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We stand to leave and our guide stops us. “You don’t come here every hour, every day, every week, every month, every year. Sit! It took 22 years to build the Taj Mahal and you can’t even sit and enjoy it for 60 minutes.”
Bashful, we sit back down and take in the sight of white marble rising in soft peaks like meringue towards a clear Indian sky. An hour later, our wizened guide, Mr. Kahn, asks if we are ready to leave. We reply in the affirmative. He says, “Five more minutes…then we go.”
If you’d told me ten days earlier that I would spend a morning watching the sunrise over the Taj Mahal I would have told you a tale of work deadlines and impossibility. You see, ten days before I had no notion of going to India. It was during an opportune moment I spotted an advert for a trip to India and said to my boyfriend, “Shall we go? I know, it’s Monday and we’d have to be at the airport on Friday and we still have to get visa’s and plane tickets and leave but what if we just did it? What if we went to India and visited the Taj Mahal and went on a tiger safari?”
Five days later we found ourselves boarding a plane headed for Delhi via the desert city of Dubai. Everything had been a rush. We’d sped from the embassy clutching our visa’s to the travel agent to finalise some details, stood under a shower for a few seconds, bundled clothes into a bag without thinking and raced against time to the airport.
It had been dark for hours by the time we walked onto Indian soil for the first time but night had done nothing to suck the heat out of the Delhi air. Wall after wall of muggy heat hit us, as we followed our driver through polluted night skies to our parked (and thankfully air-conditioned) taxi. I had no idea what to expect as we drove past a line of old-fashioned cars and their for-hire drivers. The trip had been so spontaneous and rushed that I’d no time to form preconceptions of the country, no time to create an image of India that would suit me. All I had were vague notions of a continuous crush of one billion people, pushing and tugging and moving me around, and the mouth-watering thought of curry, and lots of it.
There was no curry that night though, just bed, and a merciful 9:30am rising time for our first glimpse of Delhi in day light. Our hotel was down a side road in the area of Karol Bagh, which you’ll find on a map of New Delhi, and which used to be a residential area before it turned into a popular retail area selling everything from silverwork to sari’s and chapatti’s. Taking a tuk-tuk, or auto rickshaw as the locals call it, from our hotel door to old Delhi we spent a morning exploring the red and white Jama Masjid, followed by the streets and alley ways of the retail centre of Old Delhi before heading to India Gate and the Gandhi Memorial Gardens.
Our whirlwind tour of Delhi over, we found ourselves on the train to Agra, roughly 200km south of Delhi, and the home of the Taj Mahal. As the train pulled out of the station we chugged past people using the train tracks as a toilet, oblivious to the train rolling by just meters away. The incessant Delhi smog began to lift as we trundled past farmers doing chores, young boys playing cricket and women in brightly coloured sari’s collecting wood. The train finally pulled to a stop in Agra and we headed out to find a taxi that could take us to our hotel.
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If you think that Agra is just the Taj Mahal you will be missing out on some of the greatest Mughal architecture of the region. The Mughal’s first set up their Imperial kingdom seat here in 1526 constructing not only the Agra Fort and the Taj Mahal but also Fatehpur Sikri where we spent the afternoon wandering through the red sandstone building. I wondered what it would have been like to live their in the 1500’s when the inhabitants even had a primitive form of air conditioning installed to keep the 3 wives and 49 concubines cool.
Agra, was a mix of delights and hardship, on one hand you run into all this beautiful architecture and marble handiwork, quaint testimonies to love and marriage and then on the other you walk through streets where the smell of ammonia greets you like a friend you are trying to avoid. I could never quite fathom whether I loved Agra or was repelled by it. I was drawn to the Taj Mahal, with love carved in each crevice of the building, love drawn down from the sky to the reflection in the water and then love laid to rest side-by-side and encircled with flowers of up to sixty separate precious stone fragments. On the other hand there was the city its self which was disorientating and forgotten love in a tangle of streets and monuments.
Leaving behind the Taj Mahal we headed into Tiger territory and the small, rural town of Sawai Madhopur. Our aim was to see a tiger in the wild. A feat which proved impossible in the two short days we had in the area. It seemed everywhere we went someone had seen a tiger “yesterday”. We visited a Hindi temple at sunset, and were told how just a few days before a tiger had walked up the side of the mountain and through the temple, but the evening we were there only Rhesus monkeys played.
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The quiet and relative cool of Sawai Madhopur was hard to leave as our train, the Mumbai Super Fast, pulled out of the station headed for Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan province. I knew once back in the city the sound of birds would disappear, there would be no stars to glimpse at night and we’d once again be greeted by the fragrance of ammonia round every other street corner. A few short hours later we heaved our backpacks on our back and exited the train in search of auto-rickshaw’s to take us to our hotel before heading out for some bargaining in the Pink City. Everywhere you walked, up-and-down the street young and old shopkeepers kept bidding for your attention holding out their wares saying, “Looking is free!”
After a night sleeping in 32 degree Celsius heat we spent the following day sight-seeing Jodhpur. The Jantar Mantar observatory and The City Palace, provided the mornings viewings followed by a lunch in the Palace Café – after all eating in a Palace isn’t an everyday occurrence for me. The afternoon was spent exploring the Meherangarh Fort, which although uninhabited provides the visitor with an idea of the war, honour and extravagance which once characterised the Rajputana. There is a rumour that the Kings war chest filled with jewels and precious metals still lies somewhere below its fortresses. We, however, were not lucky enough to find it on our visit.
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Our final day dawned in Jaipur and we made our way to the bus station for our trip back to Delhi. Our spontaneous trip was about to come to an end. I sat on the bus absorbed as much as I could of the Indian culture around me. The water buffalo immersed in the water, the camels tugging wooden carts laden with anything from straw to people, women in appearing like colourful wild flowers with babies in arms or baskets on their heads, traffic jostling for no particular place and people everywhere you look. We only had a 15 more hours to take in eight centuries of India and I wasn’t going to miss a thing!
Wendy Harbottle is a freelance writer who is based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She blogs at www.halfformedwish.blogspot.com.
Copyright © 2009 Wendy Harbottle
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