I had thought about leaving Bundi on the 12th, but decided to stay another day in that pleasant city. I walked through the alleys of the old town before breakfast and noticed men on bikes and motorcycles delivering milk from the metal basins attached to their bikes or motorcycles. They poured out milk from the basins into the containters brought to them by their customers. I also saw a guy scooping out handfuls (with his hands) of thick cream from a metal container of perhaps five gallons and depositing the cream into a vat over a fire. He told me he was making ghee, clarified butter, and that it would take about three hours. I came back after about an hour and it was still boiling. After breakfast on the hotel roof, I spent the day wandering around the city. I passed two guys in a little workshop making bracelets over a little fire, and that was interesting to watch. Indian women often wear maybe ten or more bracelets on each arm. I passed metal bashers, vegetable sellers, firewood sellers (and women bringing them firewood), plus much more. Lots of kites were on sale, in preparation for a state-wide kite-flying day coming up in two days. People were friendly and I enjoyed strolling around. In the late afternoon I discovered a guy who sold the best lassi I've ever had. A lassi is a yoghurt drink you find all over India and this guy made his with saffron, giving it a yellowish tinge, plus raisins, pistachios and other nuts. I had dinner again on the hotel roof next to the fire, though it was a much warmer night than the previous ones.
The next morning, after a stroll around the alleys of the old town and breakfast on the roof, I finally did leave Bundi on a bus about 10:30 to Kota, less than an hour away. The auto rickshaw driver who took me from the Kota bus station to the Kota train station made a stop on the way to buy a couple of bundles of green vegetation from some women. He flung the bundles to a small herd of cattle in a muddy (and more than just mud, no doubt) spot just beyond the women. The cattle were already munching on the green vegetation, apparently given to them by previous customers. I waited about an hour at the train station, and then left about 1 on a train heading northeast to Sawai Madhopur, arriving about 3. We passed green wheat and yellow mustard fields through mostly flat countryside, though there were some hills about halfway there. In Sawai Madhopur I got a hotel room on the road to Ranthambhore National Park and had a poor late lunch on the hotel roof. I strolled around a bit, but there was nothing to see, and had dinner with some other tourists at a roadside restaurant, also not very good. It was cold there at night.
I spent most of the next morning on the roof of the hotel, having breakfast and lunch and sitting in the sun. A little after noon I did walk to the park office to see how they sold tickets. I had asked my hotel guy to get mine for the park and he charged me a large commission. The fees are calculated rather weirdly. My entry the first day cost 889 rupees, about $20, plus the hotel guy took a commission of 511 rupees, about $11-12. The park is the best place in Rajasthan to see tigers. There are 35 in the 600 square kilometer park. The park provides three hour tours in the morning and afternoon, and because of the cold I decided to take an afternoon tour. About 2:30 the "gypsy," a type of open jeep with two rows of three seats picked me up at my hotel and we headed into the park. There are five different routes in the park and we did route 1, a wooded and hilly area, although fairly dry. We saw some magnificent banyan trees. We saw no tigers, but we did see pug marks (that is, tiger paw marks) in the dust of the road. We did see lots of cheetal and sambar deer, plus langur monkeys, wild peacocks and other birds. The driver drove too fast and stopped not long enough when we did spot wildlife, but I enjoyed the trip. Near the end of the afternoon he apparently spotted pug marks of two tigers and drove all over trying, unsuccessfully, to find them. I got back to my hotel about 5:30, after about two and a half hours in the park.
After breakfast on the hotel roof the next morning, I walked to the train station to buy my ticket for the next day to Bharatpur. I always enjoy train stations and spent some time looking around the British-era station. I noticed a cattle guard at one of the entrances, and later noticed a cow on the tracks at one end of the station. I left from the hotel on another safari at 2:30, this time in a "canter," a larger vehicle, with 17 seats. They aren't as nimble as the gypsies, but we had a better route, route 3, said to be the best. On the way into the park, a leopard was spotted on a ridge to the left of the entry road. All the vehicles stopped, a veritable traffic jam, and, unbelievably (except that this is India), one of the gypsies in the back started honking its horn to try to get through. Some people in our canter thought they spotted the leopard, but I didn't. Moving on, we passed Ranthambhore Fort, towering far above us on a rocky hill, and spent the afternoon driving around a lake to the east of the fort. This was a beautiful area. Again, we saw no tiger, but we did see lots of deer, some wild boar, and lots of birds, including some very tame ones with long tails who perched on the canter. We passed the former hunting lodge of the Maharaja of Jaipur (Ranthambhore was his private preserve) on the lake and our guide told us the last tiger hunt was in 1962. We had a good look at a big male sambar deer munching grass in the lake. It became quite cold near the end of the safart, considerably colder than the day before.
