India day 6 - 9

Day 6 and 7: Agra Day 9 Orcha

We were up for sunrise at the Taj Mahal today. What an impressive structure. It is a mausoleum that the King built for his third wife. We also went to the Agra Fort and the Baby Taj Mahal, which was built first. Both Taj’s have impressive inlay work done on them. All of the colour you see on each building is tiny, tiny pieces of hand carved stone. We saw artisans still doing the piece work today, time consuming, expensive and laborious work. The Taj Mahal took 20 years to build and 22 000 people worked on it.

The Baby Taj Mahal was quite impressive and most people don’t make the effort to go across town and see it.

Agra has its own aroma that is not so pleasant. The smell of sewage is pretty bad in spots. We did a lot of walking last night and it was hard to get the sent out of my nostrils once we returned to the hotel. There was a festival on last night, a huge celebration in India. We were amongst the masses. At one point our picture was taken and a couple of groups of us ended up in two different India newspapers. The caption said “even the tourists cannot stay away from the festivities.” So that was pretty neat to see two different photos of us in Indian newspapers.

On our way to Agra we stopped at Fatehpur Sikri, a temple and a stair well. Fatehpur Sikri was pretty interesting. It was a palace created by the king in 1760. He was Mughal, from Mongolia and was married to three wives at the same time and had ~400 concubines. One of his wives was Islamic, one was Catholic and the other was Hindu. He had all three living with him. Each wife had their own separate part of the palace and place of worship. We thought he was a bit of a renascent man to have wives from three different religions. He believed in one god and was excepting of all religions. Where he spoke to his ministers from there was a pillar that has symbols from six religions on it and to think he spoke from the top of this pillar in the 18 century. Jain, Mughal, Catholic, Hindu, Islam and Persian were represented in symbols.

Jain’s are naked people. They don’t believe in killing things, so they walk with a fan sweeping the ground in front of them or where they sit so they do not kill any bugs. They don’t wear cloth’s or believe in any modern means of transportation etc, so they will walk from town to town if need be. Now that being said if they don’t believe in modern conveniences I am not sure why I saw and add for a wife in the newspaper. Jain looking for wife. That is another thing. Because they have arranged marriages in India the newspaper has pages of want ads. Brides wanted, husbands wanted. We had an English paper to entertain ourselves while riding the train. Education and fair skinned are common things they are looking for.

The train was nice. We had breakfast and depending on what was on your tray you ate it or not. It was just a two hour trip and it was a pretty nice car. The breakfast was bread, ketchup and a bag of mixed nuts. Interesting. Or an omelet, jam and bread. I opted to pull out my peanut butter and had that with jam on the bread, not going for the egg on a train.

We have arrived in Orcha and are staying at a nice hotel in deluxe tents. They have a toilet, shower, electricity, a/c, TV, the place has a cloudy pool and it is on a river. It is a nice laid back town with no hassle while you walk through. If you want your haircut there are stalls lining the side of the road.

The trip is going smoothly and I am loving not having to figure out my own transportation and accommodation. The streets are so small and there are so many places tuk tuk drivers do not know where things are. It would be such a hassle. I am loving being able to rock up to a new place and being dropped at our hotel. I also don't seem to be having any real side effects from my malaria pills this time, so that is great too. Just tons of dreams, all night long, but at least they are all pleasant.

  Click on this link for pictures from Taj Mahal, Agra and Orcha