India 2012: Agra Again / Taj Take Two (3/31-4/1)

The New Delhi railway station is a silly place.

The scrolling marquees above the platforms read “WelcomeAtNewDelhiRailwayStation“.  No spaces.  No “to”.

When an announcement comes over the PA at NewDelhiRailwayStation, it’s preceded by the Microsoft 3 “tada” sound.  And there are a lot of announcements.

If you take the metro to the “New Delhi” stop, you arrive above ground on the east side of the NewDelhiRailwayStation tracks.  If you would like to proceed to the west side of the tracks (the Paharganj neighborhood / backpacker slum), you MUST go through the already-overworked railway station metal detectors.  No bridge exists that simply goes over the tracks for those that have no business at the railway station itself (or, at least I never found it).

Did I mention that it’s the second busiest station in India?

Cecilia and I were going to this silly place to leave Delhi.  PERMANENTLY.

Accordingly, we did the following:

• Packed our backpacks and locked the door behind us.  PERMANENTLY.
• Said goodbye to friends at the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, where Cecilia was studying.
• Flagged down an autorickshaw, rode said rickshaw to the Haus Khas metro station.
• Paid our metro fares, went through the metal detectors and proceeded to the platforms.
• Boarded the metro headed the wrong direction:  away from New Delhi metro station and its related NewDelhiRailwayStation.

Good plan, right?  Not if you plan to leave town via train, no.

We realized the error of our ways about two metro stations in, disembarked and switched directions.  After this, I remember a lot of running:  running through the metro station and out, into the railway station, immediately after passing through security to our platform, and down the length of the entire train to find our non-AC “Sleeper” class car.

The train pulled away thirty seconds after we boarded (yeah, I timed it!).  Had we not realized our directional error until a third metro station, we would have missed our train to Agra and been thrown to the wolves of train station ticket office confusion and potential itinerary changes.  No fun at all.

Sweating through our shirts from the hustle, we settled in for a brief 3.5 hour ride to Agra’s Cantonment station.  Did I say 3.5 hours?  Make it five for good measure.  Thanks Indian Railways!  I bought a bottle of cola through the train’s barred windows and tried to cool down.

Phonetically-spelled Indian cola “Thums Up”, released in 1977 to defray incursions into the Indian market by foreign brands like Coca-Cola, was eventually purchased by Coca-Cola. Taste the thunder of multinational corporations!

I had been to Agra before, and it wasn’t fun the first time.  I expected a similar experience on the second go around, so I arrived with spikes out.

But what was this?  The first autorickshaw driver we bargained with was kind and agreed to a fair price to the Taj Ganj neighborhood (100 Rupees)!  Had we gotten off in the wrong town?  No, this was Agra alright.

We got dropped at a Lonely Planet-recommended guesthouse (full, of course) and wound up in a non-Lonely Planet-recommended guesthouse for 350 Rupees a night.  The room was so small that we had to put our backpacks in front of the door (the only exit).  The casings of the throw pillows on the bed were homemade and featured and featured a character that looked like an unfortunate offspring of Sonic the Hedgehog and Tails.

Merge! Embroider!

A late arrival meant limited food options, but our host was kind enough to reopen the kitchen for us.  The only thing on the menu was omelets on white bread, but it tasted good enough when accompanied by a large Kingfisher and a silhouetted view of the Taj Mahal from the dark, after hours rooftop.

The bed in our tiny room was as hard and uncomfortable as any other I’d slept on in India for the past two and a half months, so sleep came with no problem.  The overhead fan was either “gale force” or “off”, so we settled on the former for protection from mosquitoes.  It was like sleeping in front of a prop plane.

The time when you wake up to your first day in Agra is the time when you go to the Taj Mahal.  Everybody does it.  We did it.  It was my second time.

So excited to be back in Agra.

Yeah, it’s nice, but it doesn’t have a lot of replay value.  Cecilia felt my lack of enthusiasm and put me on retainer by paying my 750 Rupee admission while she did her best to negotiate a student price.  No dice.

60-90 minutes at the Taj is enough.

We admired the inlays, the way the white marble maintains a soft glow, the nice shadows that form when the sun comes in at an angle.  The Taj was, once again, nice, but a bit of a shrug.  The amount of importance the world has put on this building is more than for which it has asked.  It’s not that it’s not beautiful, it’s just vastly overrated.

Lunchtime came.  We pushed past the hordes of tourists, exited the Taj grounds through the south gate, pushed past gangs of annoying hawkers of postcards and soapstone miniatures and found a place to grub.

Nearly every restaurant in Taj Ganj has a rooftop restaurant with a view of the Taj Mahal. This one also features healthy helpings of STUFF. We ate elsewhere.

Cecilia picked our lunch spot:  Gulshan Restaurant, a small, average looking eatery in the middle of Taj Ganj featuring a menu that’s largely handwritten.   I confessed to her after we sat down:  I had been to this restaurant before, two months ago, on my previous visit.