I got up at 6 the next morning and at 6:30 took an auto rickshaw in the cold and darkness to the train station. The sky brightened as I waited at the station and my train left at 7:20. The sun rose as we headed northeast out of town, passing the Ranthambhore Hills. I had an interesting guy to talk to on the way as we passed more wheat and mustard fields on the flat terrain (once we got past the hills). After two and a half hours, I got off at Bharatpur and took an auto rickshaw to a very nice little hotel on the outskirts of town run by a very friendly woman and her daughter. I had breakfast in the sun on the hotel's back lawn and finally warmed up. It was sunny, but a little windy, making it colder than most afternoons. In the afternoon, I took a cycle rickshaw into town and walked around the old town inside the old, huge fort, with massive gates and a wide moat around it. There are still people living inside the fort, plus three old palaces of the Maharaja of Bharatpur. One of them is a museum and I spent some time there. Another, larger palace is all locked up. There were no other western tourist exploring the fort, and few Indian ones. I walked around inside the fort, and then outside, and finally took a cycle rickshaw back to the hotel. That night I had dinner at the hotel with four other tourists, a friendly bunch, staying there.
After breakfast the next morning, I took a cycle rickshaw about 9 into the nearby Keoladeo Ghana National Park, a wetlands area famous for its birdlife, with something like 350 species in the winters when the marshes are wet. I had a young Sikh guy named Biru Singh, and he was very good at spotting birds. I spent four hours with him, making our way slowly up the paved road through the park, with lots of stops. Besides birds, we saw quite a lot of other wildlife, including lots of large nilgai antelope, about the size of small horses. The males are black/gray and the females brown. We also saw cheetal and sambar deer, jackels, wild boar, and large turtles. There is also a tiger in the park, but didn't see him or her. The birds included three owls sleeping in a tree, hundreds of painted storks nesting in trees with their chicks, Indian rollers with spectacular blue wings visible when they took flight, two kinds of colorful kingfishers, cranes, spoonbills, ducks, geese, cormorants, and sarus cranes, said to be the world's tallest flying bird, at 1.6 meters, a little over 5 feet. They are somewhat rare and I saw three pair of them (or maybe the same pair three times). About 1 I had Biru Singh deposit me at the park restaurant for lunch, and afterward spent the rest of the afternoon on a bike, which was very enjoyable. I found a wall with a record of the famous bird shoots here hosted by the Maharaja of Bharatpur, starting with Lord Curzon, the Viceroy, in 1902, continuing up to 1964. There were other viceroys and maharajas, plus other royalty including the Prince of Wales in 1921 and even an American Senatorial delegation in the late '40's. In the late afternoon the painted storks in particular were quite active, with their large chicks, almost as large as their parents, squawking for food and the parents flying in with it. I bicycled back to the entrance and left just at sunset, at about 5:45. The afternoon had been nice, but now it was cold. From the entrance, I made the short walk back to my hotel.
After breakfast the next morning I took a bus north to Deeg about 10, arriving less than an hour and a half later after passing more wheat and mustard fields. Deeg is a dusty town with the former summer palace of the Maharaja of Bharatpur. There are tanks on either side of the palace, with women washing and men and women bathing on the steps. I spent several hours looking around and visiting the palace buildings. One was furnished and it was interesting to see the early 20th century furniture, which one of the caretakers told me was 200 years old. There was an elephant foot with decanters inside and a stuffed tiger in the main room. Another room had two tiger cubs in glass cases. The enormous bathrooms with old fashioned bathtubs and sinks were interesting. I also went into the part of the palace used by the local government, with men in the courtyard pecking away at old typewriters next to bundles of legal papers. A nearly naked beggar with a tattered blanket slept in the dirt. An enormous fort stood to the east of the palace, but I couldn't find a way in. I took the bus back about 3 and spoke with an 83 year old man from Bombay also staying at the hotel with his daughter and granddaughter at dinner. He originally came from Andhra Pradesh, in the south, but moved to Bombay 60 years ago to work on atomic energy research.
