With one week left in India, we embarked on our last (and most ambitious) sightseeing trip: a weekend in New Delhi and Agra, the site of the Taj Mahal. Originally, a Delhi/Agra weekend had not been in our plans for the month due to the sheer distance from where we were staying in the south - point to point, the distance between Manipal and New Delhi is equivalent to traveling from Orlando to Boston and back in the space of 3 days. Realizing that this would be the first and last time that most of us would be in India, however, we figured it was worth the potential aggravation in order to see the country's most famous landmark.
Our travel route was not particularly straightforward; from Manipal we hired a van to drive us the 2 hours to Mangalore, where we caught a flight to Bangalore, and then a final flight to New Delhi. From there, our plan was to spend a night in a hotel and wake up early the next morning to drive 3 hours to Agra. The Agra drive got off to a troubling start when we awoke to find Delhi blanketed in a thick haze of white fog, causing the driver to pick us up about 20 minutes late with profuse apologies. We clambered into the van and were immediately horrified to realize that despite the total lack of visibility, the driver was hurtling down the highway at a speed that was, if anything, faster than the usual breakneck velocity we'd grown uneasily accustomed to in India.
"We're not in a... hurry," Cody ventured about a half hour into the ride, as the van careened wildly around a car that hadn't been visible until we'd almost rammed into its rear bumper.
"I must go fast," the driver said apologetically. "Because I was late this morning."
"No no," we countered with alarm. "It's fine. We don't mind. We like going slow." In the rear view mirror, our driver's eyes shifted dubiously. From my seat in the third row I took a moment to savor the quiet thankfulness I felt at someone else shouldering the responsibility of interacting with the driver, who had also blithely informed us that although he liked his job, he hated driving Chinese people.
"Oh," Cody had answered, a study in politesse.
The fog persisted as the sun rose, making it impossible to see even a few feet in front of the van. We worried that we wouldn't even be able to see the Taj through such heavy cover, if we even managed to survive the drive. "Look behind you," Andrea said at one point, turning from her seat in the middle row of the van to point at something visible out our back window. I followed her gaze to a Greyhound-type bus barreling down the road directly behind us, bearing the word "PANICKER'S" in large type above its windshield. I scrambled to take a picture but wasn't quite fast enough; PANICKER'S bus disappeared, like a memory, into the mist.
One of the services we were offered when we booked the driver was a complementary guided tour of the Taj Mahal, but we hadn't decided whether our previous experiences with tour guides had been worthwhile enough to accept this offer. We debated back and forth for a few minutes and finally settled on a compromise; we'd meet the guide at the Taj and begin the tour, but go our own way if we didn't feel that it was a value-add upon arrival. The driver, who hadn't realized that our conversation had shifted to sundry other topics over the course of about an hour, interjected to ask if we'd made a decision. "We'll do the guided tour," Cody confirmed.
"I feel sorry for your boyfriends," the driver opined, alluding to the excessive amount of time he assumed it had taken us to make up our minds.
"Hey, remember when our driver was a casual racist and a misogynist?" Laura said to me in a low tone.
"Sure do," I said. "Suuure do."
The fog lifted just as we approached Agra, affording us a view of its dilapidated urban outskirts. Elissa had warned us prior to our departure that Agra was an extremely poor, ill-maintained city, despite housing the number one tourist destination in India. From the windows of the van we could see women washing laundry in wide rivers strewn with trash, as monkeys skittered from rooftop to rooftop and kicked up clouds of dry dust from the closely-packed crumbling brick buildings. The driver deposited us on a busy street that wasn't immediately obvious as any sort of entry point for a famous monument, and our tour guide materialized out of nowhere to chaperone the rest of the walk to the Taj.
"I guess I thought there'd be like, a parking lot," someone mused. "Like, this is how you get to the Taj Mahal? You just get dropped on the side of some random thoroughfare and have to weave and bob through traffic?"
"I think it's safer to have no expectations whatsoever," I said, as a rickshaw rounded the corner and missed running over my feet by mere inches.
"Follow me!" the guide said with a wide smile, leading us through a gate and past a caravan of camels ferrying tourists to the ticket counters.
There's a bench at the Taj Mahal, colloquially referred to as Lady Di's Chair, which was made famous when Princess Diana and Prince Charles visited India in 1992. Diana went alone to the Taj, and after the royal couple divorced her solo shot in front of the world's most famous monument to romantic grief seemed like something of a premonition.
Today, tourists swarm the bench in order to recreate the iconic pose or stage their own. "Professional" photographers jostle for business, arranging visitors in various stances and snapping shot after shot in quick succession before hustling the previous group away so the next can sit.
