The one where I take a lot of photos of the Taj Mahal

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As I mentioned in the last blog, it snowed all the last day I was at SECMOL, the NGO near Leh. I eventually got into town and spent the night in a freezing cold little room with no hot water. My flight was scheduled to leave at 09:00 the next morning, and as I tried to leave at about 07:00 I found out that the owner’s wife had apparently not told him that I wanted his taxi services to the airport. Since his car was therefore parked deep under snow he was unable to get it out. I walked up the street to find a taxi that wasn’t buried in snow, and walked past a few Indians (as in, non-Ladakhis) getting into a taxi. I asked if they were going to the airport. “Sure, hop in” they said.

“Where are you from?” asked one of them
“Australia”
“Oh, I’m Christian too.”
“Ah. And where are you from?”
I didn’t catch his reply. “I’m not sure where that is.” I said.
“It’s in the far east of India”
“Ah, near Assam, east of Bangladesh?”
“Yes, near Assam. You know it very well.” he said.
A bit later I asked him again what the name of the state was. This time I heard it was Nagaland.
“Ah,” I said “so when you say you’re Christian, you’re Baptist?”
He was. Nagaland has more Baptists per capita than any other state in the world, more Baptists than Mississippi. I don’t know why.

Anyway, I got to the airport and after waiting about six hours, getting two boarding passes, going through two or three different levels of security (they have some weird system where you have to “identify your bag” as it’s being loaded onto the plane) and so on, I finally got into Delhi in the evening. I think the planes had been cancelled the previous day because of the snow and so they were a bit confused about what was going on. I was surprised that they finished shovelling the snow off the runway with shovels, as the snow only stopped about noon.

On arriving back in Delhi, I thought I’d ignore the signs advising that one should only take taxis one booked through the desk in the airport, and take a cheaper auto. I found one quickly and asked how much to get to Paharganj. “250” he told me. “OK” I said. I’m not one to try to bargain too much in situations like this, I think it leads to situations where they automatically begin with stupid prices, which is just annoying and also difficult for new visitors to the area. Two hundred rupees seemed fair to me since I’d been asked to pay one hundred for a trip between neighbouring suburbs, and this was in from the International Airport (yes,for a domestic flight). Soon after we got out of the airport he turned on the meter. Auto drivers never use the meters (at least not with foreigners)!

He started talking about roadworks and how he’d have to go a longer route. “It will be, say, 400” he said. The roadworks weren’t extensive and he clearly knew about them beforehand. I complained. He switched the meter off again. I said I was happy to go with what’s on the meter (knowing that it would be probably even less than 250). “Meter not working” he told me. I asked why he turned it on and then off again if it wasn’t working, and why it appeared to be working. He didn’t answer.

I told him to let me off. He started bargaining but I told him that I wasn’t going to go anywhere with someone who tries to cheat tourists. After a lot of “maximum sorry” and offers as low as 150, he finally stopped (because I would have otherwise got out at the next traffic light anyway) and left. The thing is if he’d asked for 400 at the beginning I’d have been OK with it, but I think we need to stand up against people trying to rip tourists off. Currently in India the touts hassle foreigners heaps but don’t generally have as sophisticated scams as in SE Asia, but it’s still annoying and it’s not something that should start, given they have enough trouble attracting tourists as it is. So I found myself on the edge of a major arterial with no idea where I was, but I shouldn’t have worried, within three minutes, two autos came past. The first didn’t want to take me into the city, but the second was happy to. I asked how much. “150” he told me. Not even any need to bargain.

I didn’t do too much that week (Nov 16-22), I chilled out in Delhi for a couple of days, but I did do two sorties - one to Agra, and one to Amritsar.

Agra is, of course, the home of the Taj Mahal. I did this as a day-trip from Delhi, taking a train that left before 06:00, and arriving back in Delhi at about 22:00 (I forget the exact times). You’re supposed to be at the station half an hour early - I think in case the train decides to leave early instead of late - and it was a bit of a walk, so I found myself strolling along Paharganj’s Main Bazaar at about 05:00. Stripped of its thick blanket of humanity, the street smelled worse than normal. Not much was open, there were a few people burning small piles of rubbish (remember, at this time of year Delhi - which is about as far from the equator as Brisbane is - is quite cool at night) and of course the cows were standing around confused as they are their entire life under the street lamps eating garbage. At least the garbage in India doesn’t have many plastic bags in it.

