Posts From India

Again I am doing "catchup". We had a productive and pleasant time in Bardenweiler and as planned dropped the truck in Gaggenau on Friday morning. Spent Friday night in the Gernsbach Stadt Hotel (we have been there so often now that they recognized us) and Saturday trained to Frankfurt for our overnight flight to Delhi, India.

At dinner last night we met our tour guide Rajeev and the other members of the group, a total of 7 in all, two Australian guys, a Canadian couple, Nina and I plus Rajeev. This morning as instructed we met in the lobby at 8:00am and then into a mini-bus for the "days events".

Another early (5:30am) start today, this time in order to get to the banks of the Ganges River in time to see the start of the days activities. The river is called Ganga by Hindus and is worshipped as the god Ganga by them, and is one of the four mothers every Hindu has.

This morning was another plane ride, to the village of Khajuraho and while it was only a short hop it took up much of the morning delivering us to our hotel around 2:00pm. Then after a short break to get "organized" we were off for a visit to a local historical sites famous for its erotic carvings.

We had a longish mini-bus drive today to a town called Orchha, where lunch was provided at a local "resort" and there after a tour of a local 16th Century palace. Following the palace tour the bus ride continued to the city of Jhansi where we took a train to Agra.

Today was the big day, the (supposed) highlight of the tour, our visit to the Taj Mahal. It did not disappoint. It is an astounding work of art. In the flesh it is more impressive than all the photos but what surprised Nina and I was the details and small scale decoration. The Taj building is made from a special Indian marble and all the decorations are formed from colored stone and semi-precious stones inset into the marble. In some of the decorations the insets are really small, of the order of 1 or 2 millimeters.

We were off on another road trip this morning to an ancient Mughal capital called Fatehpur Sikri to tour its deserted city. Another amazing complex of ornate sandstone constructions, pools ad gardens.

We did not know it at the start of the day but there was going to be a bit of drama before today was over, but that is the end of this story not the beginning.

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