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Haridwar India become my official 2nd home as I was stuck there for almost 2 weeks. Every day I walked down to the train station and was told that the trains were all booked, but if I wanted to be put on a waiting list I would have a "50/50 shot" of getting a ticket. After 10 straight days of coming up on the losing end of "50/50", I decided the 50% was an extremely shaky estimate. There were still a couple of other places in India I wanted to see ... Varanasi, which is a famous holy Hindu city famous for it's ghats around the Ganges River where people cremate their loved ones and wash their sins away in the water. Also, Bodhgaya, which is where The Buddha found enlightenment sitting under the Bodhi tree, and where millions of Buddhist pilgrams trek to every year for pilgramage. Both were pratically on the other end of the sub-continent. Then I started doing the equation in my head that all travelers must calculate .... the crap:payoff ratio. How much crap would I have to endure to get to these places, and was the payoff worth it? After 2 weeks of bland, dreary
food to avoid the dreaded "Delhi Belly", the hopelessness of finding a train ticket, the 115 degree heat, the constant deflection of touts (beggers, scammers, commission salesmen who try to seperate Western Tourists from their money), I calculated the ratio for a non-Buddhist and non-Hindu was decidedly unfavorable. A game time decision was made ... let's cut India short and get the next ticket from Delhi to Thailand, where it was possible to sit on a beach with a tropical drink and one of little umbrellas floating in it while staring at a sunset. But first, a stop off to the "must see" of Indian tourists ... Agra, home of the Taj Mahal. Luckily I was close enough to Agra that train travel was unnecessary. Good News: There was a direct bus directly to Agra from Hardiwar. Bad News: It was overnight, 20 hours, non-AC'ed and it made Greyhound Bus Service look like traveling 1st Class on the Queen Victoria. But I pressed on.
I arrived in Agra feeling more than a little haggard and weary. Luckily I booked a hotel and arranged for pick-up, because if India is known for their touts then of course at the biggest
tourist trap in India you're getting the creme-de-la-creme. Many of whom have a very crude but highly effective sales approach of "Let's unwaveringly hassle the Westerner until he's completely worn dow and in exasperation pays us money to leave him alone". Also when you hail a taxi, you're immediately joined in the front seat by an english speaking stranger who let's you know that his services are for hire as a guide. As an added bonus, the guide will take you to a "marble inlay" factory to provide you an educational experience in which you're shown how the original builders of the Taj created such intricate designs in the marble ... in otherwords, a tourist trap where cheap sandstone knick-nacks are called "marble" for naive tourists to buy at 5000% retail. But despite it all, I mostly took it all in stride with a smile on face in a "don't hate the playa, hate the game" mindset. And in the meantime, I did actually see some uniquely Indian sites. Most of which were constructed during the Mughal Empire of Ackbar the Great of the 1600's, which was one of the centrail settings and characters of the latest Salman Rushdie novel
I had read during the Europe leg. Including the mausaleum nicknamed the "Baby Taj" the Agra Fort and the Taj Mahal. Feel free to wikipedia any of them to get a better historyof them than I can retell. The Taj Mahal itself was spectacular if not pretty much what you would expect after looking at the pictures.
Getting to my flight leaving from Delhi was ... believe it or not ... a bit of a hassle. There was a train available, at 6 a.m. that arrived in Delhi at 10 a.m. My flight didn't leave until 1 A.M., and Delhi really isn't a city that you decide to sight see in the middle of June with your large pack on, so I decided to go straight to the airport and patiently wait the next 13 hours out with a book. So two hours before I board Im in the immigration/customs line and an airport security guard tells me he can show me to a quicker line if I give him 500 rupees. I told him Im not going to give an airport security guard money for doing his job ... to which he replied, "Fine ... 100 rupees?" This
was my final and very symbolic human interaction in India.
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anonymous
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Cary, Your Indian subcontinent sojourn sounds amazing. Very Dickensian in its own way. My trek in Nepal was small potatoes compared to this! I did experience the competition for bus seats on my way back to Khatmandu and can empathise with the long bus ride. Uncle Jerry