Agra, Delhi & a Wrap-up of India

Before we went to Agra, people (and the internet) warned us that there really wasn’t anything to see there except the Taj (and maybe one other thing). We took the advice to heart, and only spent a couple days there. Turns out that’s absolutely correct. So, we saw the Taj, and we saw two other things: the tomb of Akbar (who was the third Mughal emperor), in the neighboring city of Sikandra, and Agra Fort. Those were enough to see, and then we got out of town.

The Taj is pretty incredible, no doubt about it! From outside the palace walls it seemed a bit smaller than we expected. But once we got inside, and could see the scale of the thing compared with the people standing in front of it, then we could really appreciate how big it was. It is pretty damned big!

Before I get to that, though, let me tell you the story of getting into Agra in the first place, because it was pretty hairy. We arrived by train, around 10:30 at night. We had arranged with a hotel to pick us up at the train station, but we arrived 30 minutes late, and nobody was there to meet us. Fortunately, we knew our hotel was not far, so we just tried to grab a rickshaw. But they were all being dicks. They all wanted to charge us more than double what it should have cost, considering how close we were. We talked to about 5 or 6 different drivers, but everybody kept saying “Not possible!”

Finally, we went back to an early guy who told us that there was a huge festival or something going on, and that they were blocking the main road, and that he would pay US if we could get our hotel to send us a car at all, let alone for what folks here wanted to charge. Since it was late, and we were tired and frustrated and sick of arguing, we gave up and paid extra. When we got about half-way there, we saw the problem. There was a MASSIVE march/festival going on, full of way too over-excited young men (thousands of them), taking up the entire main street, which was the only way to get to our hotel area.

These kids were WAY too charged up and completely full of themselves. We had to pass (the road was not closed, just full of people), but this apparently bothered some of them. One particular group of over-excited teenagers actually ran up and SMACKED our rickshaw. And then they did it again. We actually picked up and old policeman, and had him riding on the side, next to the driver. That didn’t stop them. In fact, every time we tried to get past them and failed due to some other traffic block, they would get even more bold. At one point, they even came out and smacked Jimena on the arm! WHAT THE FUCK?? GET US THE FUCK OUT OF HERE, NOW!

The cop did nothing. I think he tried to reason with them, but they were too full of testosterone. The driver could do nothing, because the road was too packed. This was a VERY long street, with walls on both sides, and no exits for at least 3km. And there was nothing either Jimena or I could do. Even if they teenagers could understand a word I wanted to say to them (along with much cussing), they were a mob, and we were just a couple foreigners. We think this was supposed to be some sort of religious celebration walk. That SHOULD have made them calm, I’d have thought, but no. In any case, we were powerless. They smacked Jime’s arm one more time, and my rage and frustration just grew. I was also scared, because if this is how they’re behaving when they’re NOT being challenged, anything I might do to defend Jimena would just make things worse.

Long story short, we eventually made it past them. After that, the driver had no idea how to find our hotel. We had to stop at an internet café and ask directions. Eventually we got to a gate and he said he couldn’t take us any farther, and that we had to walk the rest of the way. After Jime spoke with the hotel guy on the phone, and yelled at him for not sending someone to meet us, or that there was a gigantic festival blocking the way, they said that they would send somebody from the hotel to come outside and meet us. Nobody was waiting at the gate. Nobody was waiting after we went in and around the corner. Nobody was waiting when we walked a kilometer down the road and saw no sign of the hotel. You know what?  Fuck them; we’re done. We went back and chose another hotel that Jime had also read about that was closer, but just didn’t have internet. They took us, and the place was fine. Not great, but at least it was there, and we were finally done, and could take off our backpacks… at around midnight.

So, the next day we went in to see the Taj. Our hotel was right by the East Gate, which I had read you could buy tickets at. Not true. We had to walk around the corner, about 1km, to the South Gate. The gate was hard to find. For what is arguably the most famous tourist destination in the country, these guys are remarkably poorly organized and with almost no signs anywhere. Maybe they learned from Costa Rica! The “main gate” was a little room, down an alley, with a guy at wooden desk.

