Agra - 3/15/1999
| TRAVELS WITH MOM - Table of Contents |
Email sent from Agra, India on March 15, 1999:
I'm typing this from a PC in the back of a spice shop in Agra, where the owner has a PPP connection to an internet node in Agra. I just spent 30 minutes typing a message in Yahoo and then lost it when our connection was dropped, so I'm composing this one in Notepad and will then paste it into e-mail. Oh well, that's the only PC-related problem I've had all day, so I must be on vacation.
We had a good time our final day in Varanasi, and our driver Dada had some great stories about driving the Dalai Lama for a week on his last visit to Sarnath there. Sita Travel (his employer) helps arrange the Dalai Lama's travel when he comes to Varanasi, and Dada is their most senior driver so he spent a week driving the Dalai Lama to various Buddhist sites. He kept saying to me, "he sit right there in your seat, that is why you feel so calm in that seat," and he told how security officers would follow him into the bathroom at every stop to make sure he wasn't picking up a weapon or anything. He also said "Dalai Lama, he has face with burning inside, like moon ... he never speak much, but he has face you feel happy when you see." Then he explained how Buddhism is actually a sect of Hinduism, but what do you expect from a nice Brahmin man?
We took the train from Varanasi to Agra, leaving at 8:00pm Sunday night and arriving in Tundla (a few miles outside Agra) at 4:30am. It was pretty weird, and in hindsight I probably shouldn't have scheduled our first Indian Railway experience for total darkness at both stations, but now we know what to expect and the next train ride we'll be better prepared.
Our driver in Varanasi (Dada) took us to the station via a back route, and we arrived behind the tracks where men were standing around campfires talking in the dark. We were instantly attacked by a group of young men wanting to carry our bags, and we let the most aggressive one do just that. He put Mom's suitcase on his head, then piled my heavy duffel bag on top of that, then led us up the stairs and over the tracks to the train station.
In the station, people were waiting everywhere. Some slept on the concrete, either out in the open or huddled under dirty sheets. Some sat on their luggage. Others paced nervously, including the young man near us who was traveling with a shotgun and an ammo belt full of shells. (They won't let you take that stuff on the trains in Chicago!) A nearby guard with both hands on a machine gun kept an eye on him, but we decided we should ask for the no-firearms section next time, for our own peace of mind. Yeah, right.
Our driver came into the station and took our tickets to the station superintendent, but our reputation as buddies of the Sari King had preceded us. He looked at the tickets and said "oh yes, these have already been confirmed, there will be no problem."
When the train pulled in, there was 15 minutes of chaos while people tried to find the right car. We tried a few different cars, pushing through the crowd behind the boy with our pile of luggage on his head, and then we made it to our bunks. We were in AC 2-tier class, which means you have air conditioning and there are 4 people to each tiny compartment. Mom and I had the top two bunks, with a middle-aged Indian couple beneath us. The luggage storage space was full, so we wound up keeping our luggage on our bunks with us, which made for very cramped sleeping quarters. Meanwhile, the train shook violently, the AC unit inches above us blasted out freezing air, and the Indian couple cooked a traditional meal of vegetables and roti bread in an aluminum can (with Sterno fuel, I think) just 3 feet below Mom's bunk.
The train had Indian-style toilets: a hole in the floor that you squat over. On a bumpy train, that's quite an adventure!
When 4:15am finally arrived, we hauled our luggage to the far end of the car, near the door, so we wouldn't miss our stop. The conductor slept under a sheet on the wet metal grate next to Mom's feet, and we waited. And waited. Finally, at 5:00am, the train started to slow and the conductor stood up. He smiled, and his teeth were red with betel juice, with about half of them missing. He stretched, rubbed some white paste on his hands, then flung open the door. He stuck his head out into the darkness, with telephone poles whishing past a few feet away, then turned to us and proclaimed loudly "Toon-du-lu!" This was our stop.
When we got off, a little guy about Mom's age (maybe 100 pounds, with the look of a very hard life) piled our bags on his head and carried them out of the station. He had to feel for each step in the darkness (since he couldn't look down with all that luggage on his head), but somehow he avoided all the people sleeping on the steps and we made it.
Our cab driver played the usual games of pretending to not remember which hotel we wanted and so on, but we're getting used to that stuff and I calmly yelled at him until he remembered. Then he pushed two other cabs out of the way (which were parked in front of us), and we roared off into the darkness. Speeding petrol trucks coming the other way caused many exciting near-misses, but eventually we made it to the city of Agra. Along the way were many fires along the road, and the "street lights" were interesting -- 8-foot flourescent tubes propped up in the trees, with bare wires leading from them up to the nearby power lines. Not exactly UL-approved.
As we drove south along the west bank of the Yamuna River, the smell of raw sewage was overpowering, and there were people here and there squatting over the ditches in the pre-dawn mist. Then, as if in a dream or hallucination, the silhouette of the Taj Mahal appeared in the distance. What a way to first see it.
Since arriving, we've had fun in Agra. We saw Agra Fort yesterday, which was huge and spectacular. And this morning we spent two hours taking pictures at the Taj Mahal. We were the first ones in the doors at 6:00am, and it was spectacular to watch the sun rise and slowly bring the giant marble pillars to life.
We have a rickshaw driver here named Amin, and he seems like a good guy (we went through a few other losers before finding him). He has 5 kids, and he's very honest -- he hasn't tried to bring us to a single place we didn't ask for. (In Agra, that's very unusual - everyone wants to bring you to places where they get huge commissions on expensive junk you can buy.)
Tomorrow we'll vist the nearby ancient city of Fatehpur Sikri, and I'll send an update (hopefully) on Thursday before we leave for the Punjab. Have to run now, I've spent a full hour trying to send this message and I'm out of time.
