September 12: Agra, India (By Jeff)

We reached Agra in the early afternoon and only had the day to see the city, or in our case just the Taj Majal. After storing our bags at the train station and agreeing on a price for a riskshaw to chauffeur us around the day we were off. We refueled at McDonalds before arriving at the Taj Mahal and paid a ridiculous 750 Rupees for the entrance fee (Indian price is like 50 Rupees) and hired a guide to show us around for another 250 Rupees each. Being complete losers, we both left our cameras in our bags at the train station and were without any way to capture the number 1 man-made wonder of the world. This proved opportunistic for the countless photographers who harassed us upon entering, offering to take our picture in various locations and in super lame poses. This was our only way to have pictures so we spent 20 minutes posing after we only wanted like 2 pictures. The guy insisted on more and we went along making sure we had an understanding of what we were paying. It all worked fine, but of course there were people who followed us and took pictures behind our photographer of us posing. While this seems beyond creepy, there were too many people to tell to screw off. Finally, we were off to go see what we went there for and were stunned to see just how perfectly built and gorgeous the site truly is. Towering over 150 feet in the air the center of the Taj Mahal is surrounded by 4 pillars on each corner of the grounds, all that lean exactly 5 degrees outward towards the center structure. The entire structure is all made of white marble and very intricately carved down to the slightest detail. The entire building is just a mausoleum for the King and the Taj Mahal was dedicated all to the man’s 3rd wire. She was apparently the favorite as the other 2 wives were not given any sort of a similar burial. Our guide continued to lead us around and explain various historic significance and point out the symmetry or the entire grounds which was astounding.

What made this visit such a shame was the unrelenting attention every other Indian person gave us the entire time while trying to sneak in pictures. By this point we were fed up with the whole stopping to take pictures with random strangers and refused nearly everyone since our first experience in Mumbai. This was far different though as literally everywhere we turned and stopped there would be people who would crowd around us and ask us for a picture making it very distracting even to listen to our guide (who was useless in helping us). Most of the guys did their best to sneak pictures in of Liz to show their buddies and make up some bogus lies about having been with her (this is what we heard from one of our guides in another city, and the point when we stopped posing for any pictures). All in all it is a truly amazing site that everyone should experience at one point in their lives, but hopefully Indian people will be more used to seeing western people and not pester and annoy them during the entire visit. Upon leaving we had to deal with our angry photographer who wanted us to buy more than 3 pictures that he took, but most of them turned out pretty bad and he threw a bit of a tantrum. So after getting confrontational with several guys and seeing the whole Taj Mahal grounds we decided to take off and try to catch the train to Delhi that night which we were told by several sources that it was already sold out. Our rickshaw driver did his best to get us to take the late train for some reason but after insisting he take us to the train station for us to see for ourselves we were able to get on the train we wanted. We were not sure what our driver was trying to pull because we were not going to give him anymore money but he was persistent about telling us there was no way we would get on the fast train…turned out he was wrong.

We made it to Delhi around 10pm and without a hotel. We only needed a hotel for 1 night and somewhere near the airport because we had an early flight to Amritsar, but that was not easy to find at this time of the night. We chose to let some loser cab driver take us to a disgusting hotel that we overpaid for just for the 8 hours we would need the room to sleep. Our room smelled like mildew, the sheets were horribly stained, bugs in the room, and our damn cab driver even got a commission. We survived the night and got the hell out of there where we made it to the airport to run into another disaster. The Air India ticket agent misinformed us about when the boarding time was going to be and we showed up literally 2 minutes past when the gate closed. We pleaded with the man checking tickets but this man was a piece of crap and refused to let us on the plane despite the fact our bags were on board and would have to be removed. We waited at the airport for 5 hours, and had to pay another $20 each to get on the next flight…awful start to the day, but we eventually made it to Amritsar.


iPhone quality pictures