Agra and Jaipur

This weekend IES organized a trip for us to Agra and Jaipur. It's a pretty sweet deal because they arrange for a bus and nice hotels and tours of the sights and all of our meals. We left early Friday morning to drive to Agra. The drive took about seven hours, including a stop for breakfast and a detour because of some sort of road block. The road block offered some brief excitement, because when traffic began to slow down on the divided highway in front of us, the driver turned the bus around, then made a u-turn at the first break in the median and tried driving up the opposite side of the highway. This sounds much more dangerous than it was, though, because pretty much everybody travelling in our direction tried the same thing. Unfortunately, that did not work and we wound up wedged into to the town square of some very small village in the process of creating our own detour.  

In another traffic jam, a monkey jumped up onto the window of the bus. He was on a leash, and before we could take too many pictures, his owner tugged for him to come down and gestured that for a fee he would have the monkey jump back up and allow us to continue taking pictures. 

We went to Sikandra, where Akbar is buried, and the Agra Fort on Friday and then woke up at the crack of dawn on Saturday to see the sun rise at the Taj Mahal, which was amazing. After some souvenir shopping, we left for Jaipur. 

We stopped on the way at another one of Akbar's palaces, called Fatehpur Sikri. The complex itself was interesting, but getting there involved transferring from our tour bus to smaller vans designed to ferry people up to the palace. The parking area for tour buses was surrounded by small shops and all of the shopkeepers came out to harass us to visit their stores. Overall the shopkeepers and individual souvenir vendors in Agra and Jaipur were extremely aggressive, but this was probably the worst of it. 

The rest of the ride from Agra to Jaipur was uneventful, except maybe for peeing on the side of the road. They don't really have rest stops on the highways, and though there are motels and restaurants set up for travelers along the road, they are infrequent. So, every hour or two, you pull over and the men head in one direction into the bushes a bit and the women head in another direction. An important detail perhaps is that there are no laws against public urination, so even in Delhi when people are driving and need to pee they just pull their car/bus/auto rickshaw over to the side of the road and take care of it. And by people I mean men. Women don't do that in the city, I don't think. I guess the other important detail is that many toilets are just a hole in the ground, which perhaps makes the bathroom seem less essential. I'm not really sure about the thought process there. 

Sunday started with an elephant ride up to Amber Fort. It was sort of like Splash Mountain where they take a picture of you on the ride and then try to sell it to you at the end, except all along the road up to the fort were guys with digital cameras and then on the walk back down there they were with the photos printed trying to sell them to you. It's pretty much impossible to take a picture of yourself riding an elephant, so they do a good business. I will have to scan the pictures and post them. Parts of the fort were beautiful, as were the views, and there was a snake charmer there! 

Jaipur is known for block printed fabric, so after the fort we went to a store that offered demonstrations of the printing techniques. I learned the origin of paisley, which is cooler than it sounds. Apparently when people first began printing fabrics, they used their hands as stamps. When they got bored with hand prints on their fabrics, they started using the bottoms of their fists, which makes paisley. 

In the afternoon we went to Jantar Mantar, which is called an observatory but was really just a park full of all different types of sun dials built in the 1700s. It was so cool! Then we went to the City Palace, which houses an unimpressive collection of textiles and weapons, and then spent a few minutes in the bazaar, where shopkeepers each pay several young guys to harass tourists into stopping into their shops. More than once I had to leave a shop because these people had begun to ask questions like was I travelling alone and where was I staying. It was very strange and generally discouraged shopping, which seemed counterproductive for the store owners.  I only made one purchase, which was sort of accidental. I was looking at scarves and picked out two that I liked. When I asked the price, the owner said 900 rupees for each one. At that moment I remembered that I only had 700 rupees with me. I told him I only had 500 rupees and would go to the ATM and then come back, both of us knowing full well that I probably would not return. As I was walking out he continued to call after me with lower and lower prices until he got down to 500 rupees (about $12) for the two together. I couldn't really turn that down.