Also popular: forced perspective shots that make the subject appear to be grasping, touching, or leaning up against the building in the distance.
Two of the four towers had scaffolding around them at the time of our visit; our guide told us that this was for cleaning work that had to be done periodically to keep the stone white.
"How do they do the cleaning for the main part of the building?" someone asked.
"Only the towers need this," the guide said. "For the main building, rainwater is enough to clean the marble."
"But... aren't the towers also made of marble? Isn't it the same stone?"
"Yes," the guide confirmed.
"...I'm confused."
A few minutes away from the Taj Mahal lies the Red Fort of Agra. Near the end of his life, Shah Jahan was deposed by his son and imprisoned in the Red Fort. He is rumored to have died in a white marble tower that overlooked the grand monument he'd built years before.
Random Indian men demand pictures with us at every Indian attraction we visit, and the Red Fort was no exception.
We were grateful to get back into the van after our long day of travel. As we wove through the streets of Agra, I thought about the contradictions the city holds - crumbling infrastructure surrounding pristine monuments; a larger-than-life Muslim mausoleum in a city of 85% Hindus; jetsetting tourists brushing past impoverished locals. In so many ways, Agra is a microcosm of its much larger environs, the simultaneous struggles and successes of a developing country trying to figure out what it deserves from outsiders and what it owes to itself. The entrance price for the Taj Mahal is 20 rupees (about 30 cents) for Indians. For foreigners, it's $11.
We had initially balked at the price inflation, but once you're there, entering and exiting through the gates where dozens of scruffy children dart out into your path to hawk snow globes and postcards and other trinkets, where overworked camels froth at the mouth as they pull visitors to their destination, where amputees sit on the ground and gaze up at you dolefully, one hand stretched out for spare change -- well, that's when $11 feels less like indignance and more like shame. For those of us with the means to book flights and hotels and private drivers, the Taj Mahal is an exotic and breathtaking day trip. For those attempting to eke out their living on the derelict streets just outside its gates, proximity to one of the "New7Wonders of the World" must seem much less magical.
Agra is a particularly stark example, but places like it exist all over the world - a reminder that our lives, our luck at having more, depends on many others having much less. It's not a comfortable feeling. But then, it's not supposed to be.
Our travel route was not particularly straightforward; from Manipal we hired a van to drive us the 2 hours to Mangalore, where we caught a flight to Bangalore, and then a final flight to New Delhi. From there, our plan was to spend a night in a hotel and wake up early the next morning to drive 3 hours to Agra. The Agra drive got off to a troubling start when we awoke to find Delhi blanketed in a thick haze of white fog, causing the driver to pick us up about 20 minutes late with profuse apologies. We clambered into the van and were immediately horrified to realize that despite the total lack of visibility, the driver was hurtling down the highway at a speed that was, if anything, faster than the usual breakneck velocity we'd grown uneasily accustomed to in India.
"We're not in a... hurry," Cody ventured about a half hour into the ride, as the van careened wildly around a car that hadn't been visible until we'd almost rammed into its rear bumper.
"I must go fast," the driver said apologetically. "Because I was late this morning."
"No no," we countered with alarm. "It's fine. We don't mind. We like going slow." In the rear view mirror, our driver's eyes shifted dubiously. From my seat in the third row I took a moment to savor the quiet thankfulness I felt at someone else shouldering the responsibility of interacting with the driver, who had also blithely informed us that although he liked his job, he hated driving Chinese people.
"Oh," Cody had answered, a study in politesse.
The fog persisted as the sun rose, making it impossible to see even a few feet in front of the van. We worried that we wouldn't even be able to see the Taj through such heavy cover, if we even managed to survive the drive. "Look behind you," Andrea said at one point, turning from her seat in the middle row of the van to point at something visible out our back window. I followed her gaze to a Greyhound-type bus barreling down the road directly behind us, bearing the word "PANICKER'S" in large type above its windshield. I scrambled to take a picture but wasn't quite fast enough; PANICKER'S bus disappeared, like a memory, into the mist.
One of the services we were offered when we booked the driver was a complementary guided tour of the Taj Mahal, but we hadn't decided whether our previous experiences with tour guides had been worthwhile enough to accept this offer. We debated back and forth for a few minutes and finally settled on a compromise; we'd meet the guide at the Taj and begin the tour, but go our own way if we didn't feel that it was a value-add upon arrival. The driver, who hadn't realized that our conversation had shifted to sundry other topics over the course of about an hour, interjected to ask if we'd made a decision. "We'll do the guided tour," Cody confirmed.