Anyway, we got in, and through the gates, and it was definitely an impressive sight! The main gatehouse buildings themselves are pretty neat. They have some really beautiful inlaid ceramics and cool architecture. The main palace building inside was built as a tomb for the wife of Shah Jahan, a former Mughal ruler at a time when Agra was the Capital of the Mughal empire. His wife had been very popular, apparently.

(One of the Gateway buildings)

(The Taj Mahal!  For scale, take a look on that 2nd raised platform, right in front of the door, and see the line of people there.  Jori chit, that’s big!)

So, the building is gigantic, but really, it’s all just a lot of ornamentation for a very small room in the center, on the ground floor. There may be other rooms, but they’re not open to the public. Before you get to the inside, though, you walk through the very large garden, full of all sorts of pathways and ponds and fountains. Of course, since this is the summer, and the peak of heat, all the ponds and fountains were completely empty, just like all the other ponds and fountains we’d seen in the country. And the “gardens”, as the were, were really just a series of lawns with a few flower patches, a few trees and some shrubbery here and there. The audio guide called this garden “a paradise on earth”… an “earthly heaven”. Earthly heaven, my ass.  Perhaps in contrast to the vast desert we left behind in Rajasthan, this may be true. But by any other standard we’re used to… it was sort of underwhelming.

One nice thing we did find there though, that showed good planning on the part of the caretakers of the site, was they had free water-bottle filling stations, with Reverse Osmosis machines right there. Reverse Osmosis is pretty much THE most effective water filtration method. So finally HERE, at least, you COULD drink the water.

Eventually, we made our way into the tomb proper. It’s a very small room! But the room is covered in absolutely the most incredible and beautiful inlay work I think either of us has ever seen. And unfortunately, that’s the only nice thing I can say about it. But we were not allowed to take pictures, and in this particular location, they actually meant it. In any case, it was very dark, so the pictures wouldn’t have come out well anyway, at least without flash.

Speaking of flashing things, though, even though all the online guides we read told us to take a flashlight to see the inlay work, the workers inside yelled at us for it, even though when we first walked in, one of those same guys came up to us and HIMSELF showed us one of the tiles up close… with HIS little light, right on the marble. But when I tried to do it later with my own light, not even touching, he not only yelled at me, he called one of the cops from the door to come in and yell at me.

This same guy had one other really horrible feature… a whistle. He kept CONSTANTLY blowing his whistle at people to keep them moving around the room, in a circle, like fish in an aquarium. By his standards, people were allowed about 30 seconds in this place. If anybody stopped to look at the really fine details, which are the PRIMARY attraction of this room, he would yell at them, blow his whistle, and, if they didn’t move right away, he’d come bang on the railing right next to him. This room is supposed to be a peaceful, solemn place of rest. And yet, this one guy did everything in his power to create the exact OPPOSITE environment. We paid more for this one monument than any other place we’d seen in the country… by a LOT. And this one a-hole ruined the entire experience of what should have been the best part of this beautiful marble building. We, of course, ignored him, or flat out told him NO, when he tried several times to hurry us along. But we still had to suffer through the constant pressure, the constant whistling and banging and yelling by this one puffed-up, power-mad ass-clown. Jimena says that he probably learned from every guarda in Costa Rica.

After the Taj, we went home and took a nap, then headed out to the Agra Fort. Apparently, if you see anything else in town on the same day after seeing the Taj, you get a discount. The Agra Fort didn’t look like much when we first walked in, but then we went through a very small, unmarked door, and found an entire palace to walk through. It was nowhere near as extravagant or well-preserved and decorated as Mehrangarh, but it was definitely more interesting than that other palace we saw in Jaipur. There were lots of neat windows and courtyards and lattices. The architecture was neat too. Also, from one side of the building, the fort has a pretty spectacular view of the Taj Mahal off in the distance. This is notable, because apparently in his old age, Shah Jahan, who built the Taj, actually got imprisoned in this fort by his own son. He lived the rest of his life in a sort of house-arrest (which, to be fair, was still in a palace), but looking out his window every day at the magnificent building he had had built, and where he would eventually be buried himself.

