Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore!!

Sorry for the delay in posting.  We do love the chai masala tea, but our recommendation would be to not drink it luke warm from the streets (see below for more details, not that we’re sure you want them!)

We left Kolkata on an overnight train to Varanasi, leaving Kolkata at 8pm and arrived into Varanasi around 10am.  We were in the 3AC class, which means the bunks are arranged into patterns of six—lower, middle, upper.  Steve had the lower, Ang had the middle.  We were actually pleasantly surprised at how clean the train was, and rode for the first few hours sitting with a very nice young Indian family, trying to keep their one year old occupied!  They got off the train around 1030pm and we turned in for the night.  On the Thai trains, a man came along and converted the seats to beds and made your beds with fresh linens, but on this train you needed to convert the beds and make them yourselves, with a stack of blankets and sheets, wrapped in paper to confirm they were clean.  We went along just fine for a few hours, until a family of 8 came into our little area of six bunks and tried to arrange themselves.  We are quite confident they either didn’t have tickets at all, or at the very least didn’t have tickets for our class, cause they had put at least two or three people to a bunk.  It was at this point that the man’s phone went off, and apparently no one taught him how to use a quiet voice in the middle of the night!!  We were also awoken a bit later when another person arrived, who felt it was a good idea to turn all the lights on at 2am!  We did manage to get a reasonable night sleep, despite all of the above, and were happy to arrive in Varanasi unscathed. 

After securing a pre-paid autorickshaw (the Indian equivalent of a tuk-tuk!) we headed off to find a room.  We actually had to go to three places, as there was a Hindi festival in town and all the rooms were booked out.  We guess this is a good time to tell you a bit about Varanasi as a city.  Varanasi is a very very old Indian city, based on the banks of the Ganges river, or The Ganga as it is called in Varanasi.  This river is very sacred to the Indian people, representing a god in the Hindi religion.  After talking to the locals, it is very common for people of the Hindi faith to make a pilgrimage to the Ganga river in their lifetime, and we happened to come on one of the holy festivals of this town. 

We found a room and set off to explore, trying to get our bearings.   This city is very old, literally buildings upon buildings and little alleyways branching everywhere.  They are stone streets (with lots of stones missing!) and lots of tight corners to accommodate all the growth.  You will literally be walking down an alleyway that would barely accommodate two people wide, but also have to battle with bikes, motorcycles, tuk-tuks and even cows!  We came to one such corner where a Mom was eating some weeds and her calf was jumping around—you would NEVER walk this close to a cow at home, so you just go really fast and hope they don’t get startled and kick you!  We made our way down to the banks of the Ganga river and set out for a walk.  Along the banks of the river are a series of steps called Ghats that you use as entrance to the river.  The locals and pilgrims will go down to the Ganga for religious reasons, but also to bathe, cool off and even do the laundry (see the video!)  We walked for a while (the Ghats go for a few kilometers) until we met a young Indian guide named Raj.  Raj took us on a sunset boat cruise down the Ganga which we really enjoyed.  We purchased some locus flowers and candles, which are to symbolize a wish—you light your candle, make a wish and set it free in the Ganga to make your wish come true.  We were able to see the whole of the river as well as take in the big evening ritual of this festival.  It was a big procession of boats mooring around to watch the holy men worshipping the river.

Since Raj was such an informative guide, we booked our sunrise cruise with him too.  Six am was early to get on the river, but it was really neat to watch the river come alive.  When we first got on the boat, there were maybe another 10 or so tourists walking around, in addition to a few boatmen.  But within 30 mins the locals were starting to come down to bath, the laundry was starting and you got to feel the energy as the sun came up.  After our boat ride, we had a delicious breakfast and took in some of the sites with Raj.  He showed us the Muslim area of Varanasi, where the locals specialize in making silk.  We visited a silk shop and saw all the different products they make—Ang even got dressed up in a saree!  We said goodbye to Raj and wandered around the city ourselves that afternoon, attempting to stay out of the cows way!

Our final day in Varanasi again saw us in a boat, this time heading out of the town of Varanasi towards a Royal Fort on the edge of the Ganga.  Our boat ride allowed us to glimpse a bit more into the activities that take place on the Ganga—we saw locals fishing, kids swimming, and farmers bringing their buffalo down for a bath!   It was a interesting boat ride and the walk around of the fort included military memorabilia dating back a few hundred years in the museum at the Fort. 

