India Part 7: Simply Marbleous!

The long road from Jaipur to Agra is even longer when the snacks there were supposed to last the whole trip  run out on the first day. Plus, playing Count the Tata isn't all that fun when you need to switch to scientific notation after just a few kilometers of bumper to bumper truck-jams. Luckily the mighty Akbar the Great decided to plonk down a temple cum palace cum tomb complex just off the main highway. Rest stops don't come much better than this. Although rest stop toilets certainly do.

The Fatehpur Sikri palace and adjacent mosque are awe-inspiring for their epic scale. The main gate towers 54 meters over a long set of steps that lead to the vast courtyard where the actual worship takes place.

"The search for the grail is the search for the divine in all of us", Marcus Brody. Uhm, I think you have the wrong movie there chief, save that one for Team J00ster's 2012 Petra odyssey.

Mei decides to go for a more stylish option for her requisite head covering.

Back before you could show off your wealth by owning an IPL team and importing a host of offshore superstars, the only way to beat the Singh's down the road was to have a bigger palace.

The spacious grounds host a variety of carefully manicured gardens, made all the more refreshing through their contrast with the dusty surrounds. And the absence of itinerate cows.

Mei is just glad she's not the one who has to clean this place. If you can't keep a shoebox NY apartment clean, your odds here aren't so great.

Finally, just when the prospect of another manically-piloted, horn-blaring Tata is about to push Mei, not to mention the driver, over the edge, an oasis appears on the horizon. And this is not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill oasis with a couple palm trees and a tepid puddle of muddy water. No, the five star ITC Mughal comes complete with cable tv showing something other than B-grade Bollywood reruns, a massage-enabled la-z-boy, and even... wait for it... a hot water tap where hot water actually comes out when you turn it on. Hitch up the camels folks, we've arrived.

A window in the bathroom looks good in Architectural Digest, but do you really want to watch Rock... uhm... lightening the load for tonight's curry feast? Nope, didn't think so. You didn't really even want to read about it, did you?

Mei raids the tea chest. This place is so upmarket, the tea is imported from Britain. Which makes about as much sense as the hordes of Chinese that come to buy iPads on 5th Avenue when they're made down the road in Guangzhou.

With a hotel this posh, it takes a monumental effort to be up in time for sunrise. But after 10 days of anticipation, nothing could hold the eager J00sters back...

...except of course for a closed ticket office. It seems when they say the doors open at sunrise, they don't exactly mean the crack of dawn.

But all the hassles of a long wait melt away as the Taj Mahal is bathed in the pink light of a new day.

Mei doesn't see the point of having such salubrious digs once you're dead; she'd quite like a Central Park West penthouse right now, thank you very much.

The nice thing about coming early is one can engage in annoying tourist antics without having to fight through all those tourists and their annoying antics.

Fortunately the government found a bit of time between counting bribes to set up a clean-air zone around the Taj Mahal. Which means the glorious white marble should stay like that for future generations.

Apparently the falling water level of the river behind the Taj is causing some instability in the foundations. So Mei's landing can't really have helped things.

Pictures don't really do justice to the epic scale of the mausoleum. Apparently the wife whom the tomb commemorates died giving birth to her 14th child with the king, so one could argue she probably deserved such large-scale recognition.

Even Mei is willing to grudgingly admit that for once getting up early was worth it.

Circumnavigating this thing is harder than it looks.

Mei reckons the best thing about the sun coming up is now she can pull out her shades.

The Yamuna River is still shrouded in a mysterious blanket of morning mist and the faint call to morning prayer drifts through the crisp morning air. Kings come and go, empires rise and fall, but the creamy white marble stands unblinking as the centuries slip inexorably by.

They just don't make doors like they used too.

The locals add a nice touch of color, and are a lot more photogenic than yet another off white GAP t-shirt and fanny pack combo.

Marbleous!

The sun is fully up now, and in a couple more hours Mei will be too.

And with that fitting finale, we wrap up 10 incredible days in India. From here it's a long, painful drive back to Delhi, then a long, painful flight to Wuhan, then a long, painful train ride to Hong Kong, and then an even longer, even more painful flight back to the Big Apple. And since reading these posts have been long and painful enough for the readers who made it this far, we'll leave it at that.