Today we left Delhi for Agra, which was a 3 hour drive away. It was quite an eventful journey - they drive crazily in India, it seems there are no rules of the road and drivers squeeze in to any little gap there is, but it seems even worse on the motorway! Firstly, forget about the lines in the road - everyone was all over the place and often straddling the lanes (including our driver!). Secondly, forget that you are all supposed to be going in the same direction, we saw cars coming down the slipways the wrong way, and even along the hard shoulder which seems to be used as a normal lane anyway!
In the first half hour of the journey, our driver had to swerve out the way of a cow sauntering across the road, a bus burst its tyre in front of us, and we saw a jeep with 8 men hanging off the outside of it - remember this is on a motorway where everyone is bombing along! Peter and I just looked at each other and carried on looking out the window! You will be glad to know that we got to Agra unscathed!
Our hotel in Agra is very nice although the staff are bordering on being a bit too attentive for our liking which we are just not used to - when we arrived we went to have some lunch in the hotel restaurant and we had about 4 people come to us to apologise that our room wasn't ready (even though we were early for check in) including the Manager, and I lost count the amount of people who asked if our lunch was OK, including one of the chefs who came rushing out when he noticed that Peter had eaten most of his chips saying "more chips sir?"
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| Our hotel room |
After lunch were back out sightseeing, with our first stop being Agra Fort, a 16th-century Mughal fortress built of red sandstone.
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| Outside Agra Fort |
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| View of the Taj Mahal from Agra Fort |
After a look around, our next stop was Tomb of I'timād-ud-Daulah better known as Baby Taj as it is considered a draft version of the Taj Mahal. We had a walk round the gardens and then went in to the tomb where we suddenly noticed that everyone had shoe coverings on to protect the tomb - we tiptoed out slightly horrified but we had completely missed the sign outside - I am glad no one noticed!
Our final stop of the day was Mehtab Bagh which are some gardens along the Yamuna River in Agra, but you don't go for the gardens.......it has something far more interesting over the otherside of the river.....
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| The Taj Mahal! |
We will be visiting the Taj Mahal tomorrow at sunrise but it was lovely to sit across from it and just take it all in.
One thing we have noticed about Agra is that we have swapped the stray dogs of Delhi for cows - they are everywhere!
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