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.. on the ‘road to Agra’, finally! Having braced ourselves for the crazy Delhi traffic, we were pleasantly surprised to find that our departure was probably one of the easiest of all the big cities we have cycled through! Thanks to the British colonial city planners and their wide mall designs!
It took us three days to reach Agra, peppered with a few amusing incidents along the way:
– Sleeping (badly) in a haunted hotel on our first night out of Delhi (or so Sedef believed until the next morning when Nic revealed that he was joking!!! :p) Her re-ven-ge will be swift!
– Meeting Ronald McDonald (the creepy MaccyD clown) . After two months of only Asian food, we are ashamed to admit that seeing the MDs golden arches looming ahead of us we had to stop, our mouths salivating at the thought of a nice burger and fries…….. oh dear…..our standards must have dropped!!! Saying that the experience was exquisite! We also met one of the staff Vinod Kumar Aggarwal who kindly showed us around ‘behind the scenes’ – it was amazing to see how the stuff is made, and how clean the whole place was. Believe it or not the potato chips come from New Zealand, and that’s why they taste the same all over the world!
– Within a few minutes of entering the province of Uttar Pradesh (or UP as is commonly known), the road turned into a bizarre menagerie!! Almost as if the local circus inhabitants had all escaped and got themselves jobs at the local ‘dhabas’ (roadside road-kill cafes). We were waved in by a whole host of clowns, monkeys, and other bizarre manifestations, hard to believe there were humans underneath the weird masks!! There were also wild monkeys, boars, and dancing bears with their keepers.
– Nic getting hit on the face by the wing mirror of an Ambulance, driving on the hard shoulder on the wrong side of the road (i.e. towards us as we were cycling!). Luckily, his thick skull absorbed the impact and he was OK (though it does not seem to have knocked any sense into him one bit!! :p). To our great surprise the ambulance didn’t even stop to see if he was OK – or to collect their mirror which ended up on Nic’s lap before he smashed it on the floor in anger!! Cars and lorries driving on the wrong side of the road is sadly quite a common occurence here, including even driving in the fast lane!!
