Thursday, August 19, 2010

on the road to agra


morning
Originally uploaded by heathre
we left the craziness of Delhi early in the morning, headed for the Taj Mahal (in Agra). we decided to use our driver from the day before - mun - since he seemed pretty good and trust-worthy.

One of the moments i will always remember from this trip was when i had to take one of those 'leaps' of faith/trust. we hired mun through the hotel to take us to one of the markets in delhi, realizing that we were a bit too overwhelmed to deal with public transit first thing. on the way there, he talked us in to letting him drive us for the day for a ridiculously cheap amount. so we agreed. kendal read about the Mughal Gardens and we decided we should go. turns out they were at the president's palace and only open a couple weeks a year to the public - and we were there at the right time! So we went to the gardens and had to go through this huge security search before entering the grounds. of course, i had my camera. which was not allowed. which meant either not go to the gardens or leave my camera with some random guy we just met. so i took a deep breath and handed over the camera to mun. the gardens were amazing and such an interesting experience since we were the only foreigners there - at least that we could tell. lots of school groups too. at this point on the trip - day 2 - we weren't used to the constant staring and it was a little unnerving. but entertaining too. as we came out of the gardens, i started looking for mun, half-wondering if he would still be there. and he was.

by the end of the day, mun had convinced us that we should let him drive us to the taj mahal the next day instead of taking the train or bus. i don't regret that decision, but i will say five straight hours of mun on the road to the Taj Mahal tested all of our nerves. he chatted the whole time, 95% of the time trying to convince us that we should hire him as a driver for our entire time traveling. when we said we wanted to go by train, he regaled us with stories of how we would be attacked and people were crazy, etc. he also had the most manaical laugh - i don't think i will ever forget that! the other 5% was spent asking all of us about our boyfriends and particularly was interested in kendal (katie's girlfried) so that was amusing.

but back to this image - i distracted myself from mun's craziness by taking pics out the window. most of the drive was very rural and the fog (or smog?) that morning was so beautiful over the fields.

and we did eventually arrive at the taj mahal in one piece, sanity somewhat intact....and our adventures continued...

2 comments:

sunnywave said...

i adore this!!!

SoRguAaYuMi said...

Maybe sometime you should visit south india... And the traffic in india is kinda scary isn't it... Haha.