The next morning I took a bus about 10 to Fatehpur Sikri, only about 13 miles to the east. This is the place where Akbar, the third and greatest of the Moghul emperors, built his capital. However, it was only the capital from 1571 to 1585. Apparently, water was a problem, and the buildings were abandoned after Akbar's death in 1605. The British restored them a century ago and it is a very interesting site. I remember being very impressed with it when I first saw it in 1979. There is an enormous mosque, with an enormous gate. Inside is the tomb of Salim Chisti, a Sufi saint who prophesied that Akbar would have three sons (seems a fairly safe prophecy for a man with multiple wives and hundreds of concubines, but apparently Akbar's sons had all died.) When Akbar did have a son, he decided to build his capital on the rocky ridge where the saint lived. The tomb is of marble, and a marble screen inside is full of strings put there by women hoping for sons. After the mosque, I went through the palace buildings with a French guy I had met at the bus stop in Bharatpur, and I enjoyed that. It is quite clear there has been a lot of restoration. There are good views from the palace ridge out over the fields of mustard. The French guy left for Agra, only 20 miles away, and I wandered slowly again through the palace buildings of red sandstone.
Afterward, I took a path between the mosque and the palace down the ridge past the Elephant Gate, with two ruined stone elephants on it, down to a huge caravansarai where boys were playing cricket in the dusty courtyard while goats grazed alongside. I walked along the roof of the caravansarai and then to a tower below it studded with replicas of elephant tusks. Quite odd, and the experts don't seem to know why it was decorated so. From there I walked to the village of Sikri a little over a mile away, passing through mustard fields along very friendly and I regretted deciding not to spend a night in Fatehpur Sikri to be able to spend more time walking around. I returned up the ridge and went around and into the mosque again, very nice in the late afternoon sun, before making my way down through the bazaars of Fatehpur (Fatehpur is on one side of the ridge and Sikri is on the other) to the bus stop. I spent a half hour or so at the bus stop waiting for the Bharatpur bus and talking to a guy before giving up and walking to the highway where I could catch a bus for the short ride back to Bharatpur. I got there shortly after 6.
I took the bus to Agra the next morning, leaving Bharatpur about 10 and getting to Agra less than an hour and a half later. I took a cycle rickshaw from the bus station and got a great hotel right next to the east gate of the Taj Mahal for only about $11 a night. The hotel has a restaurant in a garden and I had lunch there before heading into the Taj Mahal about 1:30. The Taj has a high wall all around the large garden in which it sits, so you don't really get a good look at it until you enter the huge southern gate, and then it almost takes your breath away. It is a spectacularly beautiful building, on a platform above the Yamuna River with only sky for a background. I spent the afternoon there, leaving with the last tourists when it closed about 6. And there were lots of tourists, thousands of them, and about 90% of them Indian, and as many non-Indian Asian tourists, it seemed, as western ones. I walked around the gardens and then up to the Taj and the red sandstone mosque to the west, with a matching building to the east. The chamber inside the Taj is relatively small, with the cenotaph of Mumtaz Mahal in the center, with that of her husband, the fifth Moghul emperor Shah Jahan, to the side. They are actually buried in a crypt below. It was crowded, and noisy, inside, quite a change from 1979, as I remember. I looked down at the river, occupying less than third of the river bed, I'd say. It became chilly late in the afternoon, but it was interesting to see the Taj change color as the sun set and the light faded. There are lots of police outside the gates, and in fact all around the complex, and they do a very thorough search of you upon entry, quite unlike the cursory checks you usually get here in India. It costs 750 rupees, about $17, to get in, two and a half times the highest entry fee I've paid elsewhere in India. It was quite cold that night, and I slept in my clothes (as I have for the past several weeks) under four blankets.
