Jaipur and Agra - India

Jaipur
We arrived in Juipur late on Thursday 28th January and were soon being whisked away from the airport in a taxi on the way to the hotel. Our first impression of the city was really good. It seemed a lot quieter than Mumbai....not a horn hooting could be heard for miles, the streets were well maintained and clean, there were no homeless sleeping on the pavements or in doorways and rubbish was minimal, so we were excited to see what the other side of India looked like when we were finally checked in and warm in our beds.... little did we know what was to great us the next day!

We woke up well refreshed after a good nights sleep and met the gang in the beautiful gardens at the front of our hotel for breakfast. The hotel building was very colonial and we felt like we were in a scene from an old movie. As the sun beat down we ate our delicious spread and drank cups of chi. Once we were finished we made our way back indoors to do a few bookings for our onward journey, checked into our new hotel and headed off on the walking tour of the town which our tour guide Greg led. Wow! Jaipur by day and Jaipur by night are two completely different places! We took a walk through the old town and had chosen one of the busiest days of the week... market day. The streets were crammed with auto rickshaws, cars, trucks, buses, horse drawn carts, camels and ox wagons. On our walk we were taken through a number of bazaars’ all plentiful with fragrant spices and teas as well as bright fabrics and flowers.

The people of this town are wonderful, they offer help without being asked and children are desperate to have their photo taken and want nothing in exchange. We made our way past the Iswari Minar Swarga and the Tripolia gate where we saw our first snake charmer doing his thing. This all took a huge amount of time because the town is so incredibly over populated! Between the people and the traffic and let’s not forget the sacred cows that are allowed to roam freely it’s difficult to move at any kind of pace.

After a stop at the Water Palace and a drive passed the Red Fort, we ended the walk with a late afternoon lunch at a lovely restaurant called Natraj. There we had the tastiest vegetarian curries before heading back to our hotel for a little nap. The sights and sounds of the day had truly drained us!

We met a little later and after a few attempts to get a taxi or an auto rickshaw to take us up to Tiger Fort to see the view of the city by night, we were disappointingly unsuccessful so we made our way back to the hotel for a few games of cards before bed. It was to be an early start the next day with our train leaving for Agra at 6.10 am!

Juipur is another one of those crazy busy cities in India. Here are our highlights and lowlights:
- The people are lovely and super friendly without wanting anything in return
- This city is riddled with poverty, it’s just too sad to see
- Beautiful bazaars
- Litter and waste lines the streets of this town

Agra
We were dropped off by our taxi at Jaipur station just before 6.00 am for our 5 hour train to Agra. The floors of the station made a resting place for passengers and homeless alike and bodies were strewn all over the concourse. Unfortunately, every corner was also used as a toilet and the smell could at times be unbearable.

As we stood at the platform our train pulled into the station.... Our HA1 2nd class carriage approached us...... it was packed to the brim, people filled the seats and passageways and bodies were hanging out of doors.....I wish I could describe the look on our faces! Luckily that’s not where we had to sit for this five hour journey, rather we were a little further up the carriage were the sleeper car was to be turned into seats. This however didn’t happen. It’s not like Thailand were you are chucked out of your bunk as you near the station stop and a super fast train attendant removes all the bedding and makes up the beds into seats for the new oncoming passengers, nope..... we had to make our way through sleeping passengers in the dark and dispose of used bedding before we could settle in our allocated seats. We also struggled to fold the beds into seats, though this wasn’t too much of a problem as we were only too happy to catch a few winks.

We finally arrived at Agra Cannt train station and it was just as we had been warned..... hell! Hoards of taxi and auto rickshaw drivers bombarded us with offers to get to our hotel. The people are incredibly pushy in Agra and their persistence can be infuriating at times. As we got into our auto rickshaw, I remembered the juices and sandwiches which we had left in my bag and reached in to give to one of the little girls who had approached us for some money. In seconds there was a hoard of little raga muffins desperately grabbing in the hope to get something to eat for the day.... it’s a very heart sore thing to see.

Once we were at Hotel Sheela and checked in, we had the most average curry lunch in all of India at the hotel restaurant. Thoroughly disappointed at the lunch as well as the hotel in general we headed off to see the Taj Mahal and hoped we’d have better luck there and boy did we....! As we entered via the South gate, through the inner compound and under the red sandstone gateway we could see the Taj in all her glory. No image of this palace could ever prepare for the true beauty you see for yourself. It’s quite simply incredible!

Once we had walked the gardens as well as the inside of the memorial we jumped into our auto rickshaw and headed to Agra Fort, Mahal, Itimad-Ud-Daulah (baby Taj) and the Chin Ka Rauze monument (where I met the sweetest, shyest, lovely little local boy of about 5 years old) before heading to the North side of the Taj Mahal across the river so that we could catch sight of this beautiful monument at sunset.

After a packed day of sightseeing we were ready for some dinner and we decided on a recommendation in the Lonely Planet. When we asked our drivers to take us there, they were incredibly insistent that they had somewhere far better that we should try and along the way we should stop at a few shops. After a huge amount of aggravated discussion we convinced them that we were not interested in their recommendation for dinner or for shopping. Needless to say after a short drive the drivers pulled into a parking that showed no sign of being a restaurant and we were ushered into a Persian rug store. Once we made it out of the store and were thoroughly irritated the guys finally got the idea and took us to our restaurant, where we said goodbye and good riddance!

Dinner was fabulous despite the constant power cuts and being plunged into darkness for a couple of minutes at a time! We even managed to have a beer with our meal. As the majority of the locals do not drink we had not had a beer in a while and were thrilled when our waiter told us they had bottles of Kingfisher as cold as ice in the fridge. After dinner it was home to bed as we had another early morning start the next day.

Agra is not a pretty city, and the people have an incredibly hard life in this poverty stricken town here are our highlights and lowlights:
- The Taj Mahal is quite possibly the most beautiful sight
- The people are very pushy in this part of India – we were warned by the locals in Jaipur before we even arrived!
- Apart from the few stunning monuments there is not much else to see in this town