Travels in India with too many books

I've been procrastinating writing this as we've covered quite a lot of ground and I wasn't looking forward to going over everything. However, I believe it can quite easily be summarised by the following: go to North India, see what you have to see, and get out of there. To linger is to be a masochist.

We caught the train to Agra and arrived, naturally, a couple of hours later than expected. Pulling up at our hotel around 11pm feeling grimy and exhausted, we checked in and happened to see some people that we met briefly in Pushkar. Stupidly, we stayed up talking and drinking rum until about 2am. After 4 hours sleep, we awoke and went to see the Taj Mahal, something I've been looking forward to.

Despite the cloud that obscured the Sun as it crept above the horizon, the Taj didn't disappoint. It is simply one of the most, if not the most beautiful buildings I have seen. The symmetry and proprtion of the domes and minarets are incomparable. As the Sun gets higher, the colour of the building reflects the changing daylight. I'm sure that on a clearer day it would have been even better. The entry fee, about 30 times greater to us foreigners than for Indians, is a bit steep, but you know you can't go to North India without going in, even if you can get a decent view from some of the guesthouse rooftops and from the river at the rear.

The rest of the city is another big grimy sprawing mess. However there are a couple of other must sees. The mausoleum of Emperor Akbar (the grandad of Empereor Shah Jehan who built the Taj), about 10km North of the city, is a must. The Islamic patterning on the outside and inside, and the vast interior gardens where deer run about, make it a welcome break from the outside. The Red Fort is a slight improvement on the equivalent in Jaipur as there is a lot less mess, but equally here as with there, the bare marble walls fail to give an impression of the opulence of the Royal household that resided there.

And that's it really. The 'Baby Taj', the mausoleum of Shah Jehan's Vizier, is simply a let down compared with the other two. You can easily visit these things in a day. So, after a day in Agra, we boarded the 7pm train to Delhi. At about 8:30pm.

About 5 hours later in pulled in to Nizamuddin station. There we encountered the most difficult attempt to get a taxi yet. First we bought a prepaid rickshaw ticket with another Brit couple. Both rickshaws seemed to have drivers that had been drinking: I could smell it on his breath. After getting our money back, with difficulty as nobody seemed to speak any English, we were approached by a taxi driver who said he could take all of us for 200 Rs. I was thankful for this, it seemed reasonable, cosidering it was midnight. The other couple tried uselessly to reduce the price, and then the girl tried to get our driver to walk the straight line to check he wasn't drunk. Much amusement ensued for the Indians present. Our patience was wearing thin at this stage.

All hotels in Delhi are shit. Ours was no exception, although we'd payed more than the other couple. We wondered what on Earth they were experiencing. It was almost clean, by Indian standards, but quite depressing. Our attempts to find an even more expensive but reasonably pleasant room the following day met with little success.

I'm sorry if I sound negative, but Delhi in general and Paherganj in particular are not nice places. Paherganj is a dirty, seedy, tourist trap. The rickshaw drivers are rude and ludicrously overpriced, catching tourists as they fall into their lap from the airport. We tried many times to get a reasonable fare, and failed. The area has none of the friendly, lively traveller atmosphere of say, the Khao San Road in Bangkok. New Delhi is a bit better, as there are modern cafes and restaurants you can go into to escape from the rest of the madness, but it is nothing more than a crumbling remnant of British occupation.

In the evening we escaped into a nice cinema in Connaught Place, and watched a popular new Indian film called Salaam-e-Ishq. It was in Hindi, but the plot wasn't too difficult to follow even so. It seemed like a Hindi version of Love, Actually, with added dance routines.

We ended up staying four nights in Pushkar, moving hotel each night as everywhere decent seemed to be booked up. The one really nice place, called Seventh Heaven, only had a room for one night, but what a nice room it was! The owner, who seems to have built up a relationship with most of his guests through their repeat visits, lords over the place like it is his castle, waking up late and mingling with guests over his freshly prepared orange juice every morning, and absent-mindedly petting his fat dogs that never seem to leave this sealed oasis, an old stately home (called a Haveli).

Perhaps because we were only guests one night, we came to feel that we weren't 'in the loop' at this place, and the cliquey atmosphere made us slightly uncomfortable. But maybe that was just us. We didn't have a fantastic time in Pushkar, mainly because (a) we were ill; (b) we kept moving hotels; and (c) we spent 3 days in a travel agent arranging and rearranging our trains for the remainder of our trip. This took so long because we didn't know whether to travel to Udaipur to pick up our passports, get them to send them to Jaipur, or wait until we see our friends who have them in Goa. In the end, we decided on the latter. But the point is, after we informed our travel agent we weren't staying in his good friend's hotel Seventh Heaven, he stopped being straight with us. In the end, he tried to rip us off in about 3 different ways, and we caught him out with 2 of them. We were still overcharged, but not nearly by as much as he tried to. The most irritating thing was, even when we caught him out by showing him the rules on the Indian Railway government website, he tried to squirm his way out of it, refusing to give us a straight answer when we asked him if he was cheating us.

So we got the train to Jaipur. It took considerably longer than expected, but we arrived at about 11pm and, exhausted, checked in to the best room we've had so far. Sometimes it's worth paying a little biut extra, just to escape from the madness on the streets outside. The place, called Madhuban, is a calm, gated compund with a pleasant garden and, compared to what we had experienced, excellent rooms with a comfortable bed! The only problem... no beer. Not even in a teapot (beer is served in this way at the local Italian place, we discovered a couple of days later).

Jaipur turned out to be a little disappointing, sights-wise. The Hawa Mahal, the so called Palace of Wind, where the royal ladies of yore supposedly sat and watched the world go by, made me think of a particularly ornate tube station/public toilet that had somehow grown upwards. Perhaps this was the graffiti on the walls of the corridors. The fort had impressive views but was poorly tended. There seemed to be electrical cables and building work going on everwhere, which kind of spoiled the imagainative leap required to see it in its former glory.

However, it was kind of a relief to be in a big, busy, stinking city after Pushkar, if only because it had... restaurants! With four walls! That served meat... and beer! Plus there was a McDonalds! We made use of the latter several times for lunch. (I feel no shame in admitting my enthusiasm for this. See if you don't crave a McChicken Sandwich, fries and a coke after a few weeks of curry).

One of the best things about Jaipur is the shopping. On our sightseeing day we gave in to our rickshaw man who took us to an emporium selling carpets, wall hangings, etc. Knowing we weren't buying anything, we reduced the salesman from 6000 to 4000 Rs for an item. The next day, we went to Nehru bazaar, where we discovered that these items can be purchased for a fraction of the cost, but they still tried it on with us even there. One man started asking a hundred dollars for a patchwork wall hanging. After we finished laughing at him, we got him down to 1500 rupees, then walked out. As had happened in each place, as soon as you do that, they run after you, dropping the price withn each step, until it gets down to a tiny fraction of the original.

This turned out to be a lot of fun! We bought a load to stuff for next to nothing, and sent it home for about the same.