Incredible India

We arrived in India three days ago and were told that this was an open rally leg – which means that we have a total amount of time to do as many scavenges (in various cities) as we can cram in. The last few legs have been timed events (meaning that we got a day’s worth of scavenges and had to check in by a certain time each night). In a timed rally leg, you are literally forced to rest and sleep (between like 10 AM and 6AM) because you cannot scavenge at night. Not true for India. We could work as hard as we wanted – and – very important –the winner of this leg will get a bonus of 500 points (which is HUGE). This was a huge incentive to really work hard in India and it has been an exhausting – but fantastic – few days.

Bill’s concept in India was to make us leave the city and travel between the triangle-located cities of Delhi-Agra-Jaipur. But, in order to force us to interact with locals, we were not allowed to just hire big, expensive, comfortable cars with drivers to take us there (as that would have been too easy). Instead we had to use the local trains (VERY unclean) and moped rickshaws (VERY hot). We also are not allowed to get ANY help from the hotel concierge or any employee of the hotel. So we literally had to just head out of the hotel (with no idea where you were going), walk into the street and start asking people how to find things.

Day 1:
As soon as we got our scavenge books, we discovered that this leg involved travel between various cities by train so we packed up 2 nights of clothes in our back packs and headed out to the train station to try and figure out schedules and options – what an eye opening experience. The Delhi train station is like a scene from Slumdog Millionare but with 2 million extra people. We finally got directed to a tourist bureau where we bought night train tickets to Agra. When we got back to the station, we hired a porter to get us to the right platform and train (thank God, because we would still be lost wandering around that place – stepping over sleeping and disabled children and pushing through crowds – if he had not helped). The porter was 115 years old and he immediately wound a piece of cloth on his head, picked up Nanny’s carry-on bag, plunked it on his head and took off at a trot. We were left to run along behind him all the way to the train. Luckily, we got a sleeper car – with air conditioning - and even though it was very low on the clean and sanitary scale, we all tried to get some sleep. We did not arrive in Agra until almost midnight. The train station tourist bureau had booked us a hotel in Agra that looked fine in the pamphlet that they showed us but was AWFUL in real life – no hot water, little or no air conditioning (it made noise but did not produce any actual cool air), spiders in the bathroom… GROSS. I actually contemplated sleeping in a shower cap to stop the infestation of crawling bugs that were obviously hiding in the pillow, but ended up just falling into a coma on the very much less-than-clean bed instead. (Have you noticed a recurring theme already – most of India is so filthy and dirty that it has an almost repulsive charm).

Day 2:
Scavenge # 1: Visit one of the Seven Wonders of the Middle Ages and have your fortune told by a soothsayer. What does your future hold? Take a classic Team photo from the VIP bench.
We got up at 5 AM on Monday so that we could be at the Taj Mahal at sunrise. It was stunningly beautiful – and so few people were there at that hour that we got awesome photos without throngs of tourists in each frame – including the VIP shot (from the bench before the Taj). Since it was not yet blisteringly hot, we could really linger and enjoy the Taj. The downside: there were no fortune tellers out that early, so we had to go to a nearby shop to get our palms read. It cracked me up because the palm reader had to use a magnifying glass to see our palms – getting old & poor-sighted is clearly a real career downer for fortune-tellers.

Scavenge # 2: Find a craftsman specializing in the exquisite pietra dura of Taj Mahal-fame.
There are still a few families left in Agra who have passed on (from generation to generation) the craft of inlaying marble with thin slices of semi-precious stone to make beautiful intricate patterns (exactly how the Taj Mahal was done). We went to one of those places and watched the entire process in action. They still use hand-turned lathes (the men pull a stick back and forth to make the stone wheel turn) to slice, shape and polish the semi-precious stones and then glue them into hand-grooved spaces that they have chiseled out of the marble. 1,000 year old technology that produces beautiful results.

We ended Day 2 by going to Bharatapur to visit a bird sanctuary (dry, hot and not many animals to see – I would not recommend this excursion) and then on to Ranthambore National park to spend the night. Ranthambore is 6 hours from Agra – through the countryside – in and out of small villages – so we arrived late at night – very tired and worn out.