We had our second
day in India planned perfectly; our 5am flight to Delhi would see us arriving
in Delhi in the early afternoon (~11am), we would quickly drop off our bags at
the hotel room we had reserved and then hop the 2 hour express train to Agra so
that we could see the Taj Mahal glowing red at
sunset before training back to Dehli in the evening for a peaceful night
of sleep. As you can imagine, it did not exactly work out that way.
Our day started at
the ungodly hour of 2am after getting to bed at midnight the night before.
Miles and miles of pothole ridden, cow populated roads separated us and our 5am
flight to Delhi. The first obstacle was getting a taxi that late in the
evening/early in the morning. There were a few camped outside the entrance to
the port but asking for exorbitant tourist prices. Since the twilight taxi
market isn't exactly a competitive, I had to put my haggling skills to the
test, with my only bargaining chip being the bluff that I would walk around the
ghost town that is Chennai at 3am and find another taxi. By some miracle I eventually got the fare down to a
reasonable level 800 rupees which comes out to $16 total.
Once at the airport
things ran smoothly, I bought "The White Tiger" as my novel for India
and started to make my way through it on the flight to Delhi while my traveling
companions napped their first of many naps that day. The real adventure began
once we landed. The taxi driver from the airport took my napping companions and
I to a hotel with the right name, but at the wrong location. When we got to the
correct hotel, they had resold our room at a higher rate to vacationers who
were in town for Diwali, The festival of lights. To top it off train tickets to
and from Agra were sold out. In short we were stuck in Delhi without a hotel
and no way to make it to the Taj Mahal which we had flown all the way from
Chennai to see.
This is where flexibility comes in; long story short, we chartered a 5 hour taxi ride there and back in addition to two hotel rooms in Agra for about $200, or $50 each which only turned out to be a bit more then we would have paid to begin with. The result was that we got to see a lot more of India then we had planned for initially. At least I did, as my traveling companions were napping again. We passed through fields, tiny road side villages and past the birth place of Hare Krishna all on the way to Agra which we reached after sunset. We ate dinner on the rooftop of our hotel. Home made, slow cooked chicken our driver arranged to have delivered to us from his friend. We ended the evening with conversation, sitting on the roof of our hotel while the commotion of trishaws, rickshaws, car horns and moped engines floated five stories up from the road below.
