The colors of Rajasthan--Agra (Day 3)

Thursday January 16—Day 3 (Agra)

Our day started really early this morning (5am!) since we had to catch a train from New Delhi to Agra. Since it wasn’t an overnight, bunk-bed style train, we instead had comfy, reclining chairs. We were served a peppery omelet with biscuits, two slices of bread and curd (yogurt). It wasn’t a particularly yummy breakfast but it filled me up.

Our breakfast menu, some biscuits and tea bags

After the 3 hour train ride, we first went to the Red Fort, which was huge! I’m usually not a person that particularly likes forts and architecture, but the tour guide that we had made it interesting with all the stories. 

On a clear day, you can see the Taj Mahal from here

Monkey!!

The whole fort is about 2.5km around, but only 25% is accessible to the public. There’s a hall of mirrors that’s supposed to be beautiful, but is only open to celebrities :( A large portion of the fort that’s not open to the public though is an active military base.

Once we finished at the fort, we were able to check into our hotel rooms and have a quick lunch at the hotel before leaving for the Taj Mahal. The Taj Mahal was only a few minutes walk from our hotel, although you would never know it because you couldn’t see the Taj Mahal until you were pretty much inside the grounds of the Taj Mahal. Just like Disney, they have free shuttles from some of the hotels going to the Taj Mahal, so we took the open air shuttle for a quick ride to one of the Wonders of the World.

The view of Agra from our hotel's roof top

I was surprised to see that a lot of Agra and even the streets surrounding the Taj Mahal weren’t developed at all! They had roadside trinket kinds of shops and hawkers trying to force you to buy things from their shops, but other than that, there wasn’t much. The only signs of development was a Café Coffee Day chain café across the street from the Taj Mahal.

We made our way into the Taj Mahal entrance grounds, showed them our Rs 750 ticket ($12 US) and walked in. 

I was disappointed to find out that Intrepid didn’t have a guide or anything for us inside the Taj Mahal. But once you get inside the Taj Mahal, you realize you probably just want to soak up this wonder of the world and learn about the history later. Once you get through the entrance, there’s a red sandstone archway on each exit of the monument. Then once you walk past the red archway is when you finally see the Taj Mahal.

                                       

                                       

                                       

                                       

                                               

                                          

My experience with the Taj Mahal itself was interesting because honestly, I thought I would have more of an “oooo ahhhh” kind of reaction, but instead I just thought, “oh okay, so this is what it looks like up close”. We went on a cloudy, foggy day so our pictures on our cameras didn’t even show the Taj Mahal really well. Thank God for Photoshop!

After about two hours, I was ready to leave. Believe it or not, the Taj Mahal has never really ranked high on my bucket list. Rajasthan sure has, but never the Taj Mahal. After leaving, we went to the café and grabbed some coffee. Then once getting back to the hotel, some of us went to the rooftop to grab a drink and admire the aerial view of Agra, which wasn’t much. The rooftop though was quite surprising though! They had a swimming pool there and some tables set up for dinner and drinks. Not what I was expecting!

It was really nice though to just have time to sit and talk with the other people in my group over a Kingfisher beer. Before this, we hadn’t really had time to get to know each other so it was nice to have time to just catch up.

Soon enough, it was dinner time and at a local restaurant, I had cooked tomatoes stuffed with paneer with a tomatoey, cashew cream kind of sauce and some naan stuffed with paneer. It was delicious! Can you tell that I like my paneer?