Our tour group is 14 women (3 American, 4 British, 1 Brazilian, 1 Australian, and 7 Norwegian) and myself, along with our Indian guide named Binu. Many of the girls have travelled extensively and one is in the process of seeing the 7 modern Wonders of the World (she's on this trip to see the Taj Mahal). As we all walk around the streets we now get more stares and attract more attention than we did in Faridabad. Our group is energetic, but has enough inertia to make transitioning between activities and meals a painfully time-consuming process.
In Delhi we explored active Muslim and Sikh temples. The Sikh religion opens up its temples to people of any status or belief system to come in, and offers free basic foods. Its teachings are also quite tolerant and progressive, and just generally different from my preconceptions. Look it up. If you join though, you commit to never cutting your hair or shaving.
Next we were on to Agra. I was sick the first day but Annie got up early with the others to watch the sun rise over the Taj Mahal. Those pictures are on the camera (vs. phone), so we'll either post them later, or not if we think everyone is sufficiently familiar with the Taj. A number of others have gotten sick since then too, so I now sympathize and appreciate feeling normal. We've heard this condition referred to as 'Delhi Belly'.
We've had a great deal of time to gaze out the windows of the bus as we travel between destinations and it has been interesting seeing how many people live in this environment. It is almost solid wheat fields as far as the eye can see. We see people out in the fields cutting it down and tying it into bundles. The bundles are carried to a nearby grinding area, and the ground wheat is dumped into comically overloaded trucks. Tarps bulge over the too edges of the trucks to the point where they might almost double in width, and you see many of these on the roads.
There are also many brick-making areas, with piles of fired and unfired bricks near tall smokestacks, and with dozens of camels pulling carts of bricks every which way. There have been thousands of camels walking along the roads pulling all sorts of items. They are single-humped (dromedary) and are strong enough to pull a full load of bricks. Tall, too. We went camel riding in the evening and the camel we rode was 7 feet tall at the hump, and probably 8 feet at the top of its head. The riding is comfortable and you sit on a cushion that is on top of a wooden frame on the camel's back.
Our travel from Agra to Jaipur was stopped when we reached a section of road shut down because some of the Gujjar people were protesting their representation in the current government job quota system. We stopped at a cafe and went on our way 2.5 hours later once the road opened. Our guide Binu said this sort of interruption was not uncommon and with a smile, added, 'Welcome to India'.
We feel kind of like the seasoned travelers of the bunch. The fastest walkers, quickest to dismiss the guys hawking goods on the street and to say no to the children asking for money or pens. Or maybe we're just growing less tolerant of the encroachment on our personal space.
Either way, it can be annoying/amusing to see the other girls initially express interest in some items being pushed on them, and then to only gently start asking the salesperson to go away. The guys stick around forever, and often get someone to pay full price.
There are kickback systems everywhere. Our tour guides at temples or forts will sometimes stop us at a shop and recommend the goods as being reputable. If anyone buys anything, he gets a cut, supposedly 6-10%. Binu (our main guide) gets propositioned by shop owners constantly for this sort of thing. And on two of our taxi trips we've made unscheduled stops at textile bazaars where we we're told to go inside and look around. I guess it just helps facilitate business, but this sort of thing contributes to the constant sense that being a tourist in India is a zero sum game where most advice people give tends to be self-serving.
On the negotiations front, I've been getting most street items at around 20-40% of the initial price requested. A shirt starting at 500 rupees (around $10, or outrageously overpriced) can be had for 100. I like seeing the sometimes used tactic of not lowering the price, but just increasing the number of items. One child was trying to sell me a bracelet for 100 rupees, then offered 2 for the same price, waited a bit, and then successively increased the number to 6 over a ten second period. No deal.
We visited the Amber Fort (pictured, with water in front of it) of Jaipur yesterday. It took 150 years to build (the Taj took 20) and is impressive in its size, hillside location, and 13km wall that surrounds the border area. It reaches 46-48 degrees Celsius (pushing 120 Fahrenheit) in the summer, so the fort had an extensive cooling system that consisted of flowing water and wet porous sheets of grass that cooled air as it blew through. There were 12 apartments for the Maharaja's 12 wives (he also had 300 concubines) and there were hidden tunnels from the king's bedroom to each apartment.
In front of the fort there were free-roaming black-faced langurs, a larger kind of monkey than we'd seen before. Most of the monkeys we see are rhesus macaques, and we visited a monkey temple yesterday afternoon the was literally crawling with monkeys cavorting around.
Off on the bus back to Delhi today for the last scheduled day of the tour, then a couple days in Delhi before heading to Johannesburg.
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