From the Indian hills to the Taj Mahal

Taj Mahal II, early morning reflection
Originally uploaded by rtw2007.

McLeod Ganj, in northern India, nestles amongst lush green hills with a fantastic view out southwards over the plain below. We spent a couple of days there, wandering the narrow streets with their arrays of Tibetan tit-bits (McLeod Ganj, and more generally the district of Dharamsala, is one of a number of refuges in India for Tibetans fleeing the Chinese occupation) and doing lots of monk-spotting. The monks all look pretty happy and striking in their bright orange and red robes as they wander the streets with shaven heads. Despite standing outside his heavily guarded front door for a good twenty minutes, however, we failed to get a reception with or even a glimpse of the Dalai Lama. Disappointing.

Continuing the hill-station theme, we moved on (via a tortuous nine hour drive) to the town of Shimla, which used to be the British summer capital – a welcome relief from the scorching heat of the plains. For the first time in a long while it was on with the jumpers and shoes in the evening; a very refreshing change. The town is full of middle class Indian tourists happily promenading up and down the main ridge in front of a long high street full of strangely English looking timber framed buildings. Coming here is a stark contrast with the Pakistani hill stations, which appeared far more run down and lacking in facilities. We enjoyed a stay at the renovated Cecil Hotel, a huge white and green affair that looks down on the whole of Shimla. The cavernous five storey high atrium here, with polished wooden floors and green leather chairs, made an excellent place to watch India win the Twenty20 World Cup – we didn’t let on to anyone that we were secretly supporting Pakistan.

Chandigarh was our next stop – an experimental Indian town that would be best matched with Milton Keynes. It is based on a grid system similar to that utilised in Islamabad and was created by the Indians as a new capital for the Punjab region when Lahore was ceded to Pakistan. Rather then develop a standard Indian city – ie cramped and dirty – they employed some an architect who went by the bizarre moniker of “Le Corbusier” to come up with a better plan. He decided on the overall theme and designed many of the buildings, basing his ideas on concepts such as the Golden Ratio and that a city should be like a biological organism. Whilst this all sounds very lovely and interesting (and parts of it are – Chandigarh is very green and the traffic system runs almost perfectly on excellent roads), the town suffers from being built primarily in the 60s, so there is way too much concrete. We hired a driver who proudly showed us the revered High Court and Assembly Buildings, but it’s hard to be enthusiastic when one is an enormous concrete cuboid and the other was inspired by a cooling tower (I kid you not, it’s actually written in the architecture museum). Next to these monsters is a sculpture park that was developed on the sly by one of the road builders in Chandigarh: he made models of people, animals and the like out of rubbish – mainly broken porcelain. Once Le Corbusier had disappeared from the scene and other people were allowed to have an opinion, Ned Chand opened his displays to a public that I imagine, rather like us, didn’t quite know what to say. Still if you want to see peacocks made of children’s bangles, walls of electric plug sockets and men made from smashed up toilets, then Chandigarh is your place.

Further south we rejoined the main tourist trail at Delhi, Indian capital and home to about 12 million people (I’m not sure how they count them though, given the chaos and the number of people in shacks or on the streets). What a place – without a doubt the largest, smelliest, busiest, filthiest and craziest city of our trip so far. In fact, all we actually had to do on this visit was drive around the ring road, but this took two and a half hours, one small collision, one near marriage break up and a lots of panicking from BJ. As night fell we eventually got to the airport (the main international one, totally unsignposted until you are driving through the front gate) and decide that the only way to get to where we wanted to be was to put Helen in a taxi and try to follow that as closely as possible – me watching out for donkeys, autorickshaws, bikes, beggars, cows, children, dogs and people driving the wrong way down the road, whilst BJ tried to watch the taxi that was disappearing off into the distance with Helen.

We moved on from Delhi to Agra the next day and things calmed down slightly. We rolled into Agra just as sun was setting and had our first glimpse of the Taj Mahal across the river – it looked stunning, one of those views that takes your breath away, lit up by deep sunlight. As it was late, we left visiting the Taj to the next day and satisfied ourselves with some curry and air-conditioning. The food in India has been almost without exception excellent and we have settled into a routine of paneer (cheese) curry, mixed vegetables, raita and fresh roti (similar to chapattis in Britain). The hotels in Agra are stretched fairly along the Mall so that each can offer a ‘Taj View’ from its rooms, although this is from a distance of about 2km. The next day we jumped into another rickety auto rickshaw and headed over to the East Gate of the Taj Mahal. We suffered the rather unfair pricing strategy (Indians $1, Foreigners $20) before entering the main grounds. The building is beautiful, spectacular and actually far larger than I had imagined. It is hard to be enamoured by the organisation of the place, though. There are, as is the case in so many places in this country, just far, far too many people and it was all a bit overwhelming – so many tourists and all of them fighting for the various ‘money shot’ photos. At the end of the canals that look so serene and beautiful in the photos we found a bevy of people all fighting and jostling, trying to insert their relative into the correct place for the dream shot. As you then proceed through the immaculate gardens there is a central pedestal with some benches that Princess Di sat on for a photo when she visited. Barbara had designs on a similar photo but it proved impossible: they closed the place down for Princess Di, but for some reason we didn’t get the same treatment and trying to persuade the fifty or so people who were on the platform ruining our shot to move out of the way proved too much. We took some photos, traipsed around the inside of the mausoleum and returned exhausted to the hotel bar.

The next morning I went to search for a different side to the monument, catching another auto rickshaw to take me round to the other side of the river at five o’clock in the morning, in time for sun rise. The view from the other side of the river with the building reflected in the water is beautiful; you will have seen it in lots of photos and I didn’t have to share it with anyone. That is until the local villagers all started to wake up and wander down to the riverside to complete their morning routine all in sight of everyone. For me, that moment summed up all of the contradictions of India that we have experienced so far: I was standing in front of a beautiful picture-postcard view, which makes a stunning photo opportunity, but I had to trudge around in rubbish and human waste just to be there. Strange that they never show you that bit in the colourful photos in all the guidebooks....