Part Two
Tourists on Speed

It will be the weekend before Ron can post the wonderful photos he took of this trip. He leaves today from Nuwara Eliya and will return Sunday.

We got up early on Saturday and left at 8:00 to avoid traffic. I failed to mention how impressed we were that in a city of about 14 million there still is a lot of green spaces in Delhi, probably mostly in New Delhi although I believe the Raj Ghat is in OD and it was a lovely park. The trip to Agra where the Taj Mahal is located is a five-hour ride. The roads are far superior to SL roads but at times rough. We saw lots of camels pulling carts loaded with all manner of goods, and men on bikes carrying what looked like sugar cane but turned out to be animal feed that hung out four feet from each side of the bike. Moving goods in India takes many forms: hand pulled carts where you see men straining their guts out under the weight of their load, rickshaws which are a bicycle with a small platform for a load or a small bench seat for passengers, motorcycles, trishaws, donkeys, mules, camels, tractors and trucks of every description but all overloaded way beyond their capacity as mentioned before.

The little ‘mud’ huts with thatch roofs fascinated us. They looked like loaves of bread houses and we learned these were storage units for dung that is used as fuel for cooking in India. These storage sheds were probably four to five feet high and often had what looked like inscribed decorations in the outside wall. I am not sure if these huts were made of mud or dung. In addition there were round ‘straw houses’ again with a thatch roof. These were storage for animal feed. Hopefully some photos of these will be posted later.

Throughout the ride, we marveled at out how many people could cram into a trishaw. The trishaws in India are slightly bigger than in SL and they are constructed with ‘extras’ to hold more people. They have a small bumper so you can stand on the bumper and hold on for dear life. We counted and discovered one trishaw have eleven people riding in it. Later we saw many that had more, probably 15 people total but we were driving too fast to get an accurate count. But you could tell there were considerably more than the one with eleven by the number of those hanging out the sides. Truly amazing, particularly when you consider the weather: hot and humid. People are staked two and three deep sitting on top of one another. Oy.

We checked into our hotel, a lovely accommodation in the town center for a whopping $40 and ate lunch and headed for what is called the Red Fort, made of red sandstone. Originally constructed as a military fort by Emperor Akbar in 1565, by Shah Jahan’s time it had become partially a palace. The walls around the fort stretch for 2.5 km, surrounded by a moat over 10 meters wide. The fort is on the banks of the Yamuna River. You can see the Taj Mahal from this site. When his son imprisoned Shah Jahan who built the Taj as a monument of love to his deceased wife, he could look out his window in the fort and see the Taj. He was imprisoned for eight years until his death. The fort is a city within a city. We were quite struck with the beautiful architecture here, as it looked a lot more like a palace than a fort. There were still remnants in the ceilings and walls of inlaid semi precious stones such as onyx, carnelian and malachite. We saw halls of public and private audiences. The fort was built of red sandstone with some parts of the palace built in white marble. When I first saw the Taj Mahal from this site looking down the river, it brought tears to my eyes. What an incredible setting and sight!

From the Red Fort we went to Taj Mahal. You cannot drive onto the grounds as air pollution has started to do damage to the building. So you park about a km away and a vehicle with an electric motor takes to the rest of the way. We hired a guide who showed us things we may have missed otherwise. As background, the Taj was constructed by Emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his wife Mumtaz Mahal, Chosen of the Palace. It has been described as the most extravagant monument ever built for love. The emperor was heartbroken when Mumtaz to whom he had been married for 17 years, died in childbirth in 1631 after producing 14 children.

Construction of the Taj began in the same year and was not completed until 1653. Workers were recruited from all over India and Asia and in total 20,000 people worked on the building. Experts were brought from as far away as Europe. The main architect came from Iran. The Shah intended to build a second one, across the river in black marble as his tomb. He wanted it black ‘to be in her shadow’. Before he could embark on this second masterpiece he was deposed by his son and imprisoned in the palace where he could view her tomb.

The Taj is constructed of white marble and inlaid with semiprecious stones. The workmanship is exquisite. The building is almost 400 years old yet remarkably well preserved. Inlaid also into the marble is calligraphy from the Koran. Onyx was used for the calligraphy. The Shan is buried with his wife in the basement, out of public view. However there are two ‘false’ tombs, again in white marble with inlaid stone, in the main chamber of the mausoleum. Apparently this was a common practice in mausoleums of this type. There are beautiful carved marble screens that let in light. Symmetry is the dominant feature of this monument. Everything is balanced and in symmetry: the gates to the grounds, the reflecting pools, the walkways, Mutaz’s tomb, etc. The Taj overlooks the Yumana River. Everyone says you should go to the Taj at different times of the day to see how the light plays on the marble. We actually saw this as the sun was low in the sky and if you walked around the building, the marble was a slightly different color, depending on how much sunlight there was. We felt totally satisfied with the experience and didn’t feel the need to return at sunrise.

At each site, the Red Fort and the Taj we encountered the most aggressive vendors I have ever encountered. They were so aggressive at the Red Fort when we went in, I put up my umbrella coming out to shield my face, denying them eye contact. One vendor grabbed my umbrella and pulled it up so he could shove his wares in my face. Bad mistake! I snarled ferociously ‘stop it!’ and he quickly backed away. As a friend of mine used to say “Mess with the bull, you get the horn”. Only he didn’t use the word ‘mess’. In an effort to not offend any readers, let’s just say it rhymes with truck! The Taj receives 4,000-5,000 visitors a day. Indians pay 20 Indian rupees (40 cents) and foreigners pay 750 rupees, about $15. This is the low season and our guide is lucky to get one-two tours a week. In the high season he gets one to two a day. He asked for 475 Indian rupees for the guiding service, just about $10.

As we are traveling through three states in northern India, I am reading a funny book called Holy Cow by a woman who lived in Delhi for two years and wrote the book about her experiences. She points out how men pee whenever and wherever they wish in India. I noticed. Other things I noticed here, different from other parts of India I had seen: women are more apt to cover their faces, either partially or completely, using the end of their sari. It is a more casual practice than you see with Muslim women. Several times I saw women biting the sari in order to cover part of the face, more often I saw women pull the sari end over their heads looking through the gauzy material to find their way. I asked a guide in Jaipur if the Muslim rule for two hundred years had been the birth of this tradition. He said that purdah (the seclusion of women from the public) started as a result of Muslim men carrying off the beautiful Indian women. They covered their faces so the men could not see their beauty. I never know fact from fiction with guides…at any rate it also influenced the architecture as there are small windows with screens usually on the second floor that allow the women to look at the daily life on the street while remaining protected in the home/palace. One building we viewed in Jaipur was built at an 85-degree angle so it made it almost impossible to see inside.

This is getting a wee bit long so I’ll cut it off for now and continue with the next posting: part three.