We had purchased a bottle of water after we left the fort to drink on the way back in the boat ride to cross the river. When we finished it, the boat man wanted the bottle from us to fill up with water from the river (we did offer to buy a bottle of water for him, too, but he refused).  One of the sad facts about the Ganges River is it is extremely polluted.  We had read that water safe for bathing should contain less than 500 bacteria in every litre of water.  Samples of the river have shown to contain more than 1.5 million bacteria per litre.  The man was proud to fill up the water and show he had a strong stomach by drinking two litres of water from the river. He even offered us some. We politely declined and waited for the third eye to appear on his forehead from the effects of the water contaminants.

The next day we took a day train to Agra, the city most famously known as the home of the Taj Mahal.  Our day started off with some excitement, as since we weren’t able to book a train right from Varanasi to Agra, we had to go to  a train station just outside the city, about 12km away. When hiring a tuk tuk man,  we attempted to stress this to the cab driver that we did not want to go to the main train station but the other train station before starting out. It’s often difficult when trying to communicate with the drivers, since we are speaking to them in English and they are helping us by trying their best in English that sometimes the details need to be repeated and stressed to ensure we both understand the details of the transaction.  In the end he took us to the wrong train station anyways.  We did not realize this until we were arriving at the station as every street looks the same and is chaos so we could not figure out what was happening before to try and correct the mistake.  At the station we were able to communicate to him we wanted the other station and we raced across the city.  As we passed what we thought must have been some type of toll on the road, he threw coins onto the road at full speed in the tuk tuk as he wanted to make sure we made our trip.  It’s safe to say until the destination is reached or the transaction is completed, we really never know what could happen, not taking anything for granted.  Auto rickshaw rides are crazy enough in this town, but when you are late for a train, watch out!  We arrived with time to spare and boarded our train.

 This time we were in sleeper class. The sleeper class trains are used just the same during the day, but the beds are folded up. (We have tried to take some pictures of what this looks like, but its difficult to do when people are staring at you anyways because you are foreigners and then taking a picture makes things even more awkward. Hopefully we can get a good one.)  The sleeper class is described as, “What the rest of India rides on in the train.”  The windows are open, garbage is everywhere and the walls and floor of the train have probably not been cleaned since the cars were first put on the tracks.  The situation was actually better than we expected and we met some nice people from Bangladesh who were excited to speak with people from Canada and tell us a little bit about Bangladesh.  

We arrived three hours late into Agra, which is not fun considering we did not have accommodations booked and it was 10pm.  We got lucky as we exited the train, running into another tourist who happened to have reservations so we shared a cab to the hotel, as they had sent someone to pick her up.  This may sound like a weird situation, but at the train station and most places in India there are tens of thousands of people with a handful of “western people”.  Its difficult to figure out what is going on and not being able to read the signs most of the time and hawkers trying to sell us stuff every chance they can. Seeing another tourist and trying to talk to them to figure out to do can be a big relief and minimize some of the headaches of logistics. We were very thankful for the help (and she was equally happy to run into us!).

The hotel we stayed at was just outside the gates of the Taj Mahal and we had a very nice view of it at breakfast from the roof top restaurant.  Another added bonus of the rooftop restaurant was the monkeys in the trees around the building which were entertaining to watch.

Most of our day was going to the tourist train ticket office to purchase tickets for our trains around India. We decided to go right to the station as everyone was telling us they were sold fake tickets when using travel agents in the towns.  When we had finished buying our tickets, with a cost of around one hundred dollars to cover over 5,000km of India, we were quite happy with the outcome.

We visited the baby Taj in the afternoon which was much more enjoyable than we expected. There was no line at the ticket booth, maybe three hawkers at the gate trying to get us to buy rubber cobras and other junk, allowing us to walk into the grounds with little to no hassle. The grounds of the baby Taj were beautiful with manicured lawns and the mausoleum in the middle was in great shape considering its age. Our time here for a few hours was great as we could walk around the grounds freely without being harassed and were able to admire the detail of the architecture of the buildings and its grounds.

From the baby Taj we were driven to the park area, and the term park is used loosely, where we were able to see the sunset from behind the Taj Mahal across the river. Our tuk tuk driver was good enough to point us that it was not worth spending the money to go into the garden behind the Taj to sit and take pictures, but rather walk down the road beside the garden and get the same view for free.  It was actually quite enjoyable to sit on the benches and take some pictures of the Taj Mahal as the sun was setting at the end of the day. We also go to watch some people navigate the barbed wire fence behind the garden while carrying large bundles on their head or herding goats.   

