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Published: April 21st 2005
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My greedy wife
She was so greedy on this holiday she even tried to eat the famous Taj Yay, finally we get to see a world famous site in India - apart from its world famous stinkiness and dirtiness.
However before that, a quick update on food. We have been eating, and eating a lot. So much so that I have developed noticable new pockets of fat on my stomach. Melenie however has managed to remain immaculately skinny thanks to her regularly bouts of food poisoning and vomiting. I am hoping to get some food poisoning soon as this may be the only way of trimming down before the end of this holiday.
Okay, so back to Agra. We started the day with breakfast. The first in India because up till now we haven't really had time for breakfast. But this breakfast was free, and it was buffet!!
The day started badly. We hopped in an autorickshaw to go to the train station to book our ticket to Varanasi that night. However, the scheming indian drove us to some other train station that was nearby but tried to charge us the full price. Luckily I guessed it was the wrong station (since it looked like some local suburban station) and refused to pay full price. I'm
getting very good at being rude to taxi drivers.
Anyway, we finally arrived at the right station only to discover that the train that we HAD to be on that night was fully booked. However, a kind taxi driver (yeah right, as if any of these Indian taxi drivers are kind) offered to help by driving us to a travel agent which had prebooked tickets we could buy. Well, since we had no other hope, we went to the travel agent and as expected had to pay almost double to get our ticket. It turns out that the way this travel agent actually ends up getting you a ticket is by bribing the train guard. I pretended that my conscience didn't hear anything about bribing and just paid the guy - you have no idea how much time we had already wasted just trying to get this ticket. The actual final break down of our ticket price was 2000 rupees for the actual ticket, 500 rupees bribe money, 500 rupees commission for the taxi guy who took us there, and 500 rupees for the dodgy travel agent. How terribly disgusting. I hope their business burns down or something!! (I
was very mad that day as you can tell)
So, now we could actually look around Agra. Since we'd wasted so much time, we had to take a guided tour (to save travel time and getting lost time). This was good because the guide was quite knowledgable telling us about all the local points of interest such as 'here is a service station that sells petrol' and 'this is tin shed, it has rust on it'. At one point, he pulled over and got us to follow him into some abandonned sandy/bushy area promising good views of the Taj Mahal. I was a bit worried that he was taking us out into the bush to stab us so I made Melenie stay back a bit so that she could run for help while I was being stabbed. However, he delivered as promised and we got a nice view.
We then went past Agra Fort, which is just a big red fort. We were pretty sick of forts by now, so we kind of went 'yeah whatever', took a picture, and kept going.
This is when the tour got really dumb though. He decided to take us to
a number of shops that show you how they manufacture local stuff such as local jewellery and how they embed jewels in marble (as they do in the Taj Mahal). It was actually quite interesting except then you had to go through the compulsory tour of their shop and pretend to be amazed and interested in buying stuff. But we were seasoned Indian travellers and by now had learnt the art of pretending to be interested for approximately 2.6 minutes (the required duration to appear polite we figure) after which we then make a dash for the door saying that Melenie needed to go to the toilet (okay not really).
You have to hand it to our guide though. At least he was honest. He actually told us that the reason he took us to all these shops was because he got 10% commission. Oh well, some honesty in India is better than the complete lack of honesty amongst the rest of them.
Finally though we came to the best part of the day. The great Taj Mahal. I was in a bit of a bad mood so I was expecting to be sorely disappointed by this big
The Agra fort
Its red. Its big. Its crowded. building which I'm sure looked the same as it did in the pictures. However, it really was quite breathtaking. It was so much bigger than we thought it would be, and so white and clean (something rare in India). There were precious jewels embedded into every part of the marble that looked as bright and fresh as they would have the day they were first embedded.
And thus, a bad day in Agra ended on a good note. Next stop was Varanasi, holy city of the Ganges via a 12 hour overnight train.
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anonymous
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The Rat children rule
Love your commentary...makes my day...I know, I am easily amused and have no life. Plus now you can feel popular because you have 1 comment - Desiree