(A little nicer than your average home-jail.  That’s a fountain in the floor of what could basically be his living room.)

On our last day in Agra, we popped out to Sikandra, a nearby city about 30 minutes away or so, to see Akbar’s tomb. This was a much quieter place than every other place we’d seen. I’m guessing it’s not as popular as the Taj for all the Indian tourists, but it did seem to be popular with the foreigner tourists. My guess is, like us, all these other people had come all this way to Agra, and figured they might as well see everything the area had to offer, since they might never come back (or at least, not any time soon).

Inside the gates for this place, the grounds were laid out very similar to the Taj, with a tomb in the center of a large garden, and a big gateway building at each of the 4 corners of the compass. The tomb building itself has really ONE room with nice decoration, but those decorations are pretty incredible. And what’s better, here there was no asshole shouting at people all the time to move along! And even better than that, in this place we WERE allowed to take pictures. So we did. A LOT. :) In fact, we stayed in this little room for quite a while, to take in all the details, and most of that time, we were all by ourselves. In any case, the walls were covered with pretty spectacular inlays and tiles and paintings, and in the center of the room, and very pretty hanging lamp. We think we got some really nice shots to show off the beautiful work (Jime even used my head as a tripod for some of them).

(Main Gatehouse)

(Incredibly fancy entry room.  Many more pictures of this on our photo site)

The main tomb area, by contrast, was completely UNdecorated. It was just a very large, empty room, with unpainted, flat walls, and a tomb in the center. It did have a few vents to the outside which let in a little light and kept the room cool. It also had a very high, vaulted ceiling. All of these combined to give the room some pretty incredible acoustics. There was even a guy inside who would sing (for tips) a couple very long, loud notes and the room would resonate until the sound absolutely filled your whole body. That was pretty cool.

One other really cool part about the grounds of this place, though, was that it was also apparently some sort of wildlife sanctuary. We saw more of those antelope we had seen back in Jodhpur, just wandering around the lawn. Neat. :)

(S’up!)

That night, we jumped on a train to New Delhi. Since this was a much bigger tourist destination than some of the other cities we visited, the train station was MUCH better organized. It had electronic signs and monitors and everything, telling us when our train was coming, and exactly where to stand to wait for our specific car. The train showed up and left on time, and was quite fast, and pretty comfortable, actually.

We showed up in Delhi at around 11pm, and were happily met with a sign by our “pickup” from the hotel. We followed the guy out of the building and across the parking lot… then across the street, and down the block… when finally we said “So… hey… exactly how far away is your car parked?” We’d agreed to pay 200 rupees for this pickup, so we didn’t want to walk half-way there. Well, it turned out he had no intention of making us walk half-way there. He wanted us to walk ALL the way there. “No taxi”, he says, “the hotel is just up the street”, he says.

Well, we looked, and as far as we could see, our hotel was not visible. We told him that we would not walk with our big packs. Eventually he flagged down a bike rickshaw. We had been avoiding bike rickshaws because we don’t like the idea of having some small guy pedal our large asses down the street. And now, not only was this guy going to pedal us, but also our heavy-ass backpacks.  Still, it was better (for us) than walking.

The hotel was pretty basic. The room was small, but at least it had internet, and was in the heart of a very busy shopping area. And since, really, for us, that’s all Delhi was, was a last-chance shopping destination, that worked out just fine.

