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"A teardrop on the face of eternity," "The embodiment of all things pure," and my personal and own-made favourite: "it's big, it's white, to see it's a delight, woo yeh." Can you guess what it is yet?

The end of curry

Simon Wadsworth
2006-09-04 12:52:39

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"A teardrop on the face of eternity," "The embodiment of all things pure," and my personal and own-made favourite: "it's big, it's white, to see it's a delight, woo yeh." Can you guess what it is yet?

As you would expect, no amount of photos, TV shows or even replica tacky jigsaw puzzles can live up to greeting the Taj Mahal in person. It's beautiful, it's stunning, it's an architectural masterpiece and it's quite big too. As for Agra? Well, that's a different matter. It's the filthiest place I've been to in India; streets full of rubbish that's only chance of being cleared is when the monsoon rains come, someone decides to burn it, or a cow is particularly hungry, and a constant sulphurous smell of sewage lingers in the air. Extreme poverty is everywhere too - from the limbless beggars to the edge-of-city slums. Although one can find poverty everywhere in India, it's so much more obvious in the big cities and its images so much more depressing.

However, it's also a place full of life, and activities as a Westerner I'm unaccustomed to seeing, and so it was
interesting and harrowing, hiring a bike for a day, braving the bad roads, bad drivers, fumes and cows, not seeing a single Lonely Planet 'sight', but instead cycling wherever the roads took me; through bazaars and slums, and past parks and riverbanks aligned with cloth and dye factories. This was made all the more fun when my bike decided to humour me with a puncture 7km from the shop.

Obviously, it's safe to say I also visited and took just a few photos of the Taj from slightly different angles as slightly different times. For example, I found a boatman to take me across the Yamuna River, where the Taj's backside is arguably more stunning than its front. With buffalo swimming in the polluted black river, kids playing on the littered banks, and poor, hopeful fishermen dotted around to the backdrop of its ...