It was 55 degrees in my room when I got up the next morning at 8. I had a long breakfast in the sun in the hotel garden and afterward walked through the green, tree-filled, but somewhat dusty park between the Taj Mahal and the Agra Fort upriver to the north, less than two miles away. I got to this massive red sandstone fort about 11:30 and spent almost five hours inside wandering around. It is double-walled, with the inside wall over 70 feet high and the outer wall maybe a third of that. Akbar built it and his successors improved it. The entry curves through several gates. You can visit only about a third of the area inside; the rest is used by the military. One large red sandstone palace was built by Akbar; the marble buildings were built by Shah Jahan and are quite beautiful. Shah Jahan was deposed by his son Aurangzeb in 1658 and spent the last eight years of his life as a prisoner in the fort, able to see the Taj Mahal only from afar. The view of the Taj was fairly hazy, though it got better later in the afternoon. Agra has become an industrial city of almost a million and a half people. They are trying to cut pollution. Auto rickshaws are required to run on natural gas and most cars aren't allowed near the Taj. I left the fort and walked back to my hotel, arriving before dark.
The next morning (today) before breakfast I walked down to the river next to the Taj to see it from below in the early morning sun. Police were stationed nearby. After breakfast in the hotel garden, I hired an auto rickshaw to take me to Sikandra, about six miles from the town center, to see Akbar's Mausoleum. It is large and imposing, and apparently was in ruins until restored by the British a century ago. His tomb is in an austere crypt in the large building at the center of the gardens, where deer are grazing on the grass. A high wall surrounds the site. I spent an hour and a half there and then we went back to Agra to a tomb called the Chini-ka-Rauza on the Yamuna River, built for the prime minister of Shah Jahan. It was in pretty bad condition, but with the remnants of beautiful tiles. Below it. on the riverside, was a herd of perhaps 30-40 water buffalo, and drying in the sun were thousands of what I suppose were water buffalo dung patties, to be used as fuel. Women were using their hands to fashion the patties, and there was quite a smell wafting up. From there we headed up the river a bit to another tomb, this one of the prime minister of Jahangir (and, not coincidentally, I imagine, the father of this wife). Jahangir's wife, Nur Jahan, was the power behind the throne and built this tomb for her father and mother. It is a beautiful building of white marble inlaid with precious stones, surrounded by gardens. It is called by some the "Baby Taj," and was built in the 1620's. The Taj was constructed from 1631 to 1648. From there we proceeded further upriver to a spot just opposite the Taj in order to see it from that angle. Police were camped nearby. Next I had the auto rickshaw cross the river and drop me off near the Jama Masjid, the city's principal mosque, now in great disrepair. I walked from there to the Delhi Gate of the Fort, formerly the main gate but now used only for the military, and then to the Agra Fort Railway Station, built by the British. I walked along the reddening fort walls in the late afternoon sun and then through the park back to the Taj Mahal and my hotel.
The next morning, after a stroll around the alleys of the old town and breakfast on the roof, I finally did leave Bundi on a bus about 10:30 to Kota, less than an hour away. The auto rickshaw driver who took me from the Kota bus station to the Kota train station made a stop on the way to buy a couple of bundles of green vegetation from some women. He flung the bundles to a small herd of cattle in a muddy (and more than just mud, no doubt) spot just beyond the women. The cattle were already munching on the green vegetation, apparently given to them by previous customers. I waited about an hour at the train station, and then left about 1 on a train heading northeast to Sawai Madhopur, arriving about 3. We passed green wheat and yellow mustard fields through mostly flat countryside, though there were some hills about halfway there. In Sawai Madhopur I got a hotel room on the road to Ranthambhore National Park and had a poor late lunch on the hotel roof. I strolled around a bit, but there was nothing to see, and had dinner with some other tourists at a roadside restaurant, also not very good. It was cold there at night.
