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Published: February 27th 2007
So for the last final handful of days in our year long trip we completed India’s golden triangle. Our first stop was Jaipur in Rajasthan. Known as the Pink City, not because it is the Indian equivalent of Brighton or San Francisco but because the centre of the city was painted rose pink to welcome the visit of Queen Victoria's husband Prince Albert. The streets were wide and lined with loads of shops, mostly selling beautiful hand-made kites (we were there a few days before the international kite festival). Unfortunately for a number of reasons we were in no real mood to see the world famous City Palace, criminal I know. We will have to visit the Hall of Private Audience another time. Instead we were feeling a little travel weary, unhappy that our time away was nearly ending, and to cap it all we had a run in with a lady at an internet café who managed to wipe all our camel pictures from Jaisalmer instead of copying them onto CD. After two hours of trying we managed to retrieve them from her machine, only to find that the memory card on Tom’s camera was so riddled with her bugs
Tom & Taj 2
sorry I can't decide which is the best photo...that it now fails to work. Add in the usual Indian street hassles of haggling with rickshaws and dodging traffic - it was time to murder a beer at one of the only English style venues in town, the Geoffrey’s Pub in the Hotel Park Plaza.
In the midst of this frustration and disappointment (sorry I’m labouring the point - it’s not Jaipur’s fault everyone has a bad day sometimes, such is life) it was amazing to have a look at one of the oldest and largest working astronomical observatories in the world. Shown round by a lovely fella who was learning French at uni (only chance he got of practising the language was to French tourists), Jantar Mantar is a unique collection of giant astronomical instruments which from a distance look more like some sort of 1960s concrete skate park. Built by Jai Singh between 1728 and 1734, purely by using the shadow of the sun, times and dates are accurately measured and at night clever brass instruments which cast a shadow help onlookers identify the position and movement of stars and planets, tell the time and predict the intensity of the monsoon. Furthermore people’s star signs are
recorded at birth using these two enormous marble bowels sat in the ground. This information is then later used to match up a suitable bride or make other decisions such as whether to invade a country, try a new job or eat that final slice of pizza. To top it all was the largest sundial in the world. This 27 metre monstrosity was accurate to within 2 seconds. Strange to watch the sun move along its curved surface as fast as the ticking hands of a watch.
I don’t mean to sound like a moaner - there was nothing wrong with our room or surroundings or anything - but to finish our time in Jaipur we witnessed quite possibly the slowest ever service in a hotel restaurant ever, and after lengthy negotiations with the hotel management, quite possibly the meanest packed breakfast ever (one round of grated cheese sandwiches sans crust) - you have to laugh…
Finally we reached Agra, home of the Taj Mahal and the penultimate stop on our journey. As we had anticipated the city of Agra is generally pretty horrid and after all the horror stories written in the Rough Guide - that everyone
is out to scam you, all the rickshaw drivers lie to you and the cafés in the backpacker area have been known to deliberately poison people, send them off to a ‘doctor’ they know, pretend to perform a hugely costly medical procedure and then start collecting the money from your travel insurance company hmmmm nice - we stayed in the one place that sounded budget but nice. This was called ‘Sheela’ and although the rooms were very basic, and the hot water comes in a bucket it was a nice little place with motel type rooms around a garden.
But of course we were not here to look at the garden because just beyond the walls of our hostel was a little place called the Taj Mahal which someone had said we should probably take a look at. So one morning at 5am we stumbled across to the eastern gates in the dark to watch the sunrise over the most famous building in the world. In fact the sun rises from behind you when you are looking at the Taj but it is incredible to see this. It is incredible how 2D the building looks from the far end
of the garden when you first spot it - and lets be honest you can’t really miss it - in fact it looks exactly like it does on the post cards, and every other one of the many many times that the Taj is used to advertise India. And do you know what? It doesn’t just look exactly like it does in the pictures, in fact it looks better and as the sun continues to rise and different parts of the Taj are illuminated by the sun then the building suddenly becomes animated. The building changes from a flat, 2-D structure, to an increasingly warm creamy white structure, 3-D with curves and ever-changing shadows. The four minarets play games with your eyes, changing their heights and perfecting the sense of grandeur, scale and proportion.
We couldn’t afford a guide but by using the old trick of standing next to tour groups we managed to pick up some really interesting information about the Taj - who and why it was built - and saw a man demonstrating how the precious stones glow when light is shone on them. This is a truly magical building with some amazing attention to detail.
Less familiar than the main building are the mosque and the replica building opposite. On their own they are stunning buildings, but together they cleverly frame the Taj and are made out of another familiar Mughal building material, the red sandstone which is also used in the Agra and Delhi Forts. Whilst obviously magnificent buildings in their own right, it is here that it is most obvious that the building is in a terrible state of repair. The birds roosting in the dome and the bird poo all over the floor along with the missing stones and crumbling carvings are really quite a depressing sight. In fact this level of deterioration shouldn’t really be happening since the Agra government upped the entry fee from 25 to 700 rupees some time ago. Whilst there should of course be an entry fee and 25 rps was ludicrously low, however it is pretty obvious that the money that is made through the entrance fees is not being spent on maintaining the building, which is a shame. The waters of the adjacent River Yamuna are supposed to be an integral part of keeping the Taj’s foundations ‘afloat’. However with too much water abstraction and
little management of the building over the years, the great Taj could topple over at any moment. Mmmmmm though it could be worse. In the time of the Raj, only after much local protest, did the British decide against dismantling the Taj and selling its valuable marble to the highest bidder!
…Be it a lasting legacy of love to Shah Jahan and his wife Mumtaz or a monument to Shah Jahan’s massive ego (also did he die locked up by his son in Agra Fort or rather from excess drink and women?!), we chilled out in the gardens for a couple of hours, warming ourselves in the sun and watching the ever-changing Taj as the tour crowds from Delhi started to pile in.
What else is there to say about Agra? Not a great deal, we walked past Agra Fort and had a nice time shopping for souvenirs in the bazaars around the Jami Masjid Mosque and the local backstreets near our hotel. Did some pretty good haggling in the end, finally after six months of practicing it looks like we have cracked it!
Other than that, it was our final train of the trip to our
final destination of the trip. Delhi was a good place to pick up some more gifts and we stayed in the relative luxury of the Adjanta hotel in Ram Nagar, while comically the hotel next door where we stayed two weeks before was still under serious renovation and still didn’t have a building frontage/front door.
That’s India for you. I will miss it. The chaos, the dirt, the poverty, the noise, the scary driving, incomprehensible bureaucracy - the genuinely friendly people, places bursting with colour, history and intrigue, the amazing food, the gorgeous beaches, the beautiful buildings, cows and camels. Don’t worry I will be back, there’s far too much left of India - let alone the world - to explore.
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