India - Delhi and Agra in 36 hours

On my previous trip to India, I stayed at a guest house called the Sunny Guest House.  For my $10/night, I got a private bathroom and a filthy dirty room.  I can't say I was looking forward to our two nights in Delhi prior to our arrival.  In an effort to avoid a similar hotel situation on this trip, Heather and I decided to book a room on hotels.com.  Since we were only staying a couple of nights, we were also willing to spend a bit more money with the hopes of having a clean room.  It paid off.  we stayed at the Hotel Ajanta and I was pleasantly surprised when we walked through the door to a clean room.  The $20/night difference in room price between this place and the Sunny Gueast house made a huge difference.  The hotel also had a travel agency in it, so we were able to arrange for a private car tour of Agra right there.  Our efforts to arrange something online prior to leaving Kathmandu didn't work out so well.

We arrived in Delhi around 5:00PM, and after getting situated at our hotel we walked to down to Connaught Place to explore a bit, but what we found was not the Connaught Place I remember from 3.5 years ago.  The Connaught Place I remember was lined with small handicraft shops, but what we encountered was lined with trendy restaurants and chain stores like Nike and Benetton.  I may not have been in exactly the part of Connaught Place as I spent time in 3.5 years ago, but still, a lot has changed.

We had dinner in a restaurant near our hotel.  It was fantastic!  I had the best mango lassi I've ever had and the rest our meal was the best ever as well.  When we enetered, we were the only non-Indians in the place, so we knew we were in for a treat.

Our one full day in India started early and didn't really end, at least in the sense that there was no crawling back into our beds to go to sleep at our hotel.  Heather and I left for Agra at 6:30AM.  It took us about 4 hours to get to Sikandra, where we met up with our tour guide Ali.  He was a really nice guy, funny too, so we had a really good time seeing the sights.

Sikandra

There are a lot of beautiful patterns found in Indian architecture, and I took a lot of pictures fo them.

Blackbuck on the lawns at Sikandra.

The tomb of Akbar is inside of this structure.

After Sikandra, we headed to the Taj Mahal.  I had forgotten how impressive it really is.

Traditional pose for tourist photos.

Precious stones were carved and inlaid into the marble of the Taj Mahal.

After seeing the Taj Mahal, we stopped for lunch.  It was at a touristy place and wasn't nearly as good as our dinner the night before (but still good).  We also did a little shopping, which included a stop at a place that makes marble items inlaid with precious stones in the same manner in which the work on the Taj Mahal was done.  It was really interesting to see how intricate of a process it is.

The last place we went in Agra was the Agra Fort.  I find this to be a very architecturally interesting place.

Map of the grounds and buildings at the Agra Fort.  It is still used by the Indian military so much of the grouds are closed to tourists.

View of th Taj Mahal from the Agra Fort.

More precious stones inlaid into marble at the Agra Fort.

The drive back to Delhi took longer than the drive to Agra, so we didn't get back in time to have dinner at our little restaurant.  We barely made it back in time to make the midnight closing time of the restaurant in our hotel.  After we finished eating, we had just enough time to shower and finish packing before our taxi to the airport arrived.  Luckily, we had been able to sleep some on our drive back from Agra because there would be no sleeping that night.  We took a lot of time rearranging our bags from how they were packed for our trip from Kathmandu to Delhi.  Both of our bags were overweight leaving Kathmandu, but due to a couple of miscommunications we managed to escape paying the overweight luggage fee.  We moved our heavy items from our checked baggage into our carry-on luggage.  Naturally, when I checked in, my suitcase was fine, but they weighed my carry on bag and said it was too heavy.  I ended up having to move stuff back into my suitcase.  Heather and I had been a bit suspicious that the scales at the Kathmandu airport where not calibrated properly and this incident just confirmed that they were way off (likely a scam to rid tourists of their money - I'm glad we got away without paying).  Heather had bigger issues.  She had planned to have two carry-on items, but they would only let her have one. She was able to repack and get down to only one.  I imagine both her checked and carry-on bag ended up overweight, but the woman at the counter was kind enough to ignore that detail.  By 5:00AM we were on our way to Moscow and then back to New York.