Wonders of the world

Initially planning on doing a day trip to Agra from Delhi to see the Taj Mahal (no trip to India would be complete without it), we heard that the only way to see it and not have 200 people in the background of every picture was to get there first thing in the morning. A day trip from Delhi is 4 hours each way so unless we got up at 2:00am we would be seeing the Taj smack the middle of the day. Since we weren’t sold on spending a lot more time in Delhi anyways, we decided to stay in Agra instead. Being the off season, a lot of nice hotels were offering large discounts on their rooms so we got a room at the Trident, a 4.5 star hotel for £55 a night. After staying in places for £15 a night in Jaisalmer, we were both looking forward to a nice bed and more than anything a pool. Our time in Agra passed fairly unremarkably, with the exception of two interesting things:

1) The sheer amazement of the locals that we actually wanted to walk anywhere, on mentioning that we wanted to walk the 8-10 min to the Taj they looked so aghast that we couldn’t help but think we had inadvertently suggest they take a long walk off a short plank.

2) On our second night we visited a popular street food stall that we had noticed the night before. The manager of the stall brought over our chicken tikka (by far the best of our whole trip), we had a chat and then he headed off but not before we noticed a shotgun prominently displayed in his hip holster. I guess things can get pretty crazy when the chicken is that good.

After some much needed pool time, popcorn, and eyebrow threading we left Agra to make the long journey up to Manali.