Agra – it’s Awful!

Driving into Agra after a day in the Ambassador our hearts sank. We knew it would be a grubby industrial city but not as filthy as this. The pollution rivals Bangkok in the old days. First memorable sight was a 3-wheel delivery van sporting a huge "Sunlight Pure" margarine logo on the back mostly obscured by the enormous plume of black smoke it was pumping out.

We stopped a couple of times searching for the cheap leather hold all I should have bought in Jaiselmer, no luck, & almost gagged on the humidity. It'd rained earlier which left pools of diesel/water/cowdung soup everywhere & an atmosphere you could cut with a chapatti.

The Hotel Royal Regency is the sort of business place we expected, functional & used to tourists who only stay the night, see the Taj, breakfast & then split. On a major road in the middle of nowhere there are a couple of other hotels & 2 of the saddest malls you've ever seen given they're only a few years old. In between all this are patches of wasteland & slums.

Ramesh had warned us not to go out, eat in the hotel restaurant, don't use credit card anywhere, etc etc as "Uttar Pradesh is mostly full of criminals, & not clean". This seems a little hard on 166 million people so while C had a nap I decided to go for a march, get some exercise & see what happens.

Walked a mile down the 4 lane road via the 2 malls to find the nearest beer shop & walked back. Didn't die. Saw the following;

• The Taj from the top floor of mall #1 glistening in the polluted twilight. Jaw-dropping even from here, hyperbole warning for tomorrow.
  
• 2 well dressed 40 something ladies being shown how to use an escalator by their children in mall #2. We matched grins as they stepped onboard.
  
• My first albino horse, complete with pink eyes & lips
  
• A fight outside the street corner police lockup, someone's been up to no good
  
• More guns than I've seen in years, all the security guards at the malls have shotties as do several youths hanging out in the carparks
  
• A donkey foal stuck on one side of the central barrier while it's mother was on the far side munching on a garbage pile. The barrier is 4ft high & 2ft wide & the foal was obviously distressed & unable to jump over. I could see they'd been separated at a junction a couple of hundred meters up the road & I was worried it'd get run over. I watched for a while as the locals watched me & as always the traffic surprised. Huge tourist buses, trucks, autorickshaws & speeding motorbikes all somehow flowed around the distressed animal. Aaaahhhh