The same 13-year-old girl that waited on me in early February delivered menus to the table.  She came back a few minutes later for our orders, and brought her 16-year old brother.  She had a certain look in her eye and a question for us.

“How many time you in India?” she asked Cecilia.

“One time,” Cecilia said, holding up an according number of fingers.

Our hostess.

The girl shifted her gaze to me.

“How many time YOU in India?”

I had only been in India once, but I knew what she was getting at.

“Two times,” I lied (half-truthed?).  I had been in Agra twice, and at this restaurant a corresponding number of times.  Did that count?

The girl and her brother turned to one another and spoke in excited Hindi.  Had she won a bet?  So it seemed!  She remembered me from my visit two months ago, regardless of the thousands of tourists that had passed through Agra and had lunch there since then.

Her brother.

I’ve been repeatedly wowed by the memory of Indians for repeat visitors.  If you show a sort of semi-permanence in a town by making multiple visits to a shop, restaurant or street vendor, you get better treatment and more smiles.  The proprietors so often remember your face and name – moreso than in other countries that I’ve visited.

Two to three million people visit the Taj Mahal per year, and I’m guessing a minority of them visit Agra twice in 12 months.  How nice it must be to see a familiar face, even if that face is only back in Agra for 24 hours!

The girl on the left asked me why I had two earrings (one in each lobe). I asked her “why not?” No no no, I had it all wrong. “One earring for boys, two for girls,” she chided.

We were treated so warmly at Gulshan Restaurant that we stayed for an extra hour drinking coffee and gazing at the street traffic.  The kids in the restaurant played little games with us (poking Cecilia in the arm and running away, making crazy faces from a distance), and the brother taught us that “pagal” meant “crazy” in Hindi, and insisted that we were both “pagal”.  We returned the favor – clearly, he was also “pagal”.

Hindi lessons on the stairs. So pagal.

We spent more time on our leisurely lunch than we had at the Taj.  Warm people win out over cold marble every time!

more of the Gulshan Restaurant family.

A bay bay.

Our long lunch was just as appealing for another reason:  the advent of April meant the rising temperatures of summer in north India, and being a tourist’s tourist in this kind of weather is exhausting work.

In my opinion, trying to “see everything” in one day in a town like Agra is not a good plan.  The place is filled with nasty, swarming touts, and hitting multiple mausoleums, ruins and forts in one day is just too much, especially for a “templed/forted-out” person.  It all starts to look the same!  Plus, if you spend all your time chasing monuments you’ll miss out on unexpected warmth like the above.

It was still early afternoon and we had six or seven hours to kill before we caught our overnight train to Varanasi.  It took all of our strength to get out of our chairs and hail an autorickshaw.  To Agra Fort, why not!  We bargained hard and got a decent price for the short ride there.

Agra Fort’s unchecked ego.

We were ready for disappointment.  Many people will tell you that Delhi’s Red Fort and Agra’s Agra Fort are the same thing, and that you only need to see one.  Cecilia had been to the Red Fort and was less than complimentary.  We paid the 250 Rupee admission with gritted teeth and sauntered in.

We weren’t in the learning mood, so we skipped the audio guide and did some people watching instead.  It was a Sunday, and the fort was busy in a nice way.  The women were in their best sarees.  I wore a dirty poly-cotton t-shirt.

Cecilia’s ce-seal-ia of approval for Agra Fort. LOL!!!!

We came away from the fort with no new knowledge about it, but who cares.  We used it as a venue to enjoy ourselves, and isn’t that what this travel thing is all about?

I can tell you three things, and three things about Agra Fort:

• Shah Jahan, the man that brought you the Taj Mahal and Agra Fort, was imprisoned in Agra Fort later in life.  That stings!
• Agra Fort is the most important fort of India.  I think I read that somewhere.
• “Scratching on the monument” is prohibited.

Two unscratched monuments was enough for one hot tout-filled day.  We wolfed down a sweaty dinner of noodles on the street in Taj Ganj and followed it up with some artificial-tasting ice cream.  We grunted as we slung our packs and Cecilia’s guitar over our shoulders in the utility/slop room of our Agra guesthouse, washed our faces in the sink and considered ourselves road-ready once again.

A NOTE ON STORING YOUR BAGS AT YOUR INDIAN GUESTHOUSE:  In three months of traveling in India, only one guesthouse ever charged me for holding my backpack while I touristed on the day I checked out.  That place is Comfort Inn in Panaji, Goa, which also features a nasty 8:00 AM checkout time and will only begrudgingly give you blankets when you ask.  “You won’t need a blanket” they’ll foreboding respond, as if you had mistakenly checked into a guesthouse on the surface of the sun instead of in an old Portuguese colony town.

My first visit to Agra had been a nightmare.  The second go around was much better, and in retrospect, I had changed more than the city had.  My India training was starting to pay off!  Well, I was going to need all of it – our next stop would be the most trying yet.

Next stop, Varanasi:  the intense, dirty, holy city of the Ganga.