The Selfless Nomad: 27 Months in Kyrgyzstan: February 2014

Delhi and Agra

After our hectic ride across the city to our hostel, we exchanged some money and hit the town. We got in around 2pm so we had some time to kill. First order of business food!!! We’ve been eating Kyrgyz food for the past 8 months and it is not the best… Truthfully probably the worst food out of the countries I’ve been too. We were all stoked to get to India and largely just for the food. We found some random restaurant and were blown away. We had low expectations going in. The first day we met up with one of Kara’s friend’s from back home who is now working in Mumbai and one of her local friends. We spend the day visiting a couple of temples and taking it easy. That night we headed to one of the nicer parts of town and had some rooftop drinks and enjoyed our first night out of Kyrgyzstan. The stomach problems began the next morning. 2 out of the 6 of us were not feeling up to par the next morning. Becca headed off on her own to explore, she had quite the list of things to see and do and the rest of us were not feeling up to that level of dedication on day 1. Drake, David and I headed out to see the fort and whatever else the day had in store for us.

The Delhi traffic... it just don't make no sense

The crew at a Hindu temple

Turned out the day had a lot in store for us. Unfortunately it is very hard to ask someone for directions and get an honest helpful answer in Delhi. We were attempting to walk a little ways to our destination and upon asking for some clarifying directions someone says follow me I will take you to a place and they can help you. He lured us in with his personality. We ended up following him 10 minutes to some tourist center that just wanted to sell us stuff. When we finally procured a map and figured out where we were he had taken us the complete opposite direction of where we were trying to go… After we headed to the metro station and got to the closest stop near the fort. When we first stepped on to the metro something was strange… it was all women. 3 ignorant American guys stepped into the ladies only car of the metro. We quickly realized our mistake and went to the more crowed general seating area.

Running around in the Delhi Traffic

We got off at our stopped and were quickly swarmed by numerous bike wielding rickshaw drivers. Our first order of business was finding David a belt. We found a bazaar area and a belt, the whole time being followed by a fellow I’ll call Rick for now on. Rick originally told us we wouldn’t even find belts here, we showed him. After Ricks pursuit of us and following us for probably 20 minutes we finally agreed to let him pedal us around but made it very clear we would pay 30 rupees and no more. He agreed and we headed off to the fort. Being the smallest out of the 3 I got the please of sitting on the back of the bike cart thing, and to say the least me getting onto the back was not my smoothest move. At one point I attempted to climb over the front and slide down in which gave everyone on the street watching this white kid try and sit on bike cart a good laugh. One guy even came up to me and simply says, “You are awesome.” I like to pretend it was not entirely sarcastic but I know better. So Rick takes us through some sketchy alleys, busy streets and maneuvering through traffic on his little bike to the red fort. He tells us, he will wait for us no problem, take your time. In my mind I am thinking well we are going to have to pay more, but we never talked more about it. We explored the fort and he then took us to a mosque. After this we made a stop by McDonalds and then it was time to head back to meet up with our group so we could catch our next train. We asked Rick to take us straight to the metro station and nowhere else. During this time he was asking how he did all day, and if we enjoyed our time, he was setting up the price negotiation. During this time he also took it upon himself to take us the wrong way to his friend’s scarf shop. We explicitly told him not to take us but he did anyways. Now it got awkward. He stopped at the shop and told us to go look, we said No, and told him to go now. He kept trying to get us to go look. We were pretty annoyed at this point and he was too so it was mutual. When he finally left he took us to the metro station. We had now been with Rick for almost 4 hours and not once after saying we’d pay him 30 rupees talked about the price. This was set up to be a mess. When we stopped there was tension in the air. We initially offered a small amount more, and he said no way. We then asked him what he would charge us, and he mention 200 a piece. We laughed in his face. For that price we could have gotten a taxi to drive around all day. We told him we’d give him 100. He was not happy, he talked with some other biker guys around him and not one of them came to his defense or said anything to us. We paid him and left. In retrospect we should have paid the guy a little more. It was both of our faults for not talking about during the day, and it was pretty lame for him to take us out of the way to places when we explicitly told him we were running late and needed to get back. After feeling kind of bad about ourselves we got back to the hostel and met up with everyone.

Rick...

Off to Agra.

We head over to the train station and with no problem find our train and it was even on time. After a 3-4 hour ride we got to Agra. It was pretty late when we got in and we headed straight to our hotel for the night. Our hotel was in a great location within walking distance of the Taj. Our friends had all recommend that we get up early and go see the Taj at sunrise before it gets real busy. Sounded great and a couple of people we met at our hotel had the same idea. We got way too early the next morning and headed out. Turns out the entrance we stayed really close to did not sell tickets and you had to walk 15 minutes in the opposite direction so we headed to another entrance all together. We got through the security and were off to see a wonder of the world! Except we couldn’t see it… The mixture of fog and pollution meant we had zero visibility when we first arrived. It was a bust. It was very quiet, peaceful, and not crowded when we got there so that part was a success. We took our time and checked out some military museum and some other museum with old pictures of the Taj. We were trying to kill time so the fog would clear up a little bit. Fortunately it did clear up a good little bit. We got our stereotypical pictures with the Taj Mahal then headed out for some breakfast.

There it is!

Kara and I on the Princess Diana bench, the Taj is in the background!

The Crew in front of the Taj, you can even see it now!

We found this guy in the airport, he made the rounds.

After the Taj we headed to Agra Fort. Agra Fort was huge and very impressive. The red sandstone contrasted with other rooms of white marble was truly incredible. I hate to say it but the Taj was quite a disappointment. I think we all thought Agra Fort was just as neat if not better than the Taj. We spend about an hour or so running around the fort, the guys started taking pictures large groups of locals, we all had a small photo shoot in one of the crumbling areas of the fort. After the fort we had time to kill and nothing to do. By default we found a bar on a roof with a view of the Taj being blocked by some other bigger building… Either way it was very relaxing and we got to watch the monkey frolicking around causing trouble. One stole some person’s clothes and through them off their roof, another snuck up on some woman that appeared to be praying until she started yelling at it and chucking her flip-flops at it, and others were just target practice for the kids throwing rocks at them. It seems like it would be fun to live around monkeys, but after witnessing it forget it, squirrels are bad enough.