OzBus 14

5:45am is our suggested time to catch the sunrise at Taj.  Our guide, Anil, says that this is plenty of time to organise the tickets and get to the site before the sun comes up.  Can you guess where I’m going with this?  As we all get on the coach, doubts start to fly as to the reliability of the local “knowledge”.  The ticket purchasing process takes over 15 minutes, to which time the sun looks about ready.  There is a local bus that takes us from the ticket office to the gates of the site, where we find we have to queue for another 30 minutes.  We miss sunrise by roughly an hour, to which Anil say “sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don’t”.  My initial thought to that reaction was better planning hides ignorance, but for two days we had the company of Anil, so my silence seemed more appropriate.  Despite the disappointment of missing the sunrise, the Taj Mahal is just as good as expected.  A grand building with a romantic and heart-warming story, it was just as perfect as the pictures make it out to be.  I spent most of my time with Lana, walking around the site marvelling it’s brilliance.  After the morning spent there, we head back to the hotel for a spot of lunch before moving on to see the Red Fort of Agra.

The sun is in it’s element now as we walked through the large and extravagant Red Fort.  Just as the fort before, the size and grandeur of the building and it’s compound is breathtaking and awe inspiring.  For some, the numerous tours of such sites has reached its peak and nothing seems to impress anymore.  Should you endeavour to take a tour like this, remember to always take a step back and actually look at where you are before your mind takes over and tells you it’s just a building.  Lunch is free today, so we all take advantage while we relax in the hotel, way from the sun.

In the afternoon, a handful of us head with Anil for a tour around the rest of Agra.  The palace we visit was, in Anil’s words, the Pleasure Palace for the king at the time; a place for his mistresses and concubines to relax and enjoy the riches he had.  As mentioned before, despite the site itself was impressive and had an interesting story behind it, it was nothing that we hadn’t seen before.  The sun finally started to set, meaning the tour was at a leisurely temperature.  A few hours walking round and then we make our way back to the hotel for dinner.  Disorganised is the only word that comes to mind for dinner, but as usual there is nothing much to say about the night.

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