"I feel sorry for your boyfriends," the driver opined, alluding to the excessive amount of time he assumed it had taken us to make up our minds.
"Hey, remember when our driver was a casual racist and a misogynist?" Laura said to me in a low tone.
"Sure do," I said. "Suuure do."
The fog lifted just as we approached Agra, affording us a view of its dilapidated urban outskirts. Elissa had warned us prior to our departure that Agra was an extremely poor, ill-maintained city, despite housing the number one tourist destination in India. From the windows of the van we could see women washing laundry in wide rivers strewn with trash, as monkeys skittered from rooftop to rooftop and kicked up clouds of dry dust from the closely-packed crumbling brick buildings. The driver deposited us on a busy street that wasn't immediately obvious as any sort of entry point for a famous monument, and our tour guide materialized out of nowhere to chaperone the rest of the walk to the Taj.
"I guess I thought there'd be like, a parking lot," someone mused. "Like, this is how you get to the Taj Mahal? You just get dropped on the side of some random thoroughfare and have to weave and bob through traffic?"
"I think it's safer to have no expectations whatsoever," I said, as a rickshaw rounded the corner and missed running over my feet by mere inches.
"Follow me!" the guide said with a wide smile, leading us through a gate and past a caravan of camels ferrying tourists to the ticket counters.
Several of us in the group felt like morons for not fully realizing until we visited that the Taj Mahal is a Muslim structure. This gate, bordered by calligraphy taken from the Quran, serves as a grand entryway for the mausoleum and its grounds.
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| The Taj Mahal, completed in 1643, was built by the Moghul emperor Shah Jahan to house the tomb of his favorite wife. |
There's a bench at the Taj Mahal, colloquially referred to as Lady Di's Chair, which was made famous when Princess Diana and Prince Charles visited India in 1992. Diana went alone to the Taj, and after the royal couple divorced her solo shot in front of the world's most famous monument to romantic grief seemed like something of a premonition.
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| Princess Diana, 1992 |
Also popular: forced perspective shots that make the subject appear to be grasping, touching, or leaning up against the building in the distance.
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| At right, our tour guide (in grey) takes a picture that makes Shira's pose look as though she is touching the top of the Taj. From my vantage point, I decided to make her look as though she was touching the top of Andrea's head. |
Two of the four towers had scaffolding around them at the time of our visit; our guide told us that this was for cleaning work that had to be done periodically to keep the stone white.
"How do they do the cleaning for the main part of the building?" someone asked.
"Only the towers need this," the guide said. "For the main building, rainwater is enough to clean the marble."
"But... aren't the towers also made of marble? Isn't it the same stone?"
"Yes," the guide confirmed.
"...I'm confused."
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| The towers were also built on a slight slant away from the mausoleum. This way, if they ever fall, they won't crash inward and destroy the monument. |
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| The finial on the top of the central dome acts as a lightning rod so that the building won't be damaged if struck during a storm. |
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| View from the Taj Mahal back towards the entry gate |
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| Rachel in front of the entrance to the Red Fort |
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| At one time, the Red Fort's moat was full of crocodiles |
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| Our tour guide telling us the history of the Red Fort, which has existed on this site in various incarnations since 1066 AD |
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| Not a bad bedroom view |
From what I understood, this well-type feature funneled hot and cold water through the walls of the fort to regulate its temperature, a la Winterfell from Game of Thrones:
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| This courtyard is bordered by a number of individual rooms which, the guide informed us, housed the emperor's thousands of concubines |
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| Shira strikes a (yoa) pose |
Random Indian men demand pictures with us at every Indian attraction we visit, and the Red Fort was no exception.
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| "May I put my arms around you?" this dude asked, and Andrea sighed inaudibly. |
We had initially balked at the price inflation, but once you're there, entering and exiting through the gates where dozens of scruffy children dart out into your path to hawk snow globes and postcards and other trinkets, where overworked camels froth at the mouth as they pull visitors to their destination, where amputees sit on the ground and gaze up at you dolefully, one hand stretched out for spare change -- well, that's when $11 feels less like indignance and more like shame. For those of us with the means to book flights and hotels and private drivers, the Taj Mahal is an exotic and breathtaking day trip. For those attempting to eke out their living on the derelict streets just outside its gates, proximity to one of the "New7Wonders of the World" must seem much less magical.
Agra is a particularly stark example, but places like it exist all over the world - a reminder that our lives, our luck at having more, depends on many others having much less. It's not a comfortable feeling. But then, it's not supposed to be.
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