Our Second Vacation - Taj Mahal

Perhaps the most famous building in the country, and certainly one of the most famous buildings in the world, is the Taj Mahal in Agra. We had visited the Taj during our quarter break, but one can not expect a visitor to come all the way to India without wanting to stop at the Taj. We decided to make it a new experience for both us and Beth by going to see it at sunrise. We made sure to book a hotel very close to the Taj and we got up well before dawn so that we could stand in line and wait for the gates to open at 7:00. As we stood and waited with a couple dozen other westerners, we started to notice that it was very foggy. All the guide books assured us that sunrise was the prime time to see the Taj, so we were not too worried. When we finally made it through the security checkpoint, we were greeted with views of the great building such as this:

and this:

In fact, Beth Ann now has the distinction of having been inside the Taj Mahal before she even saw it. We walked around the grounds a bit and strained to see some birds here and there. As you can see from the picture below, Beth and Beth were both very disappointed.

Rather than mope around the garden all day, we made the trek back to our hotel without having fully appreciated the Taj (checkout time was 10:00 at our hotel, so we had some motivation to get moving). Thankfully, our hotel had a very nice rooftop restaurant overlooking the Taj, so we were able to watch the fog slowly clear. We even took a nice group picture from there before sending Beth Ann back in to get some more traditional pictures while we waited outside and did some shopping.

We also had time that day to stop by the Agra Fort. This was similar to the Red Fort that we saw in Delhi, but it is in slightly better shape.

After this full day of sightseeing, we piled onto a train in Agra to make our way to Jaipur. This was a sleeper train because it was going past Jaipur through the wee hours of the morning, so we even got a bit of sleep.

Luckily we woke up before our stop!

Dave and Beth