- ### -
I'm typing this from a PC in the back of a spice shop in Agra, where the owner has a PPP connection to an internet node in Agra. I just spent 30 minutes typing a message in Yahoo and then lost it when our connection was dropped, so I'm composing this one in Notepad and will then paste it into e-mail. Oh well, that's the only PC-related problem I've had all day, so I must be on vacation.
We had a good time our final day in Varanasi, and our driver Dada had some great stories about driving the Dalai Lama for a week on his last visit to Sarnath there. Sita Travel (his employer) helps arrange the Dalai Lama's travel when he comes to Varanasi, and Dada is their most senior driver so he spent a week driving the Dalai Lama to various Buddhist sites. He kept saying to me, "he sit right there in your seat, that is why you feel so calm in that seat," and he told how security officers would follow him into the bathroom at every stop to make sure he wasn't picking up a weapon or anything. He also said "Dalai Lama, he has face with burning inside, like moon ... he never speak much, but he has face you feel happy when you see." Then he explained how Buddhism is actually a sect of Hinduism, but what do you expect from a nice Brahmin man?
We took the train from Varanasi to Agra, leaving at 8:00pm Sunday night and arriving in Tundla (a few miles outside Agra) at 4:30am. It was pretty weird, and in hindsight I probably shouldn't have scheduled our first Indian Railway experience for total darkness at both stations, but now we know what to expect and the next train ride we'll be better prepared.
Our driver in Varanasi (Dada) took us to the station via a back route, and we arrived behind the tracks where men were standing around campfires talking in the dark. We were instantly attacked by a group of young men wanting to carry our bags, and we let the most aggressive one do just that. He put Mom's suitcase on his head, then piled my heavy duffel bag on top of that, then led us up the stairs and over the tracks to the train station.
In the station, people were waiting everywhere. Some slept on the concrete, either out in the open or huddled under dirty sheets. Some sat on their luggage. Others paced nervously, including the young man near us who was traveling with a shotgun and an ammo belt full of shells. (They won't let you take that stuff on the trains in Chicago!) A nearby guard with both hands on a machine gun kept an eye on him, but we decided we should ask for the no-firearms section next time, for our own peace of mind. Yeah, right.
Our driver came into the station and took our tickets to the station superintendent, but our reputation as buddies of the Sari King had preceded us. He looked at the tickets and said "oh yes, these have already been confirmed, there will be no problem."
When the train pulled in, there was 15 minutes of chaos while people tried to find the right car. We tried a few different cars, pushing through the crowd behind the boy with our pile of luggage on his head, and then we made it to our bunks. We were in AC 2-tier class, which means you have air conditioning and there are 4 people to each tiny compartment. Mom and I had the top two bunks, with a middle-aged Indian couple beneath us. The luggage storage space was full, so we wound up keeping our luggage on our bunks with us, which made for very cramped sleeping quarters. Meanwhile, the train shook violently, the AC unit inches above us blasted out freezing air, and the Indian couple cooked a traditional meal of vegetables and roti bread in an aluminum can (with Sterno fuel, I think) just 3 feet below Mom's bunk.
The train had Indian-style toilets: a hole in the floor that you squat over. On a bumpy train, that's quite an adventure!
When 4:15am finally arrived, we hauled our luggage to the far end of the car, near the door, so we wouldn't miss our stop. The conductor slept under a sheet on the wet metal grate next to Mom's feet, and we waited. And waited. Finally, at 5:00am, the train started to slow and the conductor stood up. He smiled, and his teeth were red with betel juice, with about half of them missing. He stretched, rubbed some white paste on his hands, then flung open the door. He stuck his head out into the darkness, with telephone poles whishing past a few feet away, then turned to us and proclaimed loudly "Toon-du-lu!" This was our stop.
When we got off, a little guy about Mom's age (maybe 100 pounds, with the look of a very hard life) piled our bags on his head and carried them out of the station. He had to feel for each step in the darkness (since he couldn't look down with all that luggage on his head), but somehow he avoided all the people sleeping on the steps and we made it.
Our cab driver played the usual games of pretending to not remember which hotel we wanted and so on, but we're getting used to that stuff and I calmly yelled at him until he remembered. Then he pushed two other cabs out of the way (which were parked in front of us), and we roared off into the darkness. Speeding petrol trucks coming the other way caused many exciting near-misses, but eventually we made it to the city of Agra. Along the way were many fires along the road, and the "street lights" were interesting -- 8-foot flourescent tubes propped up in the trees, with bare wires leading from them up to the nearby power lines. Not exactly UL-approved.
As we drove south along the west bank of the Yamuna River, the smell of raw sewage was overpowering, and there were people here and there squatting over the ditches in the pre-dawn mist. Then, as if in a dream or hallucination, the silhouette of the Taj Mahal appeared in the distance. What a way to first see it.
Since arriving, we've had fun in Agra. We saw Agra Fort yesterday, which was huge and spectacular. And this morning we spent two hours taking pictures at the Taj Mahal. We were the first ones in the doors at 6:00am, and it was spectacular to watch the sun rise and slowly bring the giant marble pillars to life.
We have a rickshaw driver here named Amin, and he seems like a good guy (we went through a few other losers before finding him). He has 5 kids, and he's very honest -- he hasn't tried to bring us to a single place we didn't ask for. (In Agra, that's very unusual - everyone wants to bring you to places where they get huge commissions on expensive junk you can buy.)
Tomorrow we'll vist the nearby ancient city of Fatehpur Sikri, and I'll send an update (hopefully) on Thursday before we leave for the Punjab. Have to run now, I've spent a full hour trying to send this message and I'm out of time.
- ### -
/// thoughts on the above; see callouts in the original web version
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| Agra 3/17/1999 → |