Day 28-30: Agra & Fatehpur Sikri
"You cannot help yourself pausing for another quick look"
It should be a recognised condition. Taj Mahal Surprise – the state of being you find yourself in whenever you look around and see the Taj Mahal. And what an excellent surprise it is too.
Having arrived into Agra at 8.30am and therefore after the supposed magical witching hour when it's best to see Agra’s monument to a love lost, we spend the day taking in the oft overlooked sites Agra has to offer, because of course everyone really just comes here for the main event.
But nevertheless a most agreeable afternoon was spent being ferried about by the ageing Uncle of our homestay’s family who waited as we wandered, surprised and wide eyed again and again by the spectacle of the white dome in the distance, visiting the town’s Fort and Taj Mahal predecessor, the charmingly named, Baby Taj.
Perhaps what comes next goes without saying or rather has been said countless times before, but as this is a diary it shouldn’t really go undocumented – the Taj Mahal proper is magnificent. It’s everything all the poets and scholars have ever written down about it and it is a privilege to see with my own eyes.
The 6am queues moved quickly and as we enter by the western gate the view of it is obscured, purposefully limited, like you’re peeking through a key hole. Only when you pass through the gateway arch does it unveil itself in all its glory. Once the photos were captured, the next few hours were simply filled with us gawping at it from different locations. It definitely casts a spell and even though we’d gazed at it (from afar) for hours on end over the previous 36 hours, you cannot help yourself just pausing and turning around for another quick look ahead of leaving.
And just one more observation. As we sat the previous day in a fairly average rooftop café with reportedly ‘the best views of the Taj’ in town it occurred that all the real estate around us may very well be prime but was still in actual fact just a mass of local people’s houses. No developers had bulldozed it to build, no big hotel chains had scooped up the land for some big bucks gain. I doubt you’d be able to say the same in most other countries. Instead the locals get the very best views – I wonder if they find themselves just having one last look before bedtime too.
Rather than linger in tiny Agra we decided to take a short detour (only an hour long bus journey but I suspect the whiplash will stay with us for longer) to Fatehpur Sikri – a fortified city, still in incredible nick after 450 years, where Emperor Akbar built his new capital and stayed for ten minutes (14 years).
We’ve read quite a lot around our mostly historical tour of India so far – modern culture, food and reclining in hammocks reading Kindles is to come – and Akbar is absolutely one of the stand out characters.
4ft 10, 900 wives, forward thinking – at Fatehpur Sikri he built three palaces for each of his favourite wives – one a Hindu, one a Muslim and one a Christian. He was incredibly well read, even though he couldn’t read himself he insisted on taking his library of over 12,000 books with him whenever he travelled.
Having decided to spend the night in Fatehpur Sikri rather than get the no suspension bus straight back to Agra, we soon realised this once magnificent capital has a little less going on these days and indeed no places to eat (and by that I mean no places that wouldn’t have a condemned rating in the UK by the Food Standard’s Agency…) So we sat in our roadside hotel and ate cheese and onion toasties and chips (marsala fries before you judge us too harshly) and two cans of Kingfisher lager.
I told you the food and culture is coming soon! Lucknow, don’t let me down
“The Taj Mahal rises above the banks of the river, a tear drop on the face of time, echoing the cry, “I have not forgotten! I have not forgotten, O beloved!””
