Agra and the Taj Mahal 8/6

We arrived in Agra yesterday, fairly late in the afternoon after a long drive. Pal wanted to cook some fish for us so spent a couple of hours at the hotel while he went to get and prepare the fish after which he picked us up and took us to a local restaurant. He referred to this as a proper Indian restaurant, somewhere where all the locals eat. It was very busy with a lot of people coming and going from the small tables. All the cooking is done at the front of the shop, so anyone waiting can see their food being prepared. The fish was really very nice and we just had it with some dahl, mixed veg curry and some chapati and rice. Simple but good. We were up at 6am to see the Taj Mahal this morning, we were dropped off about a kilometre down the road as there is a limit on vehicle emissions near to the monument (doesn’t seem to be a serious deterrent to locals driving and setting fire to rubbish though) and we got a ride on an electric bus down the road. Once through the security check (Kirsten’s iPod had to be put in the cloakroom) we set off to see the Taj Mahal just as the sun was striking the east side. For once, all the guidebooks and everything that you read about it is absolutely true, it is stunning. I won’t waste words trying to describe it, it’s simply beautiful. We spent almost three hours sitting to admire the view from various angles, as well as having a look inside the mausoleum. Agra itself isn’t terribly interesting by comparison, it’s a modern, dirty and dusty Indian city. We had some lunch in the afternoon with Pal as it’s our last day with him, after which we had a bit of a wander around a local mall. Our train departed Agra for Varanasi at 8.50pm so Pal dropped us off about 7pm. We have mixed feelings about him, we really appreciated him as a safe driver and as a good guide (and a friendly one at that) but we are fairly certain we’ve been scammed a bit by him, we are just not sure by how much. However, he reckons we’ll get an invite to his house for dinner when we are back in Delhi so we’ll see how we go. We had a porter to help us get all our crap on the train, we are lugging a bit around as trying to get some stuff posted at the post office this afternoon was a bit of a failure, seemed the staff were looking for a bit of an additional handout to get the job done. We met a Swedish girl on the train who was telling us it took an hour to get a parcel wrapped and sent recently - we are glad we didn’t persist despite the weight we are carrying. It seems that our perspective on the Vietnamese train system has changed a bit after riding on the Indian version. The sleeper carriage has three bunks each side in each ‘room’, with about five or six ‘rooms’ in all, as well as additional bunks out in the corridor. The entire carriage is open so our main concern was theft (we’ve heard mixed reports) as well as all the racket of people crammed in together. The Swedish girl reckoned it was her last train trip for a while, she’d been in India for two months travelling around. I reckon one train trip was enough for me to decide! We do have tickets on the train back to Delhi though. After that I don’t think we’ll do it again.