One of the most expensive and frustrating day trips I took on this whole global adventure involved making a 24 hour whirlwind tour of Agra, the historical city about 6 hours from Delhi that includes such popular tourist sites as the Taj Mahal.

The Taj Mahal at sunrise. The beautiful payoff to an absurd and frustrating travel experience.

Running out of time in Delhi, I decided at the last minute that I would spend my last full day taking a bus out to Agra, spend the evening seeing as much as I could, and then taking an overnight bus back to Delhi, sleeping through the drive.

Unfortunately, I really struggled to find an A/C tourist’s bus that was leaving at an appropriate time.  I overslept a bit in the morning, and by 10AM most of the popular busses were already gone.  Around noon, I really started to worry that I was going to miss Agra entirely, so I decided to simply head for Delhi’s major bus terminal and hope that I could find something — anything! — headed there.

Getting to the terminal was easy via the Delhi Metro, a very modern and simple to understand subway system.  Reaching there, however, I was overwhelmed by the station’s immensity and lack of signage.  Luckily, I found an information kiosk, and the woman there gave me detailed instructions once I told her I was trying to catch a bus to Agra.

I ended up taking a Delhi local city bus to another station — actually, one of the city’s major railway stations, where many different private bus companies jockey for clients outside.  I found a bus going to Agra for a mere 120 rupees, a couple of dollars.

Unfortunately, this bus did not take the most direct route to Agra.  It made several stopovers in small towns and villages along the way.  Although these were done very quickly, the sheer number of them made the trip stretch out and out and out!  I didn’t actually reach Agra until well after 9 o’clock, well after all of the tourist sites were closed.

A combined curse and blessing of Agra is that auto-rickshaw drivers get a bit of a “finder’s fee” for any paying guests they bring to a hotel.  It’s a blessing because, for a very small fee, an auto driver will be very happy to take you to as many hotels as necessary until you find an open room, knowing that he will receive a significant bonus in the end from the hotel owner.  It’s a curse because the drivers tend to steer you towards overpriced dumps.

Unfortunately, it turned out that there was a local trade union having its annual convention in town the very week I chose to go to Agra, so I was stuck with an overpriced dump anyway.  I ended up paying about US $30 for a night in a pretty dumpy place, which is astronomical by Indian standards.  The one thing I insist on, no matter where I travel in the world, is cleanliness.  It is very easy and cheap to wash the sheets and sweep the floor, and at the price I was paying the state of the room was really unacceptable.  But at almost midnight in a strange city, I really didn’t have much of a choice.  I also had neglected to bring a photocopy of my Indian visa.  Luckily, it was still the middle of the workday in the US, and I was able to get my amazing and lifesaving Mom to email me a scan of it that I was able to print out at a print/scan/fax shop in the city center.

I was worried a bit when a group of three or four police cars with their lights on, but their sirens off silently converged on the hotel as I was about to go to sleep, but I just jammed the end table of the room into the corner blocking the door from opening and went to bed.

I got up at 5:30AM and had an absolute whirlwind tour of the city.  I managed to cram in several beautiful historical sites, including the Taj Mahal, the Moon Gardens across the river from it, and Itmad ud Daula’s Tomb, sometimes called the “Baby Taj.”

Unfortunately, it was then that I found out that there are simply no buses running the Agra to Delhi route that early.  I was completely out of sync with a normal tourist’s Agra itinerary, and for a second it looked like I might miss my 2 p.m. Delhi to Mumbai flight, and therefore also my Mumbai to Tel Aviv flight!  After about an hour of unsuccessful searching for a better alternative, I broke down and booked myself a private car for the six hour drive back to Delhi.  This was astronomically expensive by Indian standards, around $50, but it included a driver and I would get dropped right at the Nehru University hostel where a friend of a friend was storing my suitcases for me.  I bit the bullet and drove back to Delhi in absurd luxury.

I managed to squeeze in a trip to Agra, but at a huge hit to my budget and sanity.  I would advise future travelers to India to invest much more advance planning into a trip to Agra, and also warn them that outside of its epic historical sites, there is little to see, do, or appreciate in Agra.  Every other Indian city I visited, including ones that were much smaller, was more friendly, easier to navigate, and much less aggressively “touristy.”  I never felt like I someone was trying to scam or con me in an entire month in India, except for the 24 hours in Agra, where the attempts to fleece me were pretty much nonstop.

I apologize for the delay in my first blog post from India. After a grueling few days spent trapped in planes and airports throughout the region as I moved from Pakistan to India via Saudi Arabia, I lacked the discipline to sit down and write about my experiences until now.

