The Road To Agra

The Taj Mahal is a five-hour drive from Delhi. We went via private car. The driver picked us up at 7:30am. I anticipated the usual congestion getting out of Delhi, and assumed once out of Delhi we would get on a freeway and easily make our way to Agra.

The reality was four lane road, two in each direction, which was shared with pedestrians, bicyclists, bicycle drawn carts, horse drawn carts, motorcycles with five people and young children, auto-rickshaws, farm equipment, and my favorite, the over burdened trucks that looked exactly like muffin tops a good twenty feet tall at least. On first observation you would think that these vehicles are not safe to drive – and you would be right. We saw at least two turned over on our journey, spilling out into the road. They could be filled with anything from straw, to aluminum cans, plastic bottles, to used toilet paper rolls.

Just when you get comfortable with no one paying any attention to the lanes, you notice traffic coming towards you in the wrong direction. The horn is the primary form of communication, taking the place of either turn signal, mirrors, and what we might consider mandatory visual checks. My plan was to sleep at least part of the five-hour journey on the way to Agra, but I was in a perpetual state of horrified fascination and couldn’t close my eyes long enough to rest (Sedona was fast asleep).

At one point our driver explained in broken English, that he was going to leave us for a moment, and we were not to open the doors or windows, and to remain in the car. I didn’t think much of that until, as soon as he walked away, a parade of oddities encircled the car. Everything from men with jewelry banging at the window, monkeys on leashes, to a man with a pet cobra (this is when Sedona started cowering and hiding) swarmed our car in the five minutes before our driver returned.

Traffic seemed to flow fairly well until the occasional accident or dead horse.

The Taj Mahal is a tomb built by a Mughal king for his favorite wife. It stands alone in its majestic beauty surrounded by poverty, desolation, and the general filth of Agra. All the detail to the building is done with inlays of semi-precious stones. Our tour guide said that in building it, they started out giants and became jewelers. The intention was to build a second mirror image in black on the other side of the river for the king’s tomb. However, his sons decided that he had lived too long and held him in house arrest until his death in the Agra fort.