Day 4: Agra Ahoy

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Up at the crack of dawn having packed the night before, we used an Ola taxi to get ourselves to Hazrat Nizamuddin railway station. It was a bit too early to be attempting to navigate the metro, and even then we weren’t entirely sure where we would be going when we got out of the station. We were about to experience our first taste of non-subway Indian Railway.



Now, I’m sure we’ve all heard the stories about Indian trains being rammed full, with nowhere to sit and people navigating the rooftops to try and reach their destinations. To say that’s an extreme is an understatement. I won’t pretend that it’s an Arriva midlands service to New Street because it isn’t. I also won’t pretend that there aren’t some carts at the back of the train that do look busy, with people crammed in. There were a couple, but it is also possible to reserve tickets. For 1500 rupees we were in a reserved seat and we had an air conditioned carriage with regular service. Just under 2 hours later we were in Agra.



Off the train and out of the station we had a helpful taxi driver shepherd us to a pre-paid booth where you paid a government issued fee dependant on your location (450 rupees for us). Two very friendly and talkative men sat in the front and told us what to expect at the Taj Mahal whilst also trying to plug that they could drive us anywhere we wanted the next day for a substantial fee. We tipped but did not buy into the sell.



Guess what? We are in a hotel. With an actual shower. There is also a bucket there, which is slightly ominous, but we have used the facilities twice each today purely because we can. Hotel Atalyaa Taj is our location, located 800m down the road from the Taj Mahal. By the time we’d showered, napped and got ready to have a wander around it was 3pm, at which point the Taj itself had a humongous queue, which put us both off massively so we opted to go exploring. The walk from hotel to Taj itself was flanked on either side by occasional collections of restaurants and souvenir shops. We are in luck because every restaurant on our street has a man outside telling us (well meg mainly, I remain relatively hassle free) that their restaurant has the best food in India! There seems to be a strategy whereby if the mark isn’t interested at first then the salesman will just randomly shout out a low amount of rupees in a vain attempt to draw you in, but it was to no avail.



We briefly stopped at Dost Tea, the only café that seemed to feature its own grassed lawn. Meg indulged in a chai tea whilst I opted for an iced tea, and we had some lunch.



With our plan to see he Taj foiled until tomorrow at least, we set about finding something else to do. It was at this point that we stumbled across the Taj Nature Walk. Situated about 400 metres up the road from the east gate, charging 100 rupees for foreign entry, is a vast forest with winding pathways. The park is barely mentioned in any of the websites and blogs that we had looked at leading up to our journey, and we can’t fathom why. Calm, tranquil and relaxing, we saw about ten people over the couple of hours we spent getting lost in the gardens, stumbling across roaming Peacocks, butterflies and chipmunks. My hopes of seeing a wild snake (obviously not from too close) were sadly not met here, and we did have a further round of “Photos with foreigners”, but the park is beautiful and picturesque, and we would highly advise anyone to have a look.



After a jaunt back to the hotel, we then returned to the road to find some dinner. Meg and I are both hopeless at taking the initiative on picking eateries, with any discussion on English soil normally being reminiscent to the vultures from “The Jungle Book”, before we both say “fuck it” and go to Nandos. At this point we were 4 days in and curryless however, and this had to change. We dodged a few industrious salesmen and veered into “Indian Spice” opposite the nature walk. The main reason for this was that there wasn’t anyone stood in the middle of the street trying to sell us the grandest dishes on the sub-continent. I opted for chilli (Spelt chilly) chicken whilst meg went for mushroom masala. Both were good, the chilli chicken came in a “gravy” which was basically a very thick sauce. It was nice, although the gentleman mixed up who wanted the spicy and the normal, so poor meg had something a little hotter than what she is normally accustomed too (maniacal laugh.) The bloke serving us even walked to the shop and bought me a diet coke because I ordered one and they didn’t have any in. Top lad. It came to about 620 rupees and before long we were showered (got to make the most of these things whilst you can) and in bed. We did ask the hotel staff when the best time to get to the Taj Mahal is and they told us when it opens, at 5.30am…







It’s 2am and I’m typing this…







Yaaaaaay.



Steps: 11,700



Bites amassed: 4



Photos of the white man: 4

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