"Agra. City of the Taj Mahal" Agra by Terje1966

We spent our first hours in India on the road to Agra. Compared to our own country Norway this was both chaotic and extremely hot. When the morning light came about 30minutes south of Delhi there were people,cows,elephants,goats,camels cars,mototcycles,bicycles,horses and dogs everywhere. There were cars and trucks on fire in the middle of the road.People sleeping on beds beside the road. People with nothing and people living in large palaces. When we got closer to Agra we drove on an wide sandy road and managed to destroy one of our tyres,but that was no problem. On the other side of the road a man sat waiting for this to happen with his tools ready to help us. I think I saw more people these few morning hours than I had ewer seen before in my whole life.

Building in Taj Mahal area

We stayed in Agra for only about 36hours so we can hardly call ourselves experts on this city. The day after we came we did the same as everyone else. We wnt to see the Taj Mahal. After a dusty ride on the back of a bicycle taxi driven by a poor 80year old guy we came to the gate to the area that contains the Taj Mahal toomb. After having paid to enter,paid someone to look after our videocamera ad paid the new guide that the taxidriver put us in contact with we were ready to see the great wonder. And it was a great building. The Taj is in one end of a big park with several other large buildings. Behind the Taj Mahal you will find the Yamuna river slowly flowing by

Building in Taj Mahal area 2

Everything is cheap in India. So the biggest problem is not payng for your acommodation,food or sights. Beeing in India you will soon find out that the biggest challenge is to not tip away your money. In this country it seems that everyone are experts in helping you with things`n stuff you never could imagine you needed. They also in a clever way hand you over to other helpers in their network so they can continue the "robbing" The second day we had a discussion about this on our hotel room where we decided that enough was enough. From now on we should be better at saying "no thanks" to people and tomorrow we shoud just take a taxi to the railway station and get on the train to somewhere. Somewhere that we decided ourselves.
Having finished this dicussion we went down in the lobby for a drink and there we met the owner of the tourist office that immediatly started asking about our plans. He was a wery nice man to talk to and after 10 minutes he had managed to give us our largest expense so far. He sold us 5 days in a taxi around in Rajastan.