A Long Drive

Today’s plan was to get to Agra from Varanasi. It is 606 kilometres by road, so in my mind that meant maybe 7 hours at the most. As it turned out, my mind failed to factor in the quality of the road and the volume of traffic that uses the road. Most of the journey is on the 4 lane highway that runs from Kolkata to New Delhi. It is in quite poor repair in places, so the average speed is probably 75KM per hour. The highway is used by all the national trucking companies, bicycles, auto-rickshaws and the usual amount of people just walking around. There are few rules, so vehicles  come from all directions and I noted that our driver only put his seatbelt on in the larger towns or when he saw a police car. Cows also have a tendency to lie on the road and not move. I did take some snaps out the window, but not many good ones.

 The drive was very flat and the highway is elevated due to flooding during the monsoon. The first half is mostly rice paddies, before it gives way to corn and sugar cane crops. A lot of small brick kilns are operated as the soil is high in clay and bricks are the major material of residential construction .

Kanpur is about halfway and is a large industrial city focussed mainly on Natural Gas refining and distribution (meaning thousands of trucks). Anyway, so after about 10 hours on the road we finally arrived in Agra and spent a bit of time trying to find the hotel, but here we are.

The car rental company realised pretty quickly that they hadn’t really meant to provide me the Executive Service, so that has now been replaced with local guides in most places. I did have the option of paying for food and accomodation for the executive but (perhaps foolishly) I declined. On reflection, we are paying for the driver’s accomodation tonight – a princely sum of $6. Oh well … live and learn.

Our Hotel in Agra is very nice and they had some external people come in to do some displays (pottery, puppet shows etc…) around the pool area that were all quite good.

I spoke to the Astrologer who told me I would have no money or health problems and that all my children were intelligent. Clearly he only provides good news stories!

We are up early to visit the Taj Mahal and Agra Fort tomorrow, so lots more photos. Then we drive to Jaipur in the afternoon.

Until tomorrow!