I spent most of the next morning on the roof of the hotel, having breakfast and lunch and sitting in the sun. A little after noon I did walk to the park office to see how they sold tickets. I had asked my hotel guy to get mine for the park and he charged me a large commission. The fees are calculated rather weirdly. My entry the first day cost 889 rupees, about $20, plus the hotel guy took a commission of 511 rupees, about $11-12. The park is the best place in Rajasthan to see tigers. There are 35 in the 600 square kilometer park. The park provides three hour tours in the morning and afternoon, and because of the cold I decided to take an afternoon tour. About 2:30 the "gypsy," a type of open jeep with two rows of three seats picked me up at my hotel and we headed into the park. There are five different routes in the park and we did route 1, a wooded and hilly area, although fairly dry. We saw some magnificent banyan trees. We saw no tigers, but we did see pug marks (that is, tiger paw marks) in the dust of the road. We did see lots of cheetal and sambar deer, plus langur monkeys, wild peacocks and other birds. The driver drove too fast and stopped not long enough when we did spot wildlife, but I enjoyed the trip. Near the end of the afternoon he apparently spotted pug marks of two tigers and drove all over trying, unsuccessfully, to find them. I got back to my hotel about 5:30, after about two and a half hours in the park.
After breakfast on the hotel roof the next morning, I walked to the train station to buy my ticket for the next day to Bharatpur. I always enjoy train stations and spent some time looking around the British-era station. I noticed a cattle guard at one of the entrances, and later noticed a cow on the tracks at one end of the station. I left from the hotel on another safari at 2:30, this time in a "canter," a larger vehicle, with 17 seats. They aren't as nimble as the gypsies, but we had a better route, route 3, said to be the best. On the way into the park, a leopard was spotted on a ridge to the left of the entry road. All the vehicles stopped, a veritable traffic jam, and, unbelievably (except that this is India), one of the gypsies in the back started honking its horn to try to get through. Some people in our canter thought they spotted the leopard, but I didn't. Moving on, we passed Ranthambhore Fort, towering far above us on a rocky hill, and spent the afternoon driving around a lake to the east of the fort. This was a beautiful area. Again, we saw no tiger, but we did see lots of deer, some wild boar, and lots of birds, including some very tame ones with long tails who perched on the canter. We passed the former hunting lodge of the Maharaja of Jaipur (Ranthambhore was his private preserve) on the lake and our guide told us the last tiger hunt was in 1962. We had a good look at a big male sambar deer munching grass in the lake. It became quite cold near the end of the safart, considerably colder than the day before.
I got up at 6 the next morning and at 6:30 took an auto rickshaw in the cold and darkness to the train station. The sky brightened as I waited at the station and my train left at 7:20. The sun rose as we headed northeast out of town, passing the Ranthambhore Hills. I had an interesting guy to talk to on the way as we passed more wheat and mustard fields on the flat terrain (once we got past the hills). After two and a half hours, I got off at Bharatpur and took an auto rickshaw to a very nice little hotel on the outskirts of town run by a very friendly woman and her daughter. I had breakfast in the sun on the hotel's back lawn and finally warmed up. It was sunny, but a little windy, making it colder than most afternoons. In the afternoon, I took a cycle rickshaw into town and walked around the old town inside the old, huge fort, with massive gates and a wide moat around it. There are still people living inside the fort, plus three old palaces of the Maharaja of Bharatpur. One of them is a museum and I spent some time there. Another, larger palace is all locked up. There were no other western tourist exploring the fort, and few Indian ones. I walked around inside the fort, and then outside, and finally took a cycle rickshaw back to the hotel. That night I had dinner at the hotel with four other tourists, a friendly bunch, staying there.
After breakfast the next morning, I took a cycle rickshaw about 9 into the nearby Keoladeo Ghana National Park, a wetlands area famous for its birdlife, with something like 350 species in the winters when the marshes are wet. I had a young Sikh guy named Biru Singh, and he was very good at spotting birds. I spent four hours with him, making our way slowly up the paved road through the park, with lots of stops. Besides birds, we saw quite a lot of other wildlife, including lots of large nilgai antelope, about the size of small horses. The males are black/gray and the females brown. We also saw cheetal and sambar deer, jackels, wild boar, and large turtles. There is also a tiger in the park, but didn't see him or her. The birds included three owls sleeping in a tree, hundreds of painted storks nesting in trees with their chicks, Indian rollers with spectacular blue wings visible when they took flight, two kinds of colorful kingfishers, cranes, spoonbills, ducks, geese, cormorants, and sarus cranes, said to be the world's tallest flying bird, at 1.6 meters, a little over 5 feet. They are somewhat rare and I saw three pair of them (or maybe the same pair three times). About 1 I had Biru Singh deposit me at the park restaurant for lunch, and afterward spent the rest of the afternoon on a bike, which was very enjoyable. I found a wall with a record of the famous bird shoots here hosted by the Maharaja of Bharatpur, starting with Lord Curzon, the Viceroy, in 1902, continuing up to 1964. There were other viceroys and maharajas, plus other royalty including the Prince of Wales in 1921 and even an American Senatorial delegation in the late '40's. In the late afternoon the painted storks in particular were quite active, with their large chicks, almost as large as their parents, squawking for food and the parents flying in with it. I bicycled back to the entrance and left just at sunset, at about 5:45. The afternoon had been nice, but now it was cold. From the entrance, I made the short walk back to my hotel.