My time in India so far has been spent with my friend from grad school, Saket Parekar, and his family in Kolhapur and childhood friends in Sangli, neighboring cities in Maharashtra. I landed in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) airport on a Thursday night. Saket had arranged for a shared cab to take me from Mumbai to the city of Pune, where another mutual friend would host me for the night, as Kolhapur was too far of a journey to make as late as I would be landing.

The shared cab system is excellent. It leaves from a common departure point, like an airport, but then drops its passengers off directly at the doorstep of their destinations. I had some excellent conversations with the other passengers in the shared cab — one man was a veteran of the 1971 Indo-Pak war, while I listened in with barely-concealed enjoyment as an auntie in the cab got into a most dramatic fight with the driver after being told her destination was outside of the cab company’s coverage area.

The woman was quite annoyed at not having been told this when she was reserving her ticket nor when she arrived at the waiting area, but only once we were en route to our destination city! Eventually, everything worked out, although the driver insisted, rather unfairly, that she pay an extra 10 rupees, a trivial sum.

I arrived at the home in Pune of a mutual friend of mine and Saket’s, Ravi Kale, an Ohio undergraduate. I was pretty exhausted after having been stuck in planes and airport terminals for the previous two days, neither of which I’ve ever managed to properly sleep in, so after a bit of small talk I went right to sleep.

The next day, Ravi brought me to the bus station to book passage from Pune down to Kolhapur to meet Saket. This bus trip was much more enjoyable than the flights of the previous few days. The bus was air conditioned, drove along some very scenic and interesting Indian roads, and had a flatscreen TV showing a recent Bollywood hit, Meira Brother Ki Dulhan (My Brother’s Bride), a fairly typical romantic comedy.

Arriving in Kolhapur Friday evening, I had an excellent meal and got to know Saket’s parents. Saket’s father Dashrath is a veteran journalist who recently came out of retirement to become editor at a Marathi language daily newspaper.

Marathi is the local language of India’s Maharashtra state. It is written in the same Devanagari script, and shares some vocabulary and grammar, but to even an inexperienced ear like mine it is very easy to tell the two apart — I catch bits and pieces of conversations in Hindi based on my experience with Urdu, whereas I am completely lost with Marathi!

Saket’s Mom, Dr. Nanda Parekar, is a lecturer in history at a local university. Between the two of them, they’ve amassed quite an impressive library on subjects very dear to my heart – unfortunately for me, mostly in Marathi.

My first evening in Kolhapur, I also got to try a quintessential India treat, paan. Paan is a sort of chewing tobacco, that is served mixed with some other seasonings and flavoring agents and wrapped up in a leaf from the betel tree. Of course, I managed to get a little bit of the bright red juice that results from chewing this concoction on my shirt, but Saket comforted me with the knowledge that his usually happens to inexperienced chewers.

I spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in Sangli, a smaller city that is about an hour’s bus drive from Kolhapur. Saket and I took the standard State Transport bus that local folks use to get there. It was a bit of a rough ride, but again afforded me an opportunity to see parts of rural India that are not very commonly seen by foreign tourists.

Kolhapur and Sangli are both very nice cities, but not the sort of place that Western tourists would tend to visit without having some specific personal reason to go there, as I did. (In an American context, think of Minneapolis.)

In Sangli, we spent time with the Kulkarnis, longtime family friends of the Parekars. One of their daughters, Richa, was also a university classmate of Saket’s when he was getting his first master’s degree at Nehru University in Delhi. When I arrived at the Kulkarnis’ house, I was very touched to see that a large fern in the front yard had been decorated with tinsel and ornaments. I spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with Saket and the Kulkarnis in a very traditional American way — eating and drinking!

Mr. Kulkarni is an executive with a large sugar factory, and one of the side benefits of his job is that he often brings home a delicious whiskey his company makes. Since this is made from molasses, it would probably be considered a rum in the US, but it’s uniformly called whiskey here. Either way, it tasted excellent with local ThumsUp cola.) I also finally got to try Kingfisher, a very popular and common Indian lager.

I had one of the most memorable Christmas Eves of my life, drinking whiskey and fooling around on the rooftop terrace of the Kulkarni home, including 30 minutes spent forcing Richa’s sister Rewa to get a picture of me posing on top of the concrete platform that supports their water cistern in the Heisman Trophy pose.

I also had the opportunity while in Sangli to see an exhibition of Indian woven goods. I bought myself a towel and shirt made out of khadi, a course, homespun cloth that Gandhi himself used to produce in protest of British mercantile policies, along with a few other small items for folks back home.

Today I returned to Kolhapur with Saket. It’s been a very action packed and enjoyable few first days in India, and I certainly hope they end up setting the tone for my entire trip.