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Published: September 27th 2009
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Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and New Delhi (again)......
Agra Reading over the various blog entries that we've made since leaving the UK I can't help but notice that the word "awesome" appears entirely too many times.
But the Taj Mahal
is awesome.
We also did a quick day trip to Fatehpur Sikri which is just outside Agra & home to a massive old palace built by/for (?) Emperor Akbar. Very cool crumbly old place. Very hot day. A worthwhile and inexpensive trip.
Orchha Hmmmm......
"Temples surrounded by thick jungle and only recently discovered", "An essential stop on the way to Khajuraho" etc etc etc.
Unless you have a serious interest in architecture of the ancient kind then I would advise skipping this. No jungle, just stones. If this site was in Wiltshire it would be impressive. It's not. It's in India. There are 100s of more impressive sites to see than this.
I have no doubt that it's interesting for the expert, but for the layman it's a a pile of stones in the middle of nowhere...... so a bit of an arse to get to.
And we'd just seen Fatehpur Sikri. Maybe
one or the other but both was overkill.
We (over) compensated by staying in our most expensive hotel in India so we had a pool to lounge around & a nice restaurant to eat in. Then treated ourselves further by getting a taxi on to Khajuraho - a 3-4 hour journey! It was
SO worth it in the monsoon rain!
Khajuraho Temples with sculptured porn on the walls. Intricate nature of the sculpture was very impressive but, again, unless you're an expert/fanatic/have a major stone fetish then once you've seen one of these you've seen them all. Glad we saw the one sight (of 4) that we bothered to wander through though.
As you can probably tell, India fatigue was kicking in by this point. We'd been in the country for two months and had (deliberately) left the touristy bits until last. By the time we'd hit Orchha and Khajuraho we were pretty much ready to leave.
Also a bit of a dampener to the experience was that we arrived healthy but Kerry fell ill on the last morning so the rest of our stay in India was aided by gut-blocking pills so we could carry
Fatehpur Sikri
BIG BED!
for the little emperor Akbar & his many wives/lovers - he was only 5' and a bit on seeing stuff.
However, we still managed to squeeze in........
Varanasi Old. Reeeeaaaaally old. Pilgrims. River Ganges. Clothes washed in Ganges (they still smell). Cool to see though, impressive that so many people still draw such inspiration from the river.
Were given a friendly send-off by a local cow which head-butted Kerry in the thigh and then stood on my foot.
Delhi We absolutely
refused to be defeated by Delhi. After two months of acclimatising to India we understood that we'd probably got a bad first impression of the capital, especially given that we'd chosen to stay in the backpacker hell that is Paharganj.
So we headed to the suburban (& trendy) south of the city and, surprise surprise, enjoyed it a whole lot more.
Spent Saturday evening in a cool little cocktail bar in Hauz Khas Village following a tip off from a friend-of-a-friend (thanks Yashoda!) and managed to spend the remainder of our time stocking up on travel supplies (meds and books) and catching a few obligatory sites (Red Fort - from a distance outside, Lal Mandir and the very beautiful Raj Ghat and surrounding park, a little oasis of calm
in manic New Delhi).
Our final few hours in India pretty much summed up the previous two months.
The flight to Bangkok was very early on Tuesday morning (3am ish) so as the sun went down we had a couple of drinks in a swanky high-rise cocktail bar opposite the hotel. We managed to get a good price on a taxi to the airport with a friendly driver who asked if he could bring his teenage son along for the ride ( we think because he'd never seen the airport and wanted to learn the route? Could also have been that he knew he'd have a long wait in line with the hundreds of other taxis at the airport for his next fare and company would be nice). We then careered across the city as part of five lanes of traffic squeezed onto a three lane freeway (the far left lane apparently being for pedestrians, bikes, tuk-tuks, motorcycles and any car driver mental enough try weaving between them) and got to the airport 5 hours early, hoping to get a few hours sleep in the rest lounges we'd read about.
Once at the airport we found out
Khajuraho
ooh the filth! that
1. there were no rest lounges (all train stations and airports in India have these including the domestic terminal at Delhi, just not the international one apparently) ,
2. we weren't allowed in the airport until 4 hours prior to take off but we could pay to use a special waiting room outside if we wanted, and
3. no one would/could accept or exchange rupees in the airport after we'd cleared security.
So India in summary: exhilarating and exasperating in equal measure. But everyone should experience it.
Kerry's two pence:
India changed me somehow but I'm still trying to fathom it. Maybe more later when I'm more clear on what/why/how.. It was definitely a more extreme experience for a western woman than a man. In my opinion.
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