Our street was called the “Main Bazaar”, and, while it may not have been the biggest bazaar in town, it was definitely a very busy place, completely stuffed with little stores. Most of what we saw were clothing and textile stores of one sort another, but of course, there were lots of knickknack (tiliches) stores as well.

Here, we finally found ourselves some nice fabrics and each had ourselves 3 custom shirts made, and all for what it would have cost us to buy used clothes at Goodwill in the US (o Ropa Americana en Costa Rica).

And then I saw in one of the “stuff” stores, a box of really pretty wood block stamps, and Jime decided then and there that she could love me forever. The guy running the store hired out all the actual wood carving, but at least he was the artist who drew all the designs. So, I give him credit for the creative work. And his stuff was GOOD! He had walls, and drawers just FULL of all KINDS of really beautiful, intricately carved designs. He had lots of different themes, from cutesy stuff to fine design. We loved his stuff so much, and bought so many pieces, that he decided to gift Jime with a very lovely henna tattoo that he just drew on the fly. When you look at the picture, bear in mind it took him about 5 minutes from start to finish. Cool dude!

(Nuestro Señor de los Tiliches Lindos)

(5 minutes, I say!)

For the rest of our time, we ended up hanging out with a local Couchsurfer named Sumit. We went out and had a decent breakfast and then a nice lunch at a popular and very busy all-you-can-eat cafeteria he knew about. Then we went to a coffee/hooka bar. I had myself a very LOVELY coffee from Tarrazu (Costa Rica’s best coffee region)! It even came in a french press. I also tried the hookah, which was a new thing for me. It was nice and mild, with an orange/mint flavored tobacco. I didn’t hate it. It was an amusing experience, and was neat to taste the flavored steam. But when all is said and done, smoking is not my thing. So, I let Jime and Sumit enjoy that, and I enjoyed my coffee.

(Charcoal-fired hookah, with free charcoal refills to keep things goin)

Sumit helped us work with a local post office and get all of our collected souvenirs up this point shipped off to the US. It was EXPENSIVE! Probably cost us about $75, but it was a whole pile of stuff… 15 kilos worth. Also, there’s this weird thing where they have to sew up the box in its own little canvas wrap, and you have to pay for that service. That canvas outfit for the box cost us more than our custom-made shirts from hand-chosen fabric! But we can’t carry that stuff for the whole trip. Now we have room for more!

(Hey Lyzz & Jonathan, you can expect this on your door sometime in, say… mid-September.  And guys, if you don’t want your address here, go ahead and send me a Cease & Desist at your earliest convenience)

Sumit had a flight that afternoon (he’s a flight attendant for Jet Airways), so we just hung out in his apartment and saw him again for dinner very late that night. By the time he got home, thanks to delays in the flight, it was around midnight, and we were starved. So the fancy last dinner in India was nothing fancier than McDonalds. But hey, at least that was an interesting experience. What does McDonalds serve when there’s no beef? Lots of chicken and veggie stuff. It was… interesting. I enjoyed some stuff. It was not Jime’s favorite.

We took off early the next morning to the Delhi airport. Our flight was at 1pm, but we had been warned to have extra time at this airport, so we left the house at 8:30AM. It was a good thing we did! As fancy as this airport looks, and as well as the building is maintained and designed, it has got to be THE most inefficient, backwards, lack of logic airport we’ve ever seen.

For starters, we flew on an E-ticket, but still had to have a print-out to enter the building. The check-in process went ok, but then we had to go through some weird sort of “Exit immigration” line, and THAT line was one of the most ridiculously slow and stupid lines we’ve waited in on this whole trip. It takes less time to go through the immigration line to ENTER to the USA than it did to LEAVE India! It didn’t help, of course, that we (Jime) realized at the last minute that we still had my Leatherman in our carry-on bag. So, after waiting 20 minutes in that stupid line (with only 3 people in front of us), we had to get out, find a spare box to put it in, pay to have it plastic-wrapped so it could be checked in, and then wait in that line all over again. When we finally got through a second time (after another 20 minute wait minimum, again with only 2 or 3 people in front of us), and got to the security line, the idiot guard at the end would not let us pass. He said we needed to have an ID tag on our carry-on bags.