Of course the train left, and arrived, late, not long before the next train (which was meant to leave about two hours later at a much more civil hour). Anyway, I opted to see Agra’s sights in a whirlwind tour run by the state government, leaving from the train station. This took us to Fatehpur Sikri, Agra Fort and the Taj Mahal, and back to the train station at night. We got about 1-2 hours in each place, and a hurried half-hour lunch. Fatehpur Sikri is a large old fort, which was the Mughal capital for a few years in the 16th century. It’s situated about 40 km from Agra, in an area that the Mughal king discovered - after he built it - was too dry to be viable. It contains a number of palaces, temples, etc., in red sandstone, which our guide explained but which I can’t all remember. There’s a mosque and the tomb of a Muslim saint, and palaces of the Mughal’s three wives - the Christian one, the Muslim one and the Hindu one. Agra Fort is a nice, massive, Mughal fort on the Yamuna river, not far from the Taj. It’s surrounded by a large dry moat (which in Mughal times was supposedly full of crocodiles). Inside are numerous buildings which were government offices and suchlike, plus the tower where Shan Jahan, the Mughal Emperor who built the Taj Mahal, was imprisoned after being overthrown by his son.

Of course the Taj Mahal is famous and so I had to see it at some stage. It’s kind of what I expected, and is quite nice. It’s built on a raised area near the river, so that to this day there’s nothing behind it. From afar it can look somewhat two-dimensional, but it is in fact symmetrical. We went there last, supposedly so that there would be less people, but that didn’t seem to work. Since we only had about one-and-a-half hours, we didn’t even get time to go inside it (apparently there’s not much to see inside anyway and one isn’t allowed to take photos inside), because the queue went all the way around two sides of the building. It’s also fairly pricey for foreigners to get in, but still it’s worth seeing.

Agra is quite a neat town by Indian standards. They also are very environmentally conscious, and no polluting vehicles are allowed near the Taj. So we got dropped off about a kilometre from it and shuttled to the entrance with electric vehicles. Even the autos mainly use CNG (compressed natural gas, I assume what we call LPG) because it’s supposed to pollute less. On the road to/from Fatehpur Sikri I saw a lot of camel-drawn carts, which look strange.

A few blogs ago I mentioned the smog in Delhi. I’m now finding that this seems to be all over north central India, even in very rural areas so I’m confused whether it’s fog or smog. It’s not cold enough to have fog, and I guess even in rural areas people burn their rubbish. The train to Agra went through a lot of rural areas, and indeed Agra’s not so large itself, and there was still this haze. Likewise on the way up to Amritsar and even at Amritsar itself (making it hard to get good photos of the Golden Palace). I did read something in the newspaper about flights being delayed because of the fog season, so I’m not sure what’s going on. It doesn’t feel cold enough or damp enough for fog, but it seems to be in non-polluted areas. All I know is I haven’t seen a blue sky in India since I left Leh.

Somehow I lost count of the days, and thought I had one more day than I did. This didn’t leave me with much time to see Amritsar. I went to the Tourist desk at the train station to book my ticket (a much easier way to do it than battling the Indian crowd and a much cheaper way to do it than going through any of the numerous tour offices) and to my shock realised it was already Friday. So I got a ticket up to Amritsar on Saturday and back on Sunday just in time for my 04:00 Monday flight. I was a bit worried that if the train (scheduled to arrive back in Delhi just after 23:00) was more than two-and-a-half hours late I might miss the check-in for the plane. There’s often announcements at the train stations about trains being eight hours late, but I figured this was unlikely on the train from Amritsar.

Again the train was scheduled to leave early in the morning. It seemed to take a long time to get through Delhi’s northern suburbs. The town was just waking up. Guys were peeing against walls. At one place, spread out over about a kilometre along the tracks, about ten guys were shitting on the tracks. I was reading the brilliant book “Superfreakonomics” from which I gleaned the factoid that only one in four rural Indian households has a toilet, which explains a few things. The train trip took something like seven hours. I ended up sitting next to another foreigner, a Nigerian with an enormous amount of bling who spoke exactly like Ali G. He was getting off at a stop about three hours earlier than me and spent about two hours before his scheduled arrival time spacing up and down terrified of missing his stop. This is despite his ticket clearly giving his arrival time, and all the stations having their names written in English and Hindi. After asking the conductor a few times and phoning his business contact twice he eventually did get off at the right stop.

