Bharatpur – Agra

• Posted by: Geo Kearley
• Comments: 2

Hey!
We’ve been busy – in Bharatpur we went to Keoladeo Ghana National Park to bird watch, and we saw so much more than birds! We hired a cycle rickshaw driver who was a Naturalist to point out what we were looking at, and here’s the list: monkeys, wild boar, mongoose, jackals, Nilgai (large Asiatic antelopes) and endangered Indian soft shelled turtles. The birds we saw included Indian blue jays (their wings are turquoise), cuckoos, mynahs, parakeets, peacocks and peahens (one male with a full fan display), white-throated kingfishers, painted storks, greta grey herons, a black-headed hawk, a white ibis, and loads of ibis… It was the closest we’ve come to the peace and quite of home in India. All you could hear was the birds in the trees – no traffic, and no horns and diesel fumes. It was a much needed break…

On our way to Agra we stopped at Fatehpur Sikri – an enormous place / mosque complex built by the 3rd Mughal Emperor, and inhabited for only 12 years. It does have the largest gate in India – the Buland Dalwaza, at 54 meters high. One other distinctive feature of this fort was a fondness of the Emperor at the time for dispatching of people he was displeased with by having a trained elephant “dance” on them. There’s a tower out bck of the court yard where this occurred on a fairly regular basis that is a memorial to the emperoro’s favorite elephnat. The tower has one stone “tusk” sticking out of it for every enemy the elephant had dispatched during it’s lifetime. The thing was covered with tusks. Other than that, it was another fort in India.

Once we arrived in Agra, we were too burnt out to go see the Taj Mahal (we wanted to save it for when we were fresh), so we hired rickshaws and raced our friends to the movie theater, much to the amusement of the locals. A couple of white Westerners driving rickshaws down the street at ridiculous speeds is probably not something they see everyday. The Bollywood movie we saw that night was so awful it was funny – a romantic drama about a struggling musician. We were begging for it to just be over about 1/2 way through it…

We did see the taj Mahal the next day, and it was worth the wait. No picture can do justice to the Taj’s beauty, scale and grandeur. The white marble domes and minarets are all embellished with the most intricate inlaid stone flower patterns and carvings. The white marble carved screens are more detailed than any of the other screens in any of the other forts we’ve seen, and the ponds, gardens, lawns and fountians are all clean and functional – unlike anything else we’ve seen in India. You feel the need to simply sit and stare at it for awhile to imprint it on your memory. It does not disappoint.

After visiting the Taj, We went to visit the Red Fort. It pre-dates the Taj, and was built by the same Emperor. The detialed stone work in the fort is obviously the pattern for the stone work at the Taj. One interresting thing in the Palace of the Red Fort was the architect’s fondness for creating optical illusions. Some of the fountain -ponds in the fort appear to be Persian carpets when they are full of water. It was a pretty neat trick. The other architectural featuire of note about the Red Fort was the determination of the 3rd Mughal Emperor to integrate all the religions in India at the time. He actually meant to create a new religion that intrgrated aspects of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Sikhism, and Christianity, and it is apparent in the symbolism of the decorative aspetcs of the architecture. If only that kind of forward thinking existed in our leaders today!

From Agra, we took the overnight train to Varanasi, where we met a very enthusiastic Iranian astronomer who was heading to Varanasi to see the total eclipse of the sun on July 22nd. We’ll be there for it too…

I’ll tell you about Varanasi tomorrow – the ghats and the city are the Holiest Place on earth for Hindu’s. We keep having power brown-outs here, so I’ll sign off before I lose all of this.

As always – we miss our friends, family and Phineas

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Date posted :	Jul 21, 2009
Last modified :	Jan 5, 2010
Categories :	India
Tags :	Agra, Bharatpur