Monkeys, Cattel, and Sand Lots are Rough On The Intestines.

Sitting in a dark hole in front of a computer in the middle of India I take a minute to reflect on the last few days here. This is the first of many stories.

The train to the Taj Mahal did not work out as one may have hoped. The train dropped us in Mathura, a town over and hour outside of Agra which is where the Taj Mahal is. In the very small city there is a temple that is said to be where Krishna (a Hindi god) was said to be born. My book mentioned the temple but had almost no other information on the city other than this fact. We knew we had to get a taxi into Agra so we thought it would be easy to get a taxi to take us to the temple and then if the price was right and we wanted to continue, we would have them drive us to Agra. I get off the train and there is no other tourists but my friends and I however there is more than thirty taxi drivers happpy to help us. Thus, we get mobbed. I had a guide book with names of the temple and such information so my two friends move back out of the way and photograph this *Shit Show.

After a lot bad communication (in rural areas the English is shotty with low literacy rates and my American accent is not common) we get our taxi driver and head into the temple. We are seeing some wild rural happenings and the taxi driving has not gotten better in the rural area. Rather, they insert cows, tractors, large buses, oxen carriages and bicycles into the erratic driving and all of them are swerving around the cows in the middle of the road at mach three attempting to not hit the cows.

A few minutes later we arrive at what appears to be the kingdom of monkeys. It is a whole in the ground that has been made with some sort of a red cement and built like an inverted pyramid with each foot a new step heading down to water at the bottom. It is larger than a football field with monkey climbing all around it and no one can tell me what this incredible structure is. Nonetheless, I leave my friends in the car with the bags and head down a crazy road to see the temple, at one point on the walk two monkeys jumped toward me and landed close enough to almost scare the literal shit out of me, but also enough to alert the taxi driver who is used to this monkey kingdom.

After all of this I end up not getting into the temple due to a few communication errors (which I have since worked through, and takes some knowing while traveling in this country, and will come in a later note) I head back to the taxi and we start our negotiations to drive us to Agra. The driver is incredibly unreasonable and we end up taking our bags out of the car and walking the mile back through the cows and traffic back to the train station. This "walking" incident was so wild it could hardly be explained less you where here to see the speeds and animals thus we photographed this as well, no worries pictures will be posted later.

We manage to find our way back to the train station where we negotiate a price and take off on our journey. However we only get about five miles when the driver and his friend turn off the road and barrel through a cricket game in a field and park at the back, at which time my friends and I are having another bowel moving moment. The guy jumps out and Curly, my male traveling companion has his hand on his pocket where he caries a rather scary knife. The guys get out and start talking with two other men and tell us to get our bags so we can move to the other car parked there. One man speaks some English and after we calm down we understand that the car we were first put in can not travel the distance and so they are moving us to a new car and negotiating a finders fee. We move cars and an hour and a half later safely arrive in Agra where we find a hotel and have dinner on a roof top cafe. We eat, drink chai tea and watch the sun set on the Taj Mahal. The wild day ends well with Intestines intact and no need for a rabies shot.

*capitlized because it is a borrowed term and also because it was a proper debacle that requiers a proper name.