Amritsar is only about 55 km from Lahore, in Pakistan. Before partition, they were part of the same state, Punjab, but due to the rather arbitrary lines British arbitrators were forced to draw on maps, they ended up very different. I think it says something interesting about the two countries and the three religions that while the line drawn in 1947 couldn’t reflect any actual cultural boundaries in such a homogenous population, nowadays there’s very few Sikhs or Hindus left on the Pakistani side whereas there are still a lot of Muslims left on the Indian side.

Anyway, this is very much Sikh country. Sikhism is the youngest of the major religions, and is a sort of syncretism of Hinduism and Islam, taking the Muslim ideology of one immutable God to the next step by seeing this as the foundation for the unity of all religions. While they may reject the tag of being a military people, the Sikhs certainly do have a very bloody history, but at the moment don’t seem to be pushing too hard for the return of an independent homeland. If the Golden Temple is anything to go by, they certainly do value martyrdom, which seems to be a phase all young religions go through. It contains a large martyr’s gallery with drawings and photos of a large number of young male Sikh martyrs. Usually but not always the captions are in Punjabi, Hindi and English. It seems that the main criterion for qualify as a martyr is that you be dead, although some clearly were martyrs by any definition if the sometimes rather gruesome paintings were true. This temple is also the place where in 1984 Indian troops opened fire at Sikh separatists, killing hundreds of civilians and, in the eyes of religious Sikhs, violating the sanctity of the temple. This lead to Indira Gandhi’s assassination by two of her own Sikh bodyguards, which in turn lead to deadly anti-Sikh riots throughout Delhi in which thousands of Sikhs were beaten to death, burned or lynched.

But today the Golden Temple is a rather peaceful place. There are many tourists, mainly Indians, and worshippers from other religions as well. The architecture is in some cases rather Islamic, in some cases very Hindu. The temple is a large walled square, with a large pool, and in the middle the gold-plated temple itself. A number of men were stripping down to only their underwear (a bit like a loincloth) and, of course, their turbans - a few wore the kirpan - to bathe in the water. One or two brought plastic bottles and took a litre or so of the water back with them. A continuous chant and the still water created a slightly hypnotic effect. Massive queues lined up to get into the main central temple, most with food offerings, so I didn’t go.

I also went to Jalianwala Bagh park in the centre of town, the site of the massacre in 1919, when General Dyer, who, one assumes, was one of those British colonialists who agreed with the notion that the only thing wrong with India was that so much of it was above water, opened fire at a peaceful protest without warning. This scene is depicted well in "the film" (Richard Attenborough’s “Gandhi”). 379 people, about half of them Sikhs, died from being shot and/or from jumping down a deep well, while General Dyer was demoted and sent back to England where conservatives who saw him as “the Saviour of the Punjab” presented him with a fortune from a collection they’d taken up for him. The park now has trees, a water tower, sculptures, etc., so it doesn’t really look much like it did before the 1980s, and indeed nowadays you’d have no problem finding places to hide from bullets. Signs point to the place from which the troops opened fire, the well, bullet holes visible in the terrace wall, and bullet holes visible in a little religious building near the centre of the park.

Lonely Planet, which I don’t have in front of me as I write, says something like “Punjab may share a (Sikh) Prime Minister with the rest of India, but it feels very different” and that seemed quite true. Amritsar is a pleasant town, still with the colour that most Asian cities have, but much neater. The men seem to take more pride in their appearance. There’s some really fancy-looking private schools, modern buildings that look like castles, and nice houses. The other touristy thing to see in Amritsar is the daily closing of the border crossing. Amritsar has the only border crossing between Pakistan and India, despite their very long border (a fact which almost spelt the death of Jammu & Kashmir in the far north, and Rajasthan in the south, since historically they both relied very much on trade). Every evening there’s a big show as the border is closed for the night. You can find any number of descriptions of this event on the Internet. As it was, I arrived a bit late, despite pretty much racing out there on an auto straight after checking in at the hotel. The border is about 30 km from the city I think, but that of course takes a long time on an auto. When I arrived the crowd was so big I couldn’t see much. The crowd was mainly Indian. On the other side of the border, I couldn’t see very clearly, but it looked like a much smaller crowd of Pakistanis.

