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