The Taj Mahal - Worth seeing but not worth going to see

For reasons too dull to go into, the only way to get to the Taj Mahal before I left for home was to hire a taxi leaving at 7 am this morning to get there.

It's about 150 miles each way, so I thought maybe 3 hours each way.  In the event it took about 10 hours in total.

We passed a few toll booths, and tourist tax booths on the way.  At one someone tried to get me to have my photo taken with a monkey on a stick.  He also had a noose round his neck.  Yeah, sure I didn't shout, I'll pay you to have my photo taken with the saddest looking monkey in the world, right before I blow my own head off.  What I did shout to him through the window was two things.  One.  I've already had my photo taken with loads of monkeys up at Rishikesh, so what you're peddling is hardly original, and Two, why don't you let the monkey go, he looks miserable.

Halfway to Agra we stopped at a service station that was in many ways similar to one of our own.  Totally overpriced food, a load of shite for sale in the doorway, and some overzealous toilet cleaning going on.  Where it differed from our own brand of service station was in the monkey on a string wearing lipstick outside the main entrance.

Indian roads have lost their ability to shock me now.  Nothing I see out the window comes as a surprise.  Overturned lorries, lorries run aground, a man carrying a doorframe on the back of a motorbike, it all just blends into one.

After 5 hours in a car and a visit to a shit service station, meeting our tour guide didn't improve our mood much.  He got into the car on the outskirts of Agra, and he annoyed me from the start by telling me I wasn't allowed to take guidebooks or food into the Taj.  Then he went on to say, as if we were in the middle of a war zone, not to talk to anyone but him once we were out of the car.  Bloody hell, I thought, it's the Taj Mahal, we're not trying to do a bank job.

The area round the Taj Mahal looked just about the least scary place I've been in India.  It was mostly foreign tourists and a few kids selling crap.  Didn't he realise that at six o'clock yesterday I was trapped down an alley about as wide as my head in Delhi between a man towing a trailer full of bricks, a woman doing her washing, a pack of dogs and some kids playing badminton?

For some reason we had to stand around waiting while he went off to buy our tickets, and then he gave us a bottle of water each, and gestured for us to sit on an oversized golf cart.  How far is it? Dean said.  1 kilometre, he said.  Can't we just walk it?  No, it's included in the price.  So we waited about 10 minutes for the golf trolley to take us 400 metres and then we had to walk the other 600 metres anyway.  In the golf trolley was a poster with about 40 things on you're not allowed to do or bring into the Taj Mahal.  Am I allowed to photograph the sign I asked the guide?  He didn't find this funny.

Then we got frisked head to foot by some Indian soldier guys.  I had to empty out every pocket.  Camera, phone, eyedrops okay.  Two thirds of a pack of polo mints not okay.  Dean got six sugar lumps confiscated too.  Bloody hell, did he think we were going to bomb the crap out of the Taj Mahal with a mixture of sugar and sugar free mints?

Then about 100 yards from the entrance we encountered a man selling photos of the Taj Mahal.  Of all the places in India to stand, why did he pick here?  I said to him, I don't need a picture, it's over there, and I also thought about saying 'Haven't you got any with me in?' but I didn't.

The 5 hour car journey, being told to be afraid by the guide, the 400 metre golf trolley ride, the having my polos nicked and then someone trying to sell me photos of something I could see was all putting me in a bad mood.

More or less as soon as we were in the Taj Mahal, and not even in the white bit of it, that everybody knows, just the red outer part, the tour guide started rattling off a load of facts in an incoherent accent.  Then he asked us how many domes were on the top of the entrance?  Dean kept looking the other way, and I was thinking 'What the fuck is this, a quiz?'  As it happened there were loads of domes and I thought, there's no way I'm counting them.  He got quite agitated and asked us again, how many domes?.  Dean said something about just wanting to have a look at the thing, and I said I didn't know there was going to be a quiz.

Seemingly thinking he'd frightened us with his 'Trust no one' speech, he then said words to the effect of 'Look, do you want a tour guide or not?'.  No, not really, we said.  He seemed a bit deflated by this, and we agreed to meet up with him in a couple of hours.  We wouldn't have the benefit of our guide books as we weren't allowed to bring them in, nor would we have the benefit of his incoherent ramblings, so we'd just have to make do with looking at stuff, and remembering stuff we'd read before we were allowed in.  It was a bit like taking an exam in school. 

The white bit of the Taj Mahal was pretty good, but the mood was continually being ruined by some guys with whistles who seemed like hyperactive referees blowing up for any perceived violation of the million and one rules.

We took loads of pictures, and we got as close as we could to the Diana chair but there was a massive scrum of people trying to get near it, so we just got as close as we could and took a picture that wasn't exactly what we wanted, but it was a picture.  That's India for you.

We met the deflated tour guide at 2 pm, his earlier concern for our welfare seemed to have evaporated.  He walked us back to our taxi through a gauntlet of tat selling children.  He probably thought this would worry me, but after a couple of weeks in Delhi this was nothing.

On the way back we stopped again at another bonkers service station.  This time a man with a sword opened the door for us, and this time he had a performing girl instead of a monkey.  I bottled going to the toilet because the attendant was so keen I couldn't even go near him, or the toilets.  There are things in India I can't handle, but picking up my own soap and hand towels is one of the skills I've pretty much mastered without the aid of someone handing them to me for money.

The car journey back to Delhi went on for ages, we laughed about the day, and the driver backed up our decision to go all in the one day by saying that although Agra has nice buildings, it's otherwise a heap of crap that's best to get in and out of as soon as possible.

I felt really grateful today that this two weeks has gone the way it has.  I think if you're a tourist here and you don't cycle, you just go from aeroplane to taxi to hotel to car to bonkers service station to tourist attraction and back, and you're in a cocoon and you don't get to see the bits in between.

Trying to buy cheese and coffee from a tennis ball and tampon shop on the road to Meerut, and cycling through people's back gardens are not on the well trodden tourist trail, but they give you a real sense of real Indians doing real things, and they're not just little snapshots seen from a car window.

Dean quoted Samuel Johnson today, and he said about the Taj Mahal.  Worth seeing but not worth going to see.  I have to agree.  If I'd known what the day was going to be like, I probably wouldn't have gone through with it.  Having said that, I'm glad we've been.  I've got some pictures with me and the Taj Mahal in, and that was pretty much all I wanted from the day.