Agra do do do, push pineapple, shake the tree…

---

We left a dark Amritsar the next morning, heading for Delhi where we had a whole 20 minutes between arriving and our connecting train south to Agra and tourist attraction #3 the Taj Mahal.

It’s one that you can’t come to India and miss ….. unless you’re Geoff that is and it takes 4 trips here before you actually see it. Anyway the train was late into Delhi, but with a superhuman sprint between the many platforms and weaving through the billion other people also travelling by train we made our connection. On arriving in Agra we got ourselves a room after the usual hassle with the rickshaw-wallas, crashed out for a few hours and then went for a walk to check out the neighbourhood.

We were surprised to find how poor and run-down the streets were right alongside such a magnificent and world renown building , it is like having a council estate next to Buckingham Palace - but that’s India. It was too late to get in the Taj that night, so we decided to sneak around the back to have a look. On our wanderings we came across a path around the outer perimeter, guarded by a man with a big stick. We walked towards him a little timidly, but he pointed to a rough path where we could climb on to a high wall and look over at the Palace.

Feeling pleased with ourselves we slipped him a few Rupees and he then directed us through the gate he appeared to be ‘guarding’ towards what he delightfully described as the ‘Taj backside’. A few minutes later, we arrived at the Taj’s backside and an appropriately dirty river. Ignoring the sludgy, rubbish filled backdrop, the view was great and after this we were unsure whether we needed to actually pay the £10 each to get in.

As with many such attractions, the ‘well now we are here’ factor came into play and we were up again at 6AM the next day to catch the sun rise inside the famous palace.
We took some of the standard pictures, but it feels like every shot has been done before and that you might just as well buy a postcard or not bother at all! Having said that I think Geoff managed to get a few interesting shots and looking closely at the marble inlay work it is an amazing bit of architecture. It was also built on a slight hill so that every which way you looked at it, you would only ever see sky behind.


Not to miss an opportunity to bag another attraction we went on to Agra fort, another huge construction and we only saw a third of it which is open to the public. It had all sorts of water cooling systems, with different sections used by the various Maharaja’s courts and in very democratic gesture there used to be a solid gold chain that went down the side of the battlements, that anybody in the town could ring in order to complain to the king or tell him about any corruption - I think it’s probably not there now because it wore out!


After a long day we watched the sun go down over the fort and then took a horse and cart home (not as relaxing as it sounds in the rush hour traffic!)

---