Thurs to Sun, May 17 to 20
Thursday evening we went to the mosque at the centre of the old Nizimuddin muslim quarter to hear the Sufi signing and music. Getting there involved heading down increasingly narrow and crowded streets till we got within a certain distance and had to take our shoes off for the rest of the way.
Saturday, we headed to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. The supposed three hour drive turned into a five and a half hour thrill ride (each way) on the Indian highways. Anil's driving was awe inspiring. Personally, I would turn instantly grey if I had to drive in those conditions. Oh, I forgot, my hair is already grey.
One of my road games was counting how many people could fit/on a single motorized vehicle. The winners were as follows:
- in the two-wheeled category: It is very common to see three people on a small motorcycle or scooter with, perhaps, one helmet to share between them, so it was going to take more than that to win this category. Even four on a motorcycle on the highway wouldn't be enough. For much of the trip, a family of five on a smallish motorcycle held the lead in this category - that is until we spotted a father, son and three live sheep on one motorcycle. They took first prize.
- In the three- or four-wheeled category, competition was also tough with fourteen to sixteen people crammed into an auto-rickshaw and maybe a couple more on the roof not an uncommon sight. In thoses conditions, it was difficult to count accurately. So first prize went the family decked out in their finest that we had a bit of a staring contest with while stuck in traffic, just because we eventually got every single one of them grinning back at us.
The Taj Mahal was beautiful, of course. We let ourselves get talked into hiring a guide, which cost relatively little and let us jump the queue at the ticket booth, but in the end I regretted it a bit because I felt like he rushed us through so that he could get in and out as soon as possible and be available for another hire. He also posed us in these corny poses that seemed pretty popular with a lot of people.
I could have spent hours there looking at all the details. Anyway, didn't have time for that because we had to get back on the road to drive home.
The drive home was much like the drive down except that we had lunch at the Madhuban Dhaba along the highway. $1.80 for mattar paneer.
Cathy bought some roadside hooch in Haryana State. Then it was more thrills on the highway all the way back to Delhi. All in all, the Taj was wonderful, but the driving was the most memorable part of the day - an example of why it's sometimes more about the journey than the destination. Maybe after a while I'll get more blase about the driving, but not yet. It did create in me a whole new level of respect for my dad for driving in those conditions, especially with three bratty squabbling kids in the back seats. It was also nice to get out of Delhi into the countryside and see people in the field, cow patties, cows and buffalo. The cows were mostly in the fields, but not always. Sometimes they were on the highway, and not always following the rules of the road as well as this one below.
Sunday morning we went to the Bhai Temple (here's where we start to cover the religious bases). Once past the chaos of parking and souvenir hawkers and more line-ups we again had to take our shoes off and scramble across red hot pavement to get into the temple. But once inside, what a place!! Cool, silent, breezy, serene. A fantastic example of passive cooling. The place was designed a bit like a big chimney to draw air from intakes around the perimeter of the building through underground ducts where it was cooled by the earth and then into the temple where it got heated and rose up to be exhausted out the top, in the process creating a wonderful breeze. Really impressive building.
That evening it was the main Sikh temple's turn and, yes, shoes off again. Leave them in the car and walk across the parking lot and kind of across the street before ceremonially washing them on the way into the temple. I'm not going to think about how many other people ceremonially washed their feet in the same water. Even at night, or maybe especially at night because of the mid-day heat, the place was packed. We moved slowly through the temple with the crowd to the alter (for lack of a better word), did the rounds and headed out back to the water tank where the photo was taken from. People were bathing in the water. Unfortunately, we didn't have time to eat there, but the temple serves something like 20,000 meals a day to everyone who goes through.
Quite a few days of sightseeing. Then Monday morning I started work.
Today's weather: high 43, low 30 and, yes, dust.
