Travel Day - Delhi to Agra

So today we took our car and driver from Delhi to Agra - about 245km - which takes about 4 hours on the good roads up here (would have taken a lot longer in the south where the roads aren't paved or smooth). Along the way we made a couple of stops.

The first was in Mathura, where Krishna was born and there is a temple over his birthplace. Matt says it kind of reminded him of Bethlehem because the shrine over the birthplace is in this tiny little room in the basement of the temple. The temple itself is inside a huge, heavily guarded complex where you have to go through a metal detector and by physically patted down to get in, and you can't take in any bags or electronics (no cameras, cell phones, etc). Not sure what all the security was about but it made Matt laugh when three different people searched him, made him take out his wallet, and then looked inside his wallet. Cause what safety threat was he going to be carrying inside his wallet exactly?

After the temple we decided to try and find Vishram Ghat - a spot on the river where at sunset they float lanterns out on the water. It was supposedly 2 km away through Mathura but although we walked for about half an hour, we couldn't find anything remotely resembling what we were looking for. In the meantime, we got a good look at Mathura and couldn't help but be a bit depressed... it was dusty and dirty and there were thousands of flies everywhere, and we were dodging cow poop everywhere, and the poverty was a bit overwhelming. And of course the smog... in fact everything about the North of India has been a bit depressing because of the pollution. So we were glad to get back to our nice, clean, air conditioned car.

Our next stop was the Tomb of Akbar, which we just happened to drive by on the side of the road - Mom asked the driver what the minarets were and he said "Oh, its a tomb of a king from the 1600's... did you want to stop and see it?" We said sure! It has a beautiful entry gate, and then another impressive building inside that contained the tomb. It also had quite an array of wildlife - peacocks, antelope, baboons, chipmunks...

Then finally we made it to Agra which was intimidating - our driver told us that he and his friends refer to Agra as the crazy city, and in fact when someone goes to Agra they say - "oh, he's gone to the mental hospital" instead of "he's gone to agra". Traffic was crazy, smog was thick, and we were very very grateful that we didn't take a train and then try to find out hotel on our own because it was tucked back away in a residential neighborhood and we would never have been able to locate it.

The hotel itself is a step down from our beautiful palace heights hotel in Delhi - when the scheduled black out hit this evening the hotel generator went out and it sounded like a helicopter was landing on our roof... electricity is back on until tomorrow morning at 7:30 am, so it sounds like we will be getting an early start.

Tomorrow morning we go to see the Taj Mahal... pending the weather. Apparently the smog/fog in the mornings here has been pretty bad the past couple of days, and if its bad you can't really see the Taj, so we may have to play it by ear. I'll keep you posted.