After breakfast the next morning I took a bus north to Deeg about 10, arriving less than an hour and a half later after passing more wheat and mustard fields. Deeg is a dusty town with the former summer palace of the Maharaja of Bharatpur. There are tanks on either side of the palace, with women washing and men and women bathing on the steps. I spent several hours looking around and visiting the palace buildings. One was furnished and it was interesting to see the early 20th century furniture, which one of the caretakers told me was 200 years old. There was an elephant foot with decanters inside and a stuffed tiger in the main room. Another room had two tiger cubs in glass cases. The enormous bathrooms with old fashioned bathtubs and sinks were interesting. I also went into the part of the palace used by the local government, with men in the courtyard pecking away at old typewriters next to bundles of legal papers. A nearly naked beggar with a tattered blanket slept in the dirt. An enormous fort stood to the east of the palace, but I couldn't find a way in. I took the bus back about 3 and spoke with an 83 year old man from Bombay also staying at the hotel with his daughter and granddaughter at dinner. He originally came from Andhra Pradesh, in the south, but moved to Bombay 60 years ago to work on atomic energy research.
The next morning I took a bus about 10 to Fatehpur Sikri, only about 13 miles to the east. This is the place where Akbar, the third and greatest of the Moghul emperors, built his capital. However, it was only the capital from 1571 to 1585. Apparently, water was a problem, and the buildings were abandoned after Akbar's death in 1605. The British restored them a century ago and it is a very interesting site. I remember being very impressed with it when I first saw it in 1979. There is an enormous mosque, with an enormous gate. Inside is the tomb of Salim Chisti, a Sufi saint who prophesied that Akbar would have three sons (seems a fairly safe prophecy for a man with multiple wives and hundreds of concubines, but apparently Akbar's sons had all died.) When Akbar did have a son, he decided to build his capital on the rocky ridge where the saint lived. The tomb is of marble, and a marble screen inside is full of strings put there by women hoping for sons. After the mosque, I went through the palace buildings with a French guy I had met at the bus stop in Bharatpur, and I enjoyed that. It is quite clear there has been a lot of restoration. There are good views from the palace ridge out over the fields of mustard. The French guy left for Agra, only 20 miles away, and I wandered slowly again through the palace buildings of red sandstone.
Afterward, I took a path between the mosque and the palace down the ridge past the Elephant Gate, with two ruined stone elephants on it, down to a huge caravansarai where boys were playing cricket in the dusty courtyard while goats grazed alongside. I walked along the roof of the caravansarai and then to a tower below it studded with replicas of elephant tusks. Quite odd, and the experts don't seem to know why it was decorated so. From there I walked to the village of Sikri a little over a mile away, passing through mustard fields along very friendly and I regretted deciding not to spend a night in Fatehpur Sikri to be able to spend more time walking around. I returned up the ridge and went around and into the mosque again, very nice in the late afternoon sun, before making my way down through the bazaars of Fatehpur (Fatehpur is on one side of the ridge and Sikri is on the other) to the bus stop. I spent a half hour or so at the bus stop waiting for the Bharatpur bus and talking to a guy before giving up and walking to the highway where I could catch a bus for the short ride back to Bharatpur. I got there shortly after 6.