Ummm… no we don’t. They’re carry-on; we don’t need ID tags because they won’t be leaving our side. Nope, he says, “You need ID tag.” No, they’re CARRY-ON; we don’t HAVE tags. He insists we have to go back to the airline. We tell him, quite correctly, that we are not ALLOWED to go back to the airline, since we have already passed through immigration. It is not LEGAL for us to go back to the airline. He holds fast, and doesn’t even show signs of relenting, or even asking for help. We also hold fast, for we are righteous.

Also, we were screwed. There really was nothing we could do about it. If we needed tags on our carry-ons, why the hell didn’t the airlines warn us? Of course they OFFERED them, but so does every airline check-in desk. But they’re never REQUIRED. Why the fuck would they be required now?

In the end, somebody found us some extra tags from another airline, and the idiot guard let us go. It turns out that after the inspection of the carry-on bags, they need to stamp… SOMETHING… on your bag, to indicate that it passed. No other airport that we’ve seen or heard of does this, but that’s why they needed the name tags:  not for the name, but for the paper. I’m guessing (and giving him the benefit of the doubt) that if the guard spoke better English, he could have explained what the tags were for. If I instead assume what my heart believes, I’d assume the guard had no idea what the tags were for, and didn’t care. Rule says you must have a tag. No tag? No go. Not my problem why. At least we eventually got through! It took us two HOURS to get from the entrance to this point. Glad we had extra time.

After that, it should have been clear sailing, but it wasn’t even then. First, our flight was delayed by about two hours, but there was no internet to be had, anywhere, for us to use to notify our hotel pick-up in Nepal. Oh yes, the airport HAD free Wifi. Only, like many other places in India, this free WiFi requires you to have a local cell phone. Too bad for travelers…

We gave up and decided to just go get food. Now we ran into a little money problem. You see, when you’re leaving a country, you want to take as little local currency with you as possible. Only, pretty much every restaurant in this cafeteria did not accept credit cards, including McDonalds. And there were no ATMs inside the airport.

At this point, this was the colmo of colmos (the last of the last straws), and we were about to lose our shit on the poor McDonalds cashier, when a VERY kind Sikh man in line behind us actually offered to buy our breakfast for us! We declined but thanked him heavily. Thankfully, one of the other restaurants accepted cards, and we got some food, but it was a LONG morning of contradictory, ineffective systems, our very favorite.

And finally, we were off to Kathmandu! The flight was nice, and SUPER short (like, 1.5 hours). We’re still in Nepal as I write this, but that will come in my next post.

For now, I’ll wrap up this post with a wrap-up of interesting observations we made about life and culture in India.

* Parents put eyeliner on small children, even babies, both boys and girls. Not on all, but it is very surprising to see a 10-month old with big, dark eyes.

* In India, and especially in Mumbai, you can’t go for more than 10 seconds (and usually not even 5) on a major road without somebody honking.

* In India we gave up public transportation, and moved to taxis. We also cut down on couchsurfing and switched to hotels. This also meant that we haven’t been cooking, mostly eating at restaurants. We also lost access to supermarkets, and have been depending mostly on pulperias (tiny stores in someone’s front room that sell some basic products). This makes it harder to shop, since we can’t walk down the aisles looking for stuff, and we can’t really communicate with the shopkeeper.

* A men’s public bathroom is often OFFICIALLY just a wall on the side of the road. And that’s when they bother having an official wall. Frequently, men will just pee wherever they feel like it. Women seem to not have this option. I don’t know whether to be more disgusted that men can, or that women can’t.

* You almost never see pregnant women out on the street in India. In fact, in our entire month in the country, visiting 6 cities in 3 states, I think we may have seen only one. This matches the observation that Silvia (Jimena’s mom) made when she visited 10 years ago.