The next day we were up early to arrive at the Taj for 7am to beat the crowds. We agreed with the tuk tuk man at our hotel we would pay him for the day to take us to the Taj and Red Fort which are two of the main sites in Agra.   The first part of the tuk tuk ride was about ten meters from our hotel entrance to the perimeter of where vehicles are allowed drive up to at the Taj grounds to prevent pollution.  This was a joke and he was telling us part of the fee.  We said we would talk about that later…

When visiting the Taj Mahal, everyone has to purchase a ticket in one line and then stand in another line for security to enter the Taj grounds.  This sounds simple but as your stand in line, Indian men are trying to cut the line everywhere with pushing and shoving, hawkers are saying they are the best guide in India and we need to hire them for the Taj tour and so on.  It’s a lot of nonsense and frustration that was nice to be done with half an hour later after we were inside the grounds.  The lines at 7am were long, so we can only imagine how the day would have went if we waited until later!

When we entered the grounds, we took some good photos and braved the crowds inside the hall for a view.  The crowds had to keep moving inside while an employee would continually blow a whistle to keep people going. The mentality here with crowds is that of a ten year old boy. No patience, me first, push and shove for your spot, that is tiring and frustrating.  It’s a nonstop battle to move around in any crowded place that was no different in the Taj grounds.  We were happy to make a visit to this historical monument but were also glad when the ordeal was over!

The Agra fort was impressive considering we thought it might be another old ruin, of many more to come in India. The size of the fort, detailed mosaics of the buildings inside the fort and the fact that half of the structures were carved out of marble made it even more impressive it was constructed hundreds of years ago. We had a good tour and enjoyed the variety of rooms, gardens and architecture which we decided made our visit worthwhile of the hassle to visit a major tourist attraction.

When we left the fort we were expecting to meet our tuk tuk man from the morning again at the spot outside the gate where he dropped us off.  We waited for about ten minutes for him and then decided we could not wait any longer with the constant barrage of tuk tuk men telling us we needed to get into their car, men selling trinkets and the rest of the circus that goes on outside a tourist site.   We walked home as there is a road that goes from the Taj to the Red fort that vehicles were not allowed on and we thought this would be a nice way to walk outside and get some exercise. We made it back to our hotel with little hassle.

The hassle did begin when the hotel manager came to our room around seven that night saying our driver was there to see us.  Steve went downstairs to find out what was going on when the driver was furious, demanding where we went and that he had waited five hours until the fort closed at sundown for us to come outside.  It seems that this guy expected us to find him in the crowd and madness of the tuk tuks, asleep in his vehicle. We were supposed to have known the number on his tuk tuk that that made his green and yellow tuk tuk different from the thousands of other identical looking vehicles.  It’s like saying we shown know his yellow cab from all the other yellow cabs in New York City traffic.  This man was furious saying how could we not know to wake him up and make him wait all afternoon.  A good argument ensued with his ridiculous claim and he was paid the few dollars he wanted and we were more than happy to pay to get this guy out of our hair.  As soon as he was paid, in an instant he was already talking about how we should pay him to take us to the night market, we should pay him to take us here and there in a now totally happy and changed mood.  What a joke!  We could not believe that he really thought everything was ok and that people could expect to act in such a way and for tourists to want to do more business with them.   Well, you win some you lose some—in this country, anyways!

The next morning we boarded a six am five hour train east for Jaipur with thankfully no issues or drama.  However, the call of the chai wallah was far to much for us to resist, which likely caused us to miss this Indian city altogether!  Ang felt unwell almost immediately after her luke warm chai (remember—boiling water is a good thing, luke warm milky tea is a bad thing!!), whereas Steve came down for the count that evening.  Oh well—just another Indian adventure to add to the blog!!

We are now in Pushkar, in the heart of the desert.  Camel stories to follow!

A panoramic of the Ganges.  This is our boat man, Raj.

We know this isn't the best of pics, but there were literally hundreds of people in boats to watch the festival. 

Bath time!  This isn't the busiest ghat picture we have, but at least you can see the various activities going on in the morning as the river and Varanasi wake up.

Varanasi Starbucks!  (AKA chai wallah)

Our Taj Mahal morning.  Note: it gets cold in India!!

This is just to capture how busy the Taj really was.  Remember, its only a little after 8am in this picture and they say most tour groups don't show up till after 9!

Ang in a saree