There wasn’t much to the ceremony, but they still managed to stretch it out for about an hour. There’s a slim charismatic guy in a suit whose job it is to stir up the crowd and chant something in Hindi. I think at some stage they were chanting “Long live Hindustan” (India) although I couldn’t guarantee the first two words were English. This was interspersed with goose-stepping on both sides, and generally walking back and forth. Towards the end a gate was opened so that those of us in the background could come in a bit closer. On the Pakistani side there was equal chanting. Finally the flags were lowered, both at the tops of the arches and at the border crossing itself, slowly and, diplomatically, with both flags remaining at equal height the whole time. So now I can add Pakistan to the list of countries I’ve seen from the ground on this trip but haven’t visited, along with Singapore, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Germany. It had a mosque, that’s all I can say about Pakistan.

So as I mentioned, I popped back to Australia for a bit over a week for my sister’s wedding. It meant I was gone from India for about 10 days. I picked the cheapest flight I could find, which for some reason ended up going through Dubai. This meant that the flight was cheap but my carbon footprint and the time taken were large. Basically because of the time difference and the fact that my flight left at 04:00, I missed two nights’ sleep. I got the train back from Amritsar that night, arriving in Delhi at about 23:00, then took the auto out to the airport. I arrived early on the Tuesday, and by coincidence my brother who had also been overseas was getting into the airport a few hours later. Since I had a lot of stuff (some things I was planning to leave at home) I checked my backpack into the short-term storage. The attendant, a lady probably a bit younger than me, had the strongest Australian accent I’d heard in at least 10 months. The conversation went something like this:
Me: “Can I leave my backpack here for four or five hours?”
“Sure Luv. Will ‘t be more’n four hours d’ya reckon? Coz it’s a different price.”
“hmm. No, four hours should be fine”
“Righto luv. Just whack it over there and fill in this form.” Then, while I was filling it in she asked “Where’r ya off ter then?”
I explained that I’d just arrived from India
“Noice one! So did you see the whatsername ... the Tarj Majjal?”
“The Taj Mahal? Yes, just a couple of days ago”
“Noice one!!”

And so on. They should give her a job standing at the customs saying “Welcome ter Melbuhn, ’Straya Luv!!” on arrival, just to add local colour.

Anyway, as you probably know, I spent a couple of days in Melbourne catching up with my friends and then a couple more days in Bendigo. The wedding went fine, officiated by a short minister with a massive comb-over which he did comb over for the wedding unlike for the practice the night before where it hung down strangely on one side.

The flight back was fine, I was even able to get a bit of sleep on the plane. I went to McDonalds in the Dubai airport and got a Big Mac - my last chance to eat Beef for the next month or two. On the rather short leg from Dubai to Delhi I got bumped up to Business Class, I don’t know why. The chairs were very high-tech, but I didn’t feel that much more comfortable than in economy. If you were normally proportioned except for having two-metre-long legs then it would definitely be an advantage, but otherwise not so much. The selection on the TV was much less than I’d had in economy on the way over, but I guess that’s the plane.

So I arrived back in Delhi. I’d only been gone about 10 days so it didn’t feel like coming home nor did it feel strange. People in Melbourne kept asking me how it felt to be back, but it didn’t feel like anything either. It didn’t feel like I’d been gone for 10 months or like I was visiting a strange country. Everything was still pretty much the same. They haven’t even gotten cows on the streets yet.

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Photos

Taj Mahal
Unfortunately the other guy I was hanging out with ont he tour was more concerned about having his photo taken than about taking my photo.

Agra
on the way out to Fatehpur Sikri

Agra
Fatehpur Sikri

Agra
near Fatehpur Sikri

Fatehpur Sikri
mausoleum of some Muslim saint

Fatehpur Sikri
mosque

Agra Fort
the first view of the Taj Mahal, from the window next to where the imprisoned mughal supposedly could just glimpse its reflection