I took the bus to Agra the next morning, leaving Bharatpur about 10 and getting to Agra less than an hour and a half later. I took a cycle rickshaw from the bus station and got a great hotel right next to the east gate of the Taj Mahal for only about $11 a night. The hotel has a restaurant in a garden and I had lunch there before heading into the Taj Mahal about 1:30. The Taj has a high wall all around the large garden in which it sits, so you don't really get a good look at it until you enter the huge southern gate, and then it almost takes your breath away. It is a spectacularly beautiful building, on a platform above the Yamuna River with only sky for a background. I spent the afternoon there, leaving with the last tourists when it closed about 6. And there were lots of tourists, thousands of them, and about 90% of them Indian, and as many non-Indian Asian tourists, it seemed, as western ones. I walked around the gardens and then up to the Taj and the red sandstone mosque to the west, with a matching building to the east. The chamber inside the Taj is relatively small, with the cenotaph of Mumtaz Mahal in the center, with that of her husband, the fifth Moghul emperor Shah Jahan, to the side. They are actually buried in a crypt below. It was crowded, and noisy, inside, quite a change from 1979, as I remember. I looked down at the river, occupying less than third of the river bed, I'd say. It became chilly late in the afternoon, but it was interesting to see the Taj change color as the sun set and the light faded. There are lots of police outside the gates, and in fact all around the complex, and they do a very thorough search of you upon entry, quite unlike the cursory checks you usually get here in India. It costs 750 rupees, about $17, to get in, two and a half times the highest entry fee I've paid elsewhere in India. It was quite cold that night, and I slept in my clothes (as I have for the past several weeks) under four blankets.
It was 55 degrees in my room when I got up the next morning at 8. I had a long breakfast in the sun in the hotel garden and afterward walked through the green, tree-filled, but somewhat dusty park between the Taj Mahal and the Agra Fort upriver to the north, less than two miles away. I got to this massive red sandstone fort about 11:30 and spent almost five hours inside wandering around. It is double-walled, with the inside wall over 70 feet high and the outer wall maybe a third of that. Akbar built it and his successors improved it. The entry curves through several gates. You can visit only about a third of the area inside; the rest is used by the military. One large red sandstone palace was built by Akbar; the marble buildings were built by Shah Jahan and are quite beautiful. Shah Jahan was deposed by his son Aurangzeb in 1658 and spent the last eight years of his life as a prisoner in the fort, able to see the Taj Mahal only from afar. The view of the Taj was fairly hazy, though it got better later in the afternoon. Agra has become an industrial city of almost a million and a half people. They are trying to cut pollution. Auto rickshaws are required to run on natural gas and most cars aren't allowed near the Taj. I left the fort and walked back to my hotel, arriving before dark.
The next morning (today) before breakfast I walked down to the river next to the Taj to see it from below in the early morning sun. Police were stationed nearby. After breakfast in the hotel garden, I hired an auto rickshaw to take me to Sikandra, about six miles from the town center, to see Akbar's Mausoleum. It is large and imposing, and apparently was in ruins until restored by the British a century ago. His tomb is in an austere crypt in the large building at the center of the gardens, where deer are grazing on the grass. A high wall surrounds the site. I spent an hour and a half there and then we went back to Agra to a tomb called the Chini-ka-Rauza on the Yamuna River, built for the prime minister of Shah Jahan. It was in pretty bad condition, but with the remnants of beautiful tiles. Below it. on the riverside, was a herd of perhaps 30-40 water buffalo, and drying in the sun were thousands of what I suppose were water buffalo dung patties, to be used as fuel. Women were using their hands to fashion the patties, and there was quite a smell wafting up. From there we headed up the river a bit to another tomb, this one of the prime minister of Jahangir (and, not coincidentally, I imagine, the father of this wife). Jahangir's wife, Nur Jahan, was the power behind the throne and built this tomb for her father and mother. It is a beautiful building of white marble inlaid with precious stones, surrounded by gardens. It is called by some the "Baby Taj," and was built in the 1620's. The Taj was constructed from 1631 to 1648. From there we proceeded further upriver to a spot just opposite the Taj in order to see it from that angle. Police were camped nearby. Next I had the auto rickshaw cross the river and drop me off near the Jama Masjid, the city's principal mosque, now in great disrepair. I walked from there to the Delhi Gate of the Fort, formerly the main gate but now used only for the military, and then to the Agra Fort Railway Station, built by the British. I walked along the reddening fort walls in the late afternoon sun and then through the park back to the Taj Mahal and my hotel.
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