anyway.
The first thing that strikes me about Delhi, is it's not
Another Delhi street
...there's many streets in Delhi....in the slightest what I expected. I was preparing myself for a stereotyped, crazier version of Manila - poverty everywhere, traffic jams and fumes, touts and salesmen of all kinds, a complete noisy, manic mess. Instead, I've been dished up a city full of parks, Lacoste shops, tree-lined modern highways used by expensive cars (though around 70% of them I estimate, have dents in them), by far the best underground Metro of any city I've ever had the pleasure of visiting (seriously; you're even forewarned on which side of the train the next platform will be), and a widely spoken elite English culture.
Of course, it's still dirty, rickshaw traffic is hectic, nearly every building needs renovating and there's much poverty, but no where near to the scale I was expecting. It's efficient, well-structured, and very much a modern metropolis. Maybe I just haven't gone to the 'right' places, though the train journey in dissected right through sickening slums highlighting that there's much much still to do. Nevertheless, India is definitely getting there, wherever 'there' may be, and a fitting place to end my month in India, and spicy food.
One of the highlight was having a fanta
Spices from the spice bazaar
makes more sense than finding spices in a cloth bazaar.. and a bowl of chips, not for the tastebuds, but as an excuse to sit at the window of the revolving Parikrama restaurant, resembling the CN Tower's (well, on the inside at least), 24 floors up in the New Delhi district of Connaught Place. I managed to stay for a full 90 minute revolution by cheekily leaving 3 chips and an inch of fanta on the table, much to the amusement of the waiters.
The views gave a good bearing of the surrounding area: of the circular modern shopping district of Connaught Place, south to the important political centre with the President's house (which is so large that during British rule, it employed over 400 gardeners alone, 50 just to chase away birds!) and India Gate connected by 'Rajpath', a broad, tree and water-lined avenue, host to the annual Republic Day parade and where I'm sitting now, writing much of this (while admiring a gigantic alien ant I've trapped in a bottle lid). Further north, there's Pahargarj, the tourist enclave resembling yet another Khao San Road (but this time longer, narrower, dingier, more enticing and what Khao San Rd would look like if left untouched for 100 years), and
then eastwards to the Old City full of wonderfully varied bazaars, India's largest Mosque aaaaand another fort, where I nodded off while watching an evening sound and light show with surround sound that even Roger Waters would've been proud of.
And that about concludes my stint in magical India. Not much specifically happened in Delhi, just my usual wanderings. I figure if I stayed in India longer I would have to undertake some project to get to meet more of the friendly people, and break up the monotonous schedule of a)seeing fort, then b)explore rest of town, that I seemed to have for much of the latter half of my journey. That aside, like most places, I urge everyone to come here, even if it's just to understand how different and varied the world really is. Seeing the level of poverty and inherent problems is an education in itself, with local political issues always fighting for space in the newspapers.
I was shouted at, grabbed, lied to, hassled, driven over, cheated, stared out, burnt and poisoned. But who cares about all that, ey?! It's an amazing country, with the most open people of any culture I've yet visited,
and if you bare with it through the inevitable stressful moments, you'll really appreciate it for what it is - a crazy melting pot, a bewildering mix of experiences, a million things, and none of them like home.
Today I fly to East Africa. It's as if all my skills and experiences have been building up to challenge and test me in these final 2 months - the security, public transport, costs. I won't say it'll be easy, but there should be a few stories to tell to you........
Byeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
xx
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J-P
non-member comment
Into Africa...
Good Luck Simon, (yes, it's a good luck with captials...gettin' serious :) ) hope Africa lives up to India and when you get home we'll be ready to horrify you with our decadent western ways once more. All the best, J-P