A Beauty!
I have know idea where I’m up to and as you may have guessed from the photos I can not keep up with the name of the temples and the palaces we go to. Add to that I have all of today’s and yesterdays stuff floating around in my head which I will write up another time. I have at least got up the photos for the last entry and for this one and so I hope you at least find them amusing.
Looking back at my last entry I would guess this is all about the Taj Mahel and our time in Agra. Our journey to Agra was interesting. The road went from being non existent to a fully functional dual carrigeway during the day but not before we had to cross the central reservation to get round a more than broken down truck and then actually ran out of road (it hadn’t been completed and just stopped) which meant we went off road for a few k’s. This also meant getting the truck stuck but luckily that was only a minor issue. Up on arrival to Agra it was all very different. There was less cows, less litter and slightly more organisation of the traffic! We headed to the Taj at sunrise the next day. I wasn’t expecting much. It’s such an iconic building that has been seen so many times that you don’t think it will have much wow left. However just like with the Sydney opera house I was wrong! The Taj is a bloody awesome building and it’s size and detail of every marble stone is simply mind blowing. Even the crowds didn’t seem too bad. It took 22 years and 20,000 people to build the Taj which is understandable when you see the amount of detail that has gone in to it. Certainly a must see world treasure!
On the same day, we headed to Agra Fort which is reasonably impressive but the main reason for going I suppose is that the king who built the Taj (for his wife as a simple act of Love) got put under house arrest by his own sun in Agra Fort. The real kick in the teeth I suppose being that his quarters looked straight out back towards the Taj. We later went to the ‘baby Taj’ which was built before the big Taj Mahal as a kind of warm up exercise I suppose! Oh, I meant to say, the four towers of the big Taj are all leaning out slightly away from the main building, this in the event of an earthquake means the towers would fall away from the main building! In the evening we headed to the other side of the river to see the sunset with a view of the Taj from behind. It was probably one of the best sunsets I’ve seen, setting over the streets of Agra, very Indian!
We are now in Jaipur or the ‘Pink city’ and I suppose we are now getting a flavour of the more ‘typical’ India. I hate saying that any country has a typical image, but in this instance we are seeing more colour, spices, good markets etc but I’ll write more about here another time as right now I’m spent writing, as I am sure you are reading!
Trig Tales 