September 19, 2017

After spending the remainder of the night at the Jaypee Siddharth hotel in Delhi. Dogs, which are roaming the streets, started barking just after 5 a.m. several times, making sleep impossible.  The buffet breakfast was open at 7.  It was a plentiful selection of Indian food, pasties like croissants and muffins, yoghurt, and a custom omelet accompanied with juices and coffee.  The luggage needed to be in the hallway by 8 a.m. for pickup and transfer from the room to the bus.  Just after 9 the buses were ready to take us to Agra.

     A temperature at 9:15 a.m. read 29C and there was a haze in the sunny sky.

   Delhi is included in India's seismic zone-IV, indicating its vulnerability to major earthquakes.  There are more than 22 million people in the Delhi capital region.

Our guide for the trip is Rajesh or Raj for short. There is also a driver and assistant. Each of the buses holds about 33 people in the passenger compartment (each bus has 21 people) which is air conditioned and a good sound system to hear Raj’s informative narrative.  The driver and assistant’s front compartment is stiflingly hot, when you exit the bus from the air-conditioned interior. Raj gave everyone a fresh orange marigold necklace which most of us wore for the whole day. Passing through Delhi (pronounced Dill-hee by locals), we stopped at Laxmi Naragan Mandir temple. It is dedicated to Laxmi, the goddess of prosperity and Narayana, the preserver.

 There were a few vendors selling postcards, jewelry, purses and trinkets. The tour of the temple, where photos were not allowed – not any kind of electronics was allowed and were left in the locked bus which the driver and assistant stayed with.  After six years of construction, the main Hindu temple was completed in 1939 and dedicated by Mahatma Gandhi as a place for Indians of all castes and most religions to worship. It was one of several temples in India funded by the wealthy industrialist Baldeo Das Biria.  There are also side Buddhist, Shiva and Krishna temples as well as accommodation for pilgrims. The construction of the temple started in 1933 and was inaugurated by Mahatma Gandhi in 1939 on the condition that people of all castes will be allowed in the temple. Also, people of all religions could visit the temples.  This style of Hindu architecture is known as Nagara.  Their interior chapels contain intricate carvings and there are some stained glass windows in the entrance hall about 10 metres above the floor. The statues of the main idols, goddess Lakshmi and lord Narayan, are located in the main temple. All the temples idols are carved of marble from Jaipur. The structure is built from Kota stone from within a 300 km radius of the site.  We spend an hour walking around the marble floored structure in our bare feet.  Then we were on our way to Agra, through rural India.

   Not far away, there are other religious buildings including a Catholic Cathedral, a golden domed Sikh temple and a mosque.  We will be in that same area when we return to Delhi in five days and tour the city center. The traffic leaving Delhi was chaotic. In one section as the bus headed to the expressway, there were three lanes of traffic, where the lane lines only showed there was room for two. The trip to Agra was about 235 km in about four hours, not including the snack stop at noon.  We crossed one of India’s large rivers, the Yamuna, which is a tributary to the sacred Ganges River.  Just outside the capital region is the new city of Noida.  It is the center for film and television studios as well as a technology center.  Bollywood in Mumbai is still the movie making center. Further along we joined an eight-lane expressway with the four lanes going in opposite directions, separated by a treed median.  Slowly, at walking speed, on the left lane (India drivers drive, like the British, on the left side of the road) travelled pilgrims walking and pulling small one meter by two meter flat bed carts carrying colourful mini shrines containing the burning flame of the goddess whose gift is a flame.  They are returning to their home temples to tend the flame for 9 days during a Hindu festival.  

  For lunch, we tried Paneer Tikka and Paneer Tikka Butter.  The former was similar to a fried tofu with nice spicing with a vegetable stir fry and the latter was a bowl of spicy crumbled tofu in a meatless thick stew.  We passed through farmland which had straw huts scattered on the farms which contain dry cow dung to use as fuel for cooking in the rural areas. The temperature was probably in the mid 30s and the haze was more noticeable in the country probably caused by stubble burned of harvested crops. Crops grown in the area are millet, mustard, corn and sugar cane   Occasionally, there were a few camels, with handlers, walking along secondary roads. As we passed grazing fields we saw, water buffalo, goats and cattle.  The cow is sacred to Hindus as well as Buddhists.  In the political world, it is a major reason for the Myranmar Buddhist Government to be chasing the Muslims out of the country since they eat beef.

   Raj gave us lots of information about the history of farming over the centuries in India.  There are over 100,000 languages spoken in India.  Of those, 108 are spoken by more than 100,000 speakers. There are 18 official languages of India, with English and Hindi used by the majority of citizens. We spent the early afternoon on the bus on route to Agra updating today’s blog.

