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What can we say about Agra that hasn’t already been written in countless travel books, journals, and web blogs?! Well we can start by talking about the rubbish heaps and the fact that a lot of the streets smell of sewage. The city’s infrastructure is woefully inadequate, despite the flux of tourists from all over the world, come to visit one of the world’s greatest monuments (not the Pizza Hut, the Taj Mahal that is!)
Having checked into a lovely resort style hotel with individual chalets circling a big garden, we decided to save the Taj for xmas day, and took in other sites around the city – including the Agra Fort, and the tomb of Mirza Ghiyath Beg (referred to by the locals as the ‘baby Taj’) , the wazir and father in law to the Emperor Jahangir.
Having mentioned Pizza Hut earlier we should probably also confess that we have been there now so many times that we know all the staff! Alas our Delhi Bellies still being rather tender, we have been opting for the safer western cuisine option (aka Pizza Hut in this town). As you can see from the picture with the green pepper, the western food is agreeing with Nic and he is almost back to his normal self again!! 😀
One of the other reasons we have been choosing safer eateries was the recent drugging scams in the town (as told to us by the police) – whereby tourists drugged at restaurants are taken by the restaurant manager to ‘private clinics’, where so-called doctors syphon off exorbitant amounts of insurance money whilst keeping the patient under ‘observation’ (=more drugs) for several days!!
Touts and commission hunters at all the hotels and tourist shops are another major problem of this town – as seasoned Asian travellers we now know how to deal with them (having learnt the hard way – telling them that we are having a ‘private’ talk seems to work better than anything else!!). However, we have been feeling sorry for the uninitiated tourists who allow rickshaw drivers to take them from shop to shop, not realising that the price of every item they are buying is doubled or trebled by the shop to pay off the drivers’ commission!!
We did some souvenir shopping ourselves for a change – we could not resist some of the amazing handcrafts on offer, including marble inlaid with precious stones, and miniature paintings on silk. Needless to say we haggled very hard and got ourselves some real bargains! We also had a surprise shopping experience when buying some underwear for Nic, the guy at the shop decided to display his goods by dropping his own trousers!!! We didn’t buy those, needless to say :p – though we have seen in several bazaars in Pakistan and India second hand underwear for sale!!!
We also admired the fantastic scenery over the sacred river Yamuna, which flows through the city. The wide delta is awash with bufallo resting in the sands, and people washing clothes and carpets and laying them out to dry over the sands in the estuary.
