Agra and Surroundings

The next morning we met up with our driver, Manmohan Singh from Mussoorie, who drove Tori, Jaime, Barb and Cole to Agra. Chris and Jeff took a later train back to Mussoorie to finish financial aid and applications. The drive to Agra was nail-biting for Jaime & Tori, who were still getting used to Indian drivers! The trip took several hours, dodging bullock carts, camel carts, huge colorfully painted trucks, bicycles, motorcycles and many pedestrians! But the trip was worth it – the Taj Mahal was incredible! It was so much more amazing in person than we could ever have imagined! It was a beautiful day, the temperature was perfect, and the whole experience memorable. What a monument to a great love story . . . Hollywood (or Bollywood!) couldn’t have done it better! We learned about Pietra Dura (marble carving with semiprecious stone inlay) that is seen throughout the Taj when we stopped at a marble showroom following our visit. It is amazing how the workmen create even the smallest pieces, and how many tiny, tiny pieces go into the decoration! Boggles the mind! They actually calculate the price of each piece not by the size, but by the number of individual pieces in the inlay, the number of craftsmen, and the number of weeks it took to complete. Can you imagine if they had had to pay for the work in the Taj that way?! Caught an early bird special (lunch/dinner) on the way out of town, and headed to Bharatpur where we checked in at the Jungle Lodge for an early evening.

This morning we were up with (before!) the sun, and at the Keoladeo Bird Sanctuary by 7:00 a.m. We hooked up with a guide, “Jack”, don’t you know, a bicycle rickshaw for Tori and Barb, and Coleman and Jaime on bicycles (this is Jaime – I’m STILL feeling that seat on my bum!!!!!) for a wonderful bird sighting and watching experience. We can’t wait to show you our pictures. Ashok Singh, the owner of the Jungle Lodge, is also quite an amateur ornithologist, and helped us correctly name all of the beautiful birds in the pictures we took. Then back to the hotel for a late breakfast and off to Fatehpur Sikri, an amazing palace built in Uttar Pradesh where the Badshaah (king) had hoped to move his home and center of government, but his plans were foiled when the lake dried up! But it is another AMAZING palace. Oh, and did I forget to mention that he built it for his three wives – one Muslim, one Hindi and one Christian? Well, he did! From there we went to, believe it or not, another palace! The Deeg Palace, also known as the water palace, built between two lakes with ingenious methods of using water for “air conditioning”. There are 137 large and 200 small fountains (we can thank Cole for remembering that stat) throughout the palace, each more beautiful than the last. This place has not received the tourism money that the Taj or Fatehpur Sikri has, so has gone down from its glory days – but we can imagine what a pleasure palace it was. --Barb