Agra: Not my cup of chai

After barely 12 hours in Agra, one thing is clear: This city and I do not get along.

Things went reasonably smoothly this morning – the hotel driver was waiting to pick me up at the train station, the hotel allowed me to check in at 8:30 in the morning, and I had a pleasant enough lunch in the hotel restaurant.

But as soon as I stepped foot outside the hotel, I discovered that Agra stinks. Literally. Like sewage. It smells vaguely like sulfur, but by comparison the sulfur we have in the U.S. is downright pleasant. Or maybe it really is sewage. I don’t know, and I hope I don’t find out.

Worse though were the rickshaw drivers (both motorized and bike-powered) hounding me with every step. I was walking a mere 200 yards to an Internet café, and was hassled by at least a dozen different drivers trying to get me to use their services. Initially I would politely say no, or explain that I was just walking up the street. But they kept insisting that they needed the money, and that they could wait for me, or take me later, or tomorrow. I got so fed up with one guy that I actually yelled at him, but it made no difference whatsoever – he just kept it up. If the walk had been 400 yards, I probably would have decked him.

After the madness of the streets, I decided to ease some of the tension with an Ayurvedic massage at the hotel. Now, I’ve had massages all over the world, and among them I’ve certainly had my share of bad ones. There was the scary Russian lady who pummeled me like a side of beef in Washington; the obviously untrained Vietnamese woman who swished her hands back and forth and drew squiggly patterns on my back; the bizarro Italian mud massage followed, literally, by a hose-down. But I’ve never had to actually tell the masseuse (female in this case) to stop touching me you-know-where.

Then tonight I took a shower, which was actually quite pleasant, except for the fact that the tub wasn’t draining very well. Little did I know that the tub is connected to a drain for the whole bathroom, which was clogged, so all my shower water was backing up through the main drain into the bathroom and my entire hotel room. By the time I got out, my room was a 1-inch-deep lake, and very soon a hotel staffer was pounding on my door because water was seeping into the hallway. I had an entertaining minute of him yelling at me to open the door and me yelling back that I would do so as soon as I could get some clothes on, which for some reason he couldn’t seem to grasp. Or perhaps he didn’t want to. Anyway, after a half hour the staff had the drain unclogged and the water cleaned up, and I was just relieved that I hadn’t left any of my belongings on the floor.

Tomorrow I plan on waking up early to go see the Taj Mahal at sunrise, but I have to say I’m a little nervous – I can only imagine what else Agra has in store for me.

P.S. After my trip to the Taj Mahal this morning, I can only say I dislike Agra even more. Inside the grounds of the Taj Mahal everything was peaceful and enchanting, but outside I was harassed by vendors and rickshaw drivers, plagued by swarms of mosquitoes, saddened by sick and mangy dogs, disgusted by huge piles of camel dung, and assaulted by countless foul smells. I can’t wait to get out of this city.