* The fact that we don’t see pregnant women at all may be related to the fact that women make up no more than, say, 20% of all the people on the street. Overwhelmingly, the people you see are men; the waiters, drivers, even people walking around, are mostly men. This also matches what Silvia noted.

*Of the women we saw, around 90% (based solely on our own observations) were wearing traditional saris for clothing, while the men were frequently dressed in western clothing (and were much more varied in general). It was pretty shocking to see women doing heavy physical work (like laying bricks on a construction site) while still balancing a veil, or a scarf that kept shifting. Women wore saris while cleaning, carrying bricks, shoveling and moving heavy loads.

* Monkeys are everywhere, in big cities and small. That is to say, you don’t see them on every street corner or anything. But it wouldn’t be out of the question on any given occasion.

* Our camera’s auto-focus died in Agra. We don’t know if this was from the heat, the humidity, heavy use, or what. We just know it died. At around the same time, it got some sort of a speck inside the lens. We have no idea how it got in there, but we can’t shake it loose, so it’s going to show up in all of our photos from our good camera until we can replace that lens (which we hope to do in Hong Kong or elsewhere in China, where they make everything in the world that India doesn’t).

* In Istanbul, all the vendors kept asking us if we spoke English, as a way to start a conversation (that we didn’t want to have). In India, we were constantly barraged by random people asking us where we’re from, and trying to take our picture (sometimes asking, sometimes not). A lot of the people trying to take “our” picture were actually groups of teenage boys trying to take Jime’s picture. This did not make her feel happy, so we happily told them all no. In some cases, though, the people were just random families, so we used the opportunity to take their picture back. We had always wanted to have pictures of the local people, but felt it would be rude to just snap pictures of people as if they were curious zoo animals. However, since many of them clearly had no such issues about doing the reverse to us, we figured those folks would be ok with it.

* This was the beginning of more regular exposure to squat toilets. Throughout India, in either temples, restrooms or hotels, it was hit or miss if the toilets would be sitting or squatting. In fact, in our hotel in Delhi, we started out in one room with a sitting toilet, then had to switch after a couple days to the room next door, and it had a squat toilet.

* Pretty much every bathroom we saw in India was a full-bathroom shower. That is, there was no separate area for the shower. The entire bathroom was the shower area. The drain was just on the edge of the floor. This meant that everything in the bathroom (brushes, toilet paper, toilet) would get wet when you shower, and the bathmat is OUTSIDE of the whole bathroom!

* In Jodhpur, our toilet, for some reason, was on a raised platform, with two steps up to get to it. This felt very much like the proverbial royal throne. The fact that the floor and steps were all floored with perfectly smooth tiles that become like Newtonian frictionless surfaces when wet (in this shower-bathroom), so that we felt like we were in danger of breaking our Newtonian necks every time we ascended or descended from the “throne” took away, somewhat, from its grandeur. Especially at 3 in the morning.

* India in July is HOT! For how hot, see the Robin Williams monologue from Good Morning, Vietnam. In the entire month we were there, with the exception of those few times we found some free AC, I think we did not stop sweating… ever. I sweat so much that my sweat pores CLOGGED, and actually started stinging me every time I sat down or leaned on something. I didn’t even know that was a thing that could happen. I had to google the shit. “Why does it feel like my whole body is being stabbed by thousands of tiny needles?”

* Speaking of “things”, Chinese food in India is a “thing”. They have their own interpretation of it, of course, just like every country does. But it is everywhere. If you ever visit India, you totally gotta try the Chinese food. I especially recommend the Hot & Sour soup at the Mewar Haveli hotel in Udaipur, Rajasthan.

* If you happen to fly out of the international airport in Delhi, leave at LEAST 3 hours to get through all the red tape.

* Mehrangarh, in Jodhpur, is still the coolest thing we’ve seen in India.