Delhi, Agra and Jaipur are by far India’s most popular destinations for foreign tourists, and accordingly the amount of hassle you get here as a feringi is far worse than just about anywhere else. A rickshaw driver or over-eager shopkeeper yelling at you or following you around for a bit isn’t so bad, and the scammers we met seemed almost laughably obvious (I guess we’re a lot more tuned into that stuff now though), but there are just so many of them around it can wear down the weary traveller after awhile. After two months in India we walk among the touts with much more confidence and they tend to back off pretty quickly – but for the uninitiated, somewhere like Jaipur could feel like more trouble than it’s worth.
For us, Jaipur was okay as a three day stay, and as with a lot of places I think we starting warming to it at about the same time we were getting ready to leave it. Like other tourist towns in Rajasthan it has an array of palaces and forts, but none that we saw were as beautifully preserved as Mehrangar in Jodhpur or as atmospheric as Bundi Palace, although the Amber Fort 14km from Jaipur was an excellent detour in its own right.
I know we keep banging on about the heat, but Jaipur was really blazing. On at least one day it came close to 47 degrees, which is exceptionally hot for May. Every day Rajasthan gets warmer and warmer, and more and more people fill the mosques and temples with prayers for a timely monsoon. The other tourists staying at our guesthouse seemed to almost never leave the relative cool of their rooms, and even we spent a lot more time than usual, stripped down and lounging on the bed under the fan (we have become stubbornly tight when it comes to accommodation – we really should have splashed out for AC).
After a day wandering inside the walls of Jaipur’s old city, we took the advice of Ben’s cousin, Indophile and tour group leader Debbie, and made a call to a Jaipuri friend of hers, Sam. Sam turned out to be an affable auto-rickshaw driver, and we enlisted his services to take us to a few of Jaipur’s further-out attractions. Apart from allowing us to enjoy the rare luxury of having our very own private driver, Sam provided a wealth of local knowledge, and most importantly, knew where to get some of the best food in Jaipur. In the evening he escorted us through his own neighbourhood, a Muslim enclave where chicken and mutton are the flavours of the day. In a cheap local restaurant we savoured the world’s most sublime butter chicken. Let me tell you, real butter chicken in India is nothing like the bright orange stuff they serve at North Indian Diner. Whereas butter chicken at home is sweet, creamy and overwhelmingly tomato-flavoured, real Mughlai-style butter chicken is stewed in a complex, earthy masala with plenty of heat to it. It’s also even more unhealthy than the takeaway stuff – there’s no cream, but the tandoor-roasted meat is literally swimming in ghee. For us, Jaipur’s main appeal was its abundant, cheap and fabulous tandoori restaurants, thali joints, juice bars and lassi shops. And our next destination, Agra, presented us with just one single, inevitable goal.
The Taj Mahal is already so familiar in our minds, an icon of India, of architectural achievement, of perfection in symmetry, and of the extravagance of the Mughal Empire. Seeing the most famous, the most legendary monument on earth with my own eyes seems almost unreal. A dream palace appearing beyond the grand red gates, materialising out of a hazy Indian sky. It really is an incredibly beautiful structure, perfectly conceived in every aspect, and so much bigger and more intricate than any photo can portray. Inside and out the walls are inlaid with verses of the Koran in elegant Arabic calligraphy, and decorated with flowers and vines of shimmering semi-precious stones. Yet like many wonderful places in India, the experience is marred somewhat by the inescapable hustle of the tourist boon. Here, rampantly over-charging “official guides” double as commission agents, and anyone who reckons they can scam a few rupees off you will try their damndest. At the Taj, the Indian government’s dual pricing policy is especially offensive, because Indians pay only 40 rupees to get in and we pay a staggering 750. I won’t go into all the reasons I’m irked by dual pricing, but 750 rupees is a lot of money to see any monument, anywhere in the world. Despite being India’s number one tourist drawcard and cash cow, the Taj is suffering from obvious and not-so-obvious signs of decay (it’s considered an endangered monument). The fact that most of the money clearly does not go to upkeep makes it all the more painful to hand over. But it’s the Taj Mahal, and you have to see it. It’s not overhyped, it’s just overpriced, but on that first glimpse of the marble domes, the towering minarets, you will forget...
Until Agra’s touts, swindlers and hectic crowds slap you back into the world of modern India.
