Agro in Agra

Warning this is a long one!
Agra is home to one of the wonders of the world… the Taj Mahal! As such it is probably one of the hottest tourist destinations in India. Where there’s tourists, there’s touts. Stepping off the train was a little overwhelming as there are a few hundred people vying for your attention and your money. The authorities were swinging long sticks around to keep the peddlers from mobbing the bewildered tourists. One rather frou-frou looking woman stood paralyzed with terror, clutching her frilly white pillow in the midst of the dusty chaos; wishing I’m sure, that she had chosen the French Riviera package deal instead.
We negotiated an autorickshaw ride to our hotel. The autorickshaw is a partially enclosed three wheel scooter, a very popular mode of transport here. Although designed to seat two passengers, we have seen some crammed with up to 10 passengers (including people clinging to the sides!).

Here is our very first autorickshaw ride.... it finishes at our hotel- Hotel Kamal.

Our enterprising porter also struck a deal with us to take us to Fatehpur Sikri, an abandoned fortified city about 40km away. Since everyone here seems to be connected by an invisible thread of commissions, we were actually passed onto another man who was to drive us in a huge old 50’s style car… without seatbelts of course. The first ¾ of the drive were a white knuckled dance with death. We found ourselves barrelling down streets dodging cows, pigs, dogs, rickshaws, camels, pedestrians, buses, scooters carrying small families, and anything else that came in our path. Most times this meant swerving directly into the path of some other large oncoming vehicle which would hopefully shift over to accommodate us. There was incessant blowing of horns and a few shouts of what I extrapolated to be Hindi insults out the window. We came within millimetres of sideswiping most things and within a foot of a head on crash on multiple occasions.
We arrived shaken but alive and declined our “highly recommended” tour guide (another invisible thread of commission) hoping for a peaceful walk around the site.
Not quite… there were more people following us around offering to sell us postcards and giving us “free information” that we also declined, only to get angry when we didn’t purchase a souvenir from their buddy at the end of it all.
Nevertheless, the site was full of beautiful architecture and very ornate stonework. There were many people maintaining the site, doing everything by hand including chiselling raw sandstone into large smooth flat pieces.
We were accompanied back down the hill (where we were to meet our driver) by several children. The hardest part about India so far has been the children. They are constantly asking for simple things like pens for school, soap samples, or toothbrushes. The children have clearly learned to associate tourists with handouts and we have come to discover that most locals discourage giving directly to the children as it teaches them that begging is rewarding and they focus more on this than playing or going to school. We will definitely be contributing to a charity as an alternative but in the meantime it is hard to play the bad guy and not succumb to such basic requests. We have given food on occasion and before we learned that direct giving is frowned upon I basically emptied my purse for one little guy who gladly took my toothbrush, sample toothpaste, sewing kit and a couple of pens that I had.
We had a snack of stuffed naan while we waited for our driver. He finally pulled up, his teeth stained red from chewing paan (the local form of spiced chewing tobacco). I was already fretting about the drive back and desperately hoping we would make it before dark (headlights are highly underutilised here) so my gut feeling that he was acting a bit odd was tossed aside and we jumped in the car and settled in for the joyride. We were drifting around on the road quite a bit, but given the driving style here of dodging obstacles and really not staying on any particular side of the road, I wasn’t quite sure if it was abnormal. We also noticed he wasn’t using his horn – definitely abnormal. I started watching his eyes in the rear-view mirror and noticed that they were drifting closed. Adam told him to wake up and he mumbled something. Finally after a couple very close encounters (could be considered normal) his eyes closed completely. We screamed at him to stop and he basically passed out right there on the road- he had stopped accelerating but didn’t actually brake until we screamed at him again. Then he lolled his head around and gave us this dopey, eyes half closed kind of smile?!
Fortunately we were at a tiny little roadside village. We jumped out of the car and spotted an official looking guy in a green beret. We asked for a taxi and he pointed at our big white car that was now slowly reversing all over the highway back towards us. We explained the situation as the driver got out of the car and within the next sixty seconds we had 200 villagers (no exaggeration) mobbed around us to see what the commotion was about. At first we were a little nervous but as the driver tried to explain his side of the story it was clear that the crowd also realized that he was drunk or stoned and were siding with us. One of the villagers appeared to be ripping a strip off of him in Hindi, wagging his finger and yelling. We just wanted the mob to disperse so we could work on a way of getting home; Adam defused the situation by paying the driver his fare just as the bus to Agra pulled up. Some villagers flagged the bus as it started to pull away and hurried us onto it. We were directed to an elevated bench seat facing the driver right next to the flashing LED shrine to Ganesh on the dashboard. Darn, no cricket match overhead to distract the onlookers this time. Despite the penetrating stares of the twenty-odd passengers, it was the happiest bus ride I have ever had.