From door to door our next modes of transport would be: Auto-rickshaw to local bus station; local bus to Kota; auto-rickshaw to Kota station; 8h train to Agra; auto-rickshaw to hotel. Pretty normal stuff, but we dreaded the local bus part so much that we even considered spending the equivalent of a tenner on a taxi to Kota to avoid the unpleasantries of lugging our rucksacks and bags on a manky rust-bucket with tiny seats and a million people crammed into all corners of the bus. However, our fears where unfounded as the morning bus was in far better condition than any of the ones we checked out the day before and our journey (plus bag lugging) went smoothly. Our train journey was a little unexpected though; when we boarded around 2pm we expected it to be lively, but we boarded our carriage alone and everyone already in it appeared to be asleep.
Agra may have been important in the past and the guide book does list a few attractions, but most people I would guess come here to see only one, the Taj Mahal. And it is impressive. Though the administration does try their best to put tourists off with an exceedingly high entry fee, a ticket office that is about 1km from the gate and arbitrary rules for prohibited items made on a whim by security. For example, although 'playing cards' were not indicated anywhere on their comprehensive list of forbidden items, they were considered on the day too contaminating for the sacrosanct compound which contained the Taj. Perhaps a list of non-forbidden items would be easier and shorter.
We spent quite some time in the Taj compound taking the same kind of pictures everybody takes, sitting and reading, being chased by killer wasps and flailing our arms around like girls when a couple managed to get trapped in our shirts. After, we read some more on the roof of our hotel, which has a nice view of the Taj and finished the night off with a present to our digestive systems, Pizza Hut.
To get from place to place we had some superb hair-raising rides on the cycle-rickshaws. The old men who ride these contraptions are incredible; wiry yet powerful with an acute knack of fearlessly ploughing across busy roads and never flinching or being intimidated by the aggressive larger and faster vehicles blaring their horns or cutting them up.
Are you naive or is it me? Young men also try to ride cycle-rickshaws; the ones who survive are few and probably deaf and blind as well as supremely foolhardy. The other, and lots of them, are dead, squashed as flat as wasps in the gutter, and picked clean by passing vultures.
ReplyDeleteAnd for Cassie, there is tale told of Kerala where they have reduced the population radically by decreasing child mortality while increasing education, so that the average birth rate there is now quite modest. [apparently helped by lots of the population moving away [our masseuse in Goa was from Kerala] and relatively high maternal mortality rates.
Wish I were there though! love, Ruth