   Agra’s latitude is 27.18330 North, Jaipur latitude’s is 26.56 North, while Corpus Christi, Texas, latitude’s is 26.44 North.   Agra is in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. The population is near two million.  During part of the reign of the Mughal Dynasty, Agra was the empire’s capital.  Its history goes back to at least 200 AD when the philosopher, Ptolemy makes reference to the city.

  We arrived at the Trident Agra hotel about 2:30. The temperature was about 35C and the sun was shining but was obstructed by the haze. The air quality index for Delhi at 3 p.m. was 194 and in Agra 152 compared to downtown Toronto at 50.  It was not bad enough to bring out the masks to filter the smoggy air; a thicker haze would be needed.

   The check-in procedure was the same as in Delhi. The passports were photocopied, then returned and the room keycards were distributed, and this time the porters took our luggage to our rooms within 20 minutes of the group arriving.  The room is nicer than yesterday, with wood floors in the bedroom and marble, which was nice and cool on the feet, for the entry and bathroom.  The wings of the two storey building surround a beautiful garden with fountains and a swimming pool. You can enjoy the view from the dining room. The doormen wore light coloured traditional Hindu uniforms and the female staff were dressed in lovely cream and navy saris.

   At 4:30 the group members assembled in the bright marble floored lobby for the Agra Fort tour.  Raj advised our bus group to leave our backpacks and purses at the hotel and just take cameras or cellphones. The bus took us though the city center on a street only four lanes wide with no curbs or boulevards. Some of the ramshackle buildings along the way looked rather unstable and then a beautiful Four Seasons, or Ramada Inn would appear.  We did see a McDonalds and a KFC restaurant.  Agra Fort is a UNESCO World Heritage site which was a combination Palace, small city and fortress, built from sandstone by the grandson of the invader and later emperor Babur, the conqueror of northern India in 1526.  Babur, an Afghani war lord, was persuaded by a brother of a reigning emperor to overthrow his brother and invade the territory. The battle victory by the Afghani war lord was the beginning of the Mughal Dynasty.  The family was descendants of the legendary Ghenghis Khan. Babur’s great grandson, Akbar, started construction of Agra Fort in the mid 1550s. Akbar’s son, Shah Jahan, made changes to the fort using marble and it was he who commissioned the building of Taj Mahal, as a memorial to his favourite wife.  We could see Taj Mahal in the distance about 1.6 km away. When Shah Jahan’s son, Aurangzeb, imprisoned him in Agra Fort’s Muasamman Burj, a tower with a marble balcony, Jahan watched the continuing construction of his Taj Mahal until his death. He is buried there with his beloved wife.  We were only able to see about one quarter of the complex since the Indian army still uses the rest of the complex, constructed with an underground water distribution system using the pumped water from the Yamuna River.  While we were exploring Agra Fort, a few monkeys were frolicking up on the edges of roofs.  We also saw several families of monkeys playing in the trees and buildings of Agra’s city center which a mixture of ancient and modern buildings. We spent over an hour exploring the fort, admiring the mosaic ceilings in Shah Jahal's living quarters and reading about the advanced water system and other innovations. Returning to the hotel before the restaurant opened for dinner.

    Before we left the bus, Raj reminded everyone that they needed to be on the buses by 5:30 a.m. in the morning, in order to arrive at Taj Mahal in time to see the sun rise over Taj Mahal.  The glowing white marble is said to reflect different colours as the sun rises.  We are hoping for less haze in the morning and a light breeze to keep us 25C heat at bay.

     Tonight, the whole group had a section of tables in the hotel dining room reserved for a buffet dinner of Indian food. Dinner is served between 7 and 10 p.m. There were three other groups also staying at the 135 room Trident Agra and enjoying the same buffet dinner.  There were two soups, one was cream of pumpkin that people liked and the other was a chicken broth. There were salads that looked tempting, but we are trying to stay with cooked food to avoid “Delhi belly”.  So far no one has been sick.  There was an array of dishes including chicken and fish in spicy and not so spicy sauces, even mashed potatoes.  There was also steamed rice, tomato rice, an eggplant mixture, and noodles.  There were servers there to explain the ingredients of the different platters to whomever asked.  The dessert selection was interesting with a mix of Western and Indian desserts.   We sat with follow travelers Darren & Kali, Dorothy & Dan and Ben and Annie.  Some of the other group members had been on the Chamber’s trip to Machu Pichu, Peru, earlier this year.  We walked back to our room past the swimming pool area, that had been closed for the night and through the garden.  It was still above 30C at 9 p.m.

   It is going to be an early night for most of the group since most got less than five hours of sleep after our long flight and long lineup at the Delhi airport.

   With all the time driving today we did manage to walk 10,945 steps.