This Is A Lake - A travel blog

Jaipur gave me a very good first impression: the morning was sunny, warm without being uncomfortably hot (25-27°C), and the pollution levels are much better than in Delhi and especially Agra. It’s still high on the meters, but there’s no sickly haze hanging in the air and breathing is noticeably easier. In addition, as I would find out through the day, Jaipur is way more developed than Agra, with paved roads and streets and larger buildings. It’s still India, so there’s still lots of crazy traffic in all directions and people trying to sell you stuff, but walking from one site to another was easier than in Agra, where it was so inhospitable so as to be impractical. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I started off with breakfast at the hotel -I was a bit spooked to find myself being the only guest in the big, garish dining hall; I wondered what was going on but people started filing in afterwards, I guess I must be an early riser here- and then I took an Uber to the old town of ...

Today I had nothing on my books before taking my 14:50 train to Jaipur, so I mostly hung out in my hotel room until it was time to check out, then went for lunch to the restaurant next door (had a butter chicken that was to die for and a vegan mango cheesecake that I didn’t much like) and called myself an Uber to Agra Fort station. When I arrived at the station, I was fully prepared for more “Your train is cancelled” type scams, but no one so much as uttered a word in my direction. Inside, the place was overrun by families of monkeys: on the stairs, on the roof, on the trains, walking up and down the platforms like they owned the joint, occasionally trying to snatch an unsuspecting person’s bag. In this station, blissfully, the panels did work so I was able to find my platform straight away. The train was already there, even though it was around fifty minutes before departure. I double- and triple-checked the train number to make sure it was indeed my train and got in...

So here’s the thing: when I organize a trip, the way I build an itinerary is I read through a guidebook and I start getting a sense of what places I want to see, and how many days I can spend in each of them. When I read about Agra, I thought it was a one-day city, that I could do just two nights here and then squeeze in another destination at the end. But, I was given the excellent advice that in India it’s better to simplify your travel as much as possible, so I decided to do two full days here and drop Darjeeling from my itinerary. I figured I could do the Taj one day and Agra Fort the next. As it turns out, I did both of those yesterday, so I didn’t quite know what to do with myself today. One possibility was to visit Fatehpur Sikri, the archeological site of an ancient Rajasthani city, but the issue is that it’s in an entirely different region 50 km from Agra. In Japan, that’s the distance you cover when you sneeze in a shinkansen, but in India it’s not as easy. I looked for...

The Taj Mahal, Agra Fort Today, at the convened hour, my driver was waiting for me with his rickshaw to take me on my full tour of all things Agra. Before we started, I double-checked the itinerary and the price and everything, to make it extra clear what I wanted and what I didn’t. I said explicitly that I reserved the right to say no to any bazaar/market tourist trap he may want to take me to, but that I would still pay him the full agreed fee, and to sweeten the deal I told him I’d let him take me to a restaurant of his choosing for lunch. We agreed on that, and took off! The first priority, of course, was to get to the Taj, which was just a five or ten minute ride from the hotel. The driver dropped me off at the Western Gate (there is also an Eastern Gate, and a Southern Gate that is currently closed), where I bought the most expensive ticket I’ve yet come across in India. For 1300 rupees (€16.40) you get your admission ticket, which gives you a discount at all other Agra a...

Tuesday Bye, Delhi! But not for long! Today I left Delhi to go to Agra, home of the Taj Mahal. I had to leave my hotel to go to the New Delhi Railway Station, which wasn’t terribly far but you can’t walk anywhere with a bag here. Instead of asking for a cab, I tried using Uber, and turns out it was super convenient -the guide said you have to pay cash, but I was able to pay via the app like you would anywhere. The car arrived in five minutes and cost just 120 rupees (€1.5) vs the 350 the hotel said a cab would cost. Once I arrived at the station, things got a little chaotic, even if I had tried to plan and research as much as humanly possible. For starters, it was packed with people, lots of touts trying to get you to take rickshaws or use them as porters, and of course lots of travelers too.  The first thing I did was locate the Tourist Information Bureau, on the first floor, because try as I might I was unable to ascertain whether my reservation slip was an ac...

It was a rough morning, y’all. I woke up still tired from yesterday, to the news that air pollution had hiked in Delhi back to severe levels (and indeed the view from the window was hazy and unappealing), as had the far right in the Spanish elections; this brought back unhappy memories of when Trump won while I was in Tokyo in 2016. I was this close to just saying to hell with it and staying in my room watching Netflix all day, but I snapped out of it and started on my initial plan: visiting Humayun’s Tomb, a historic mausoleum, and then Gurdwara Bangka Sahib, a Sikh temple. I decided to go by metro, as there’s a station right next to the hotel, and as soon as I got down the stairs two different Indian guys (first one, and then another after the first left) walked up to me out of the blue to offer advice. I was wary at first, because I assume all unsolicited contact is liable to be a scam, but I realized they weren’t trying to sell me anything and were just interested in my plans...