you can pretty much get anywhere in india via trains, but you spend an exorbinant amount of time getting from point a to point b, often times having to stop at point z, q, and l along the way. we only wanted to stay in agra for a day, just to see the infamous taj mahal. annette has already been here, and agra is a wicked dump of a city. so we wanted our stay to be as short as possible. we had even thought of getting into agra (after being on a 10-hour overnight train), hustling ourselves to the taj and then getting back on a train out that evening to head to darjeeling. but we should have known that nothing is that easy, especially in a massive city like agra.
as soon as we got off the train we were accosted by this man, saleem, who is a rickshaw driver/hustler. one of the things that people do when they want things from you is bombard you as soon as you get off the train in order to confuse you, i think. and you really don't know which way is up. we were just trying to make our way over to the ticket counter to get our next train tickets and saleem just kept telling us that it was not possible to go to darjeeling from there and we had to go to this town called new jailapurgi and that there was no train, blah blah, blah. usually i am pretty passive when it comes to people hustling me, but i was in a particularly foul mood so i started gettng snippy. and as the morning unfolded, i got angrier and angrier. the bureaucracy in this country is pretty unbelievable. there are 10 people behind the glass and only one person is actually working, if you can even call it that, while the others watch and drink chai. and lines do not in any way matter here. yu can just be standing in line and then 5 people will push to the front. being the tourist you don't know what is going on initially, because you were taught to respect line so you end up waiting and waiting and waiting and being a sucker until you can't do it anymore and then you become a royal bitch. and by "you", i mean me.
when we finally got to speak to rhe man behind the glass, he told us we couldn't buy tickets there and we had to go to delhi, which is 3 hours away, in order to go to a foreign tourist bureau to get to darjeeling, which i knew for a fact was BS. so i started getting mad at him and the asshole just sat there with this smug look on his face saying there was nothing he could d, but he could not sell us tickets to darjeeling. so then we asked him to sell us tickets to delhi, just so we had a plan of action out of agra, but he said he could not sell us tickets to delhi.
it was like i was asking the local butcher to book my train tickets. i mean, this is the ticket person at the ticket counter at the train statin. but i was the crazy tourist who wanted him to sell me a goddamn train ticket. he kept saying we had to go to another train station. eventually we got so frustrated, we walked out and guess who we met? our friend saleem. and then saleem proceeded to tell us that of course we could buy tickets to delhi from there and that the man just didn't want to help tourists. saleem offered to go buy the tickets for us. and of course, my tourist hairs stood on end a bit, sure that he was trying to rip us off. but we were so tired (and i was very hungry) so we acquiesced, and went back to the train station. We waited for saleem to get us tickets; which he did, although we were wait listed. i kept asking him what would happen if we didn't get on the train and he kept saying that we would and we went back and forth like this for a bit before i had to just give in and assume that we would get on the train.
after this delightful experience, saleem took us to our hotel (after a side trip to the travel agency of a friend of his, where we did manage to get tickets to new jailpaguri so we could move onward to darjeeling. although we did have to stay in agara an extra day, against our will). The good thing is that the hotel was just a 2 minute walk from the south gate of the taj mahal. and the great things about it was that the room was just 250 rupees, about 5 dollars for one night! and despite our pretty crappy morning, we found out that admission to the taj mahal was free the day we arrived, so we were able to save 20 dollars, which is a nice reward for our misery. obviously the taj mahal was magnificent and big and all those positive adjectives, so i will spare you the details.
our next travel venture out of agra was a 26 hour train ride, which i wasn't really all that worried about. we had been traveling in 2nd class ac sleeper cars, but opted out this time because it was 20 dollars cheaper to ride in the sleeper car. we figured we should save the money and just forgo ac. and that would have been fine, except for the fact that we were the only 2 female non-indian people on the train with mostly males. they just had no idea what to make of us. i don't think there was even one minute where we were not stared at on this journey (which ended up being 28 hours, by the way). we paid for sleeper beds, but we quickly discovered that during the day, you do not get your own bed-seat, anyone can sit on the seat you paid for, which they do. i was on the bottom bunk, so i shared my seat with anywhere from 1 to 6 people. i figured at night we would be able to lie down, and i was partially right. as it got later in the evening, less people were on the train, so i finally got to lay down. but, while i was sleeping, i felt something on my le, so i jolted up, and there were 2 kids sitting on my "bed", which was fine, but then one of the girls used my feet as a pillow and curled up right away, while the other girl curled into my knees. so i had to sleep in a cramped fetal position for a couple of hours, which was not the most comfortable. my body did adjust though and i finally fell back asleep, only to be jolted awake by a woman who had another child with her, who somehow managed to squeeze herself and her toddler into the bed with us, so we were a total of 5 people sleeping on a bed that is maybe 6 feet long and is really just a twin. needless to say, i did not sleep too well. annette, luckily, had no one bothering her because she was on the top bunk.
the other thing about this train ride is that since there was no ac you had to keep the windows open and every once in a while i would get sprayed with some kind of liquid from outside and had no idea what it was. we think maybe someone was peeing off the top of the train and we were getting some of the yummy after effects. yum. but the icing on the cake was when annette and i were sitting on my seat, playing cards, and we happened to be next to a group of the indian equivalent of frat boys who just could not stop laughing at us and talking abut us in hindi. we really didn't take to them all that much, especially when they tried sneaking pictures with their camera phones. when i decided that i really despised them was when one of the onboard toilets overflowed, which they saw. the pee and other such delights were all over the floor and seeped onto our backpacks, but they said absolutely nothing. a woman from another berth had to come and tell s so we could get our packs off the floor. all these guys did was laugh.
anyhow. As you can infer I have not had the most pleasanr last few days. But the good news is that we did get to darjeeling. And absolutely love it! So my next blog entry will be more positive. I promise. Namaste.
there are all kinds of animals walking the streets in india. cows are ubiquitous. while we were in agra we saw camels and elephants being led around by people. there are also hordes of wild pigs and goats rummaging through trash. actually all the animals rummage through the trash, i think. look how skinny this camel is...the state of the animals here (like many of the people) is quite grim.
monkeys are also all over the cities of india, mostly these red-faced monkeys. i love, love, love the monkeys (as i am sure i have mentioned before). but sadly, they do not all love me. while we were at the fort in agra, we stopped to look at this family of monkeys. i was in monkey heaven. there were also these kids getting kind of riled up by the monkeys and one of the moneys in a different part of the lawn let out a warning cry at the kids, which riled up the other monkeys sitting on the lawn where i was. all of the sudden, the monkey you see in the picture, looked at me with such hatred in its eyes, jumped the fence, shrieked, and started chasing me. i started running and shrieking too, trying to copy the monkey's sound so it would leave me alone. it came within an in inch of swiping my leg and biting me. now every time i see a red-faced monkey in the city, i am terrified. there were a group of them sitting at the train station and i couldn't walk down the stairwell, i was so on edge. i hope this new phobia leaves me soon.
this is me looking on with disgust as annette makes me stand in another embarassing pose picture. she knows i hate them, which is why she makes me do them. these pictures are a constant source of humiliation for me. alas, annette's rock-hard heart does not care.
these are the little rickshaws, or tuk tuks, that careen us about town. this will also be the last thing i see as i die on the roads in india.
the people in india are constantly asking the whiteys if they can take pictures with them. seeing as annette is the whitey in our dyad, she gets asked quite frequently. as soon as she is asked, i run away, and sometimes secretly take her picture from afar. even at the taj mahal, people were taking more pictures of her than they were of the actual building. it is pretty hilarious because it is not me.
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