firey: Agra, India

On our second day in India most of our group took vans from Delhi to Agra. Along the picturesqe ride I tried to take snapshots of the gorgeous grass huts and farmland.

The trucks were hand-painted brilliantly with driving advice, flowers, religious symbols, and nationalist flags. The painted trucks asked for other drivers to 'blow horn' to indicate when the truck should move. Indians use their horns constantly. The roads were chaos. No one kept in lanes, and driving headlong into oncoming traffic was normal. It seemed there were no traffic rules except the use of the horn.

At a pit stop, there were monkeys in the manicured lawn!

The monkeys crawled all around the building facade.

The Taj Mahal is flanked by three gorgeous large red sandstone buildings. One is the entrance gate, one a guesthouse (seriously huge) and one mosque.

The Taj Mahal was built in the 1600's (so not that old, for India) as a mausoleum for Mughal emperor Shah Jahan's favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal. She died in childbirth to their fourteenth child. The Taj Mahal is said to be a "testament to love" and the story is quite romantic. It's certainly a testament to the fantastic craftsmen who built it.

We visited the Taj at noon on one of the hottest days of the decade. It was 117F. These landscapers rested in the shade.

The big deal about the Taj Mahal (other than the romantic story of true love) is that the white marble is inlaid - not painted - with precious and semi-precious stones in fantastic designs.

Near the Taj Mahal, but across the holy Yamuna river, is the Agra Fort. This was also built by Mughals, but much earlier in the 900's.

This is the view of the Taj Mahal from the Agra Fort, India. The famous story about the Agra Fort is that, after the Moghul Shah Jahan had the Taj Mahal built, his power was usurped by his younger son (or he went a little crazy). He was locked up by his son in the Fort for the remainder of his life, and as a prisoner could only look upon his beloved creation from a distance. He lived the remainder of his pitiful life longing to be at the Taj Mahal and honor his deceased wife. (Or, in another story, he was perfectly content as a prisoner, had lots of female companionship, and died of syphillus).