At last, the Taj Mahal

Dean and I booked a driver for three days to travel the 'golden triangle' of tourist sites reasonably close to Delhi. Basically to get us to see the Taj.

Ringku, our driver, firstly took us to the home town of Hari Krishna. But thanks to my lateness in starting that morning (a little climatic sickness) we missed the opening time for the temple. But the outside was very impressive. Just no Govinda's unfortunately.

Next stop was Agra, home of Agra Fort and the Taj. Agra Fort was massive. Again in Red Sandstone, this Fort had assembly halls for the Maharaja to meet his guests along with usual palace and temples that you find in a fort. One feature that Dean particularly liked though was the courtyard where the Maharaja would play a backgammon-like game - using dancing women as his pieces. That and the views of the Taj of course.

Agra Fort

By now we were weary and it was time to check into our hotel - but just before we could rest for the evening, the hotel man told us where we could sneak a view of the Taj for sunset, and that was where we got our first glimpse.

Taj at sunset

Next morning we dragged ourselves away from hte fan of our room at 5:30am to go and see the sunrise at the Taj. Very impressive. The entry gates and surrounding walls are nice enough, but the Taj itself was very nice. White marble tattoed with floral designs, very majestic.

The Taj at sunrise

After a few hours we dragged ourselves away and headed for Keoladeo National Park, known for it's birds. In a months time the monsoon will be in full swing and many brids migrating from other parts fo the world will fill the park. For now, we still saw a few. For the bird enthusiasts, we saw storks (no babies), herrons, egrets, parrots, and the rest of the names i can't remember. We also saw jackals, more monkeys, cows (they really are everywhere), huge turtles, a strange ferret like thing, and lots of antelopes and spotted dear. The best bit was the interactions between species. We watched as the Egrets walked beside the cows to eat the bugs from them and were lucky enough to see a viper in a tree being sqawked at by many species of birds/potential dinners. This was really cool because even though they could be eaten any second, the birds would try to scare the snake away by swooping in to peck it head. And when that snake moved, we saw how long it was... Our guide - being the wanker that he is - decided to walk under the tree to get a closer look. Dean and I stayed a little further behind. Unfortunately the guide wasn't bitten and thankfully we didn't see a bird or eggs go down either.

Strange Turtles

Cheeky viper

PS. we did this tour on bike, and living up to expectations, in the last kilometre Dean's bike got a puncture - is that 3 or 4 times now D? :)

The final mention for Keoladeo was the excellent guesthouse we stayed at. Jungle Lodge was excellent. The room was super cheap, it was run by a lovely family who cooked us a delicious Indian meal from scratch, and it had the cutest dog i had seen in ages. Dean groaned as I went completely nuts for the first hour we were there playing with the little fluffball, then went to play with him later himself. We were both sad to leave this guesthouse, we would have stayed for longer had we not locked ourself to our driver.