The Golden Triangle

The Golden Triangle is probably the most visited tourist track of India.  It starts in New Delhi, and where you visit the India Gate, government buildings, the house where Gandhi spent his last days, the biggest mosque in Asia, and of course lots of temples.

From there the journey to takes you to Agra, where you visit the Agra Red Fort – one of the many Mughal forts/palaces we visited during this trip – and one of the Seven Wonders of the World – The Taj Mahal.  We woke up at 4:45 AM to visit the Taj right at sunrise, and I have to say it’s totally deserving of all the praise it gets.  It just sort of takes your breath away when you first see it.   And it only gets more impressive the closer you get with all of the detailed inlaid marble work.

And the trip goes further to Jaipur, with a stop at Fatehpur Sikri (another Mughal fort) along the way.  In Jaipur we visited more palaces and forts, of which I unfortunately can’t remember the names.  We also visited the Monkey Temple near Jaipur, and it’s exactly what you think it is.  Literally dozens of monkeys all over the place in a temple complex situated in the walls of a small canyon.  It felt like something out of a movie.  At the top of the temple was a small bath where at least 30 or so monkeys were swimming around and playing with each other.  Unfortunately they charged for bringing cameras into the temple complex, so I don’t have any pictures (although I’m sure you could Google search and find plenty of good ones!).  However, the best part of Jaipur was the old city where we stayed.  Everything in there seemed to go at a much slower pace and lacked the chaos to which I’d grown so accustomed in other Indian cities.  To top it off, the city was surrounded by a wall that offered spectacular views; all you have to do is climb!  Finding remote places away from everyone and everything is probably one of my favorite things about travelling, and the wall of Jaipur was one of those places!

And from Jaipur it was back to New Delhi and then on to Bhubaneswar for me.

Being that this is a very well-travelled tourist circuit, hawkers, cab drivers, beggars, “free guides”, and many other people interested in your money are vying for your attention and wallet every step of the way.  They wait outside hotels, or on paths leading up to monuments, or even at tollbooths on the highway.  Many of our guides would even take us to “museums”, where somebody would offer us a Coke and then show us how the marble of the Taj Mahal is made, or how gems are shaped for jewelry, or how the printed textiles are made in Jaipur.  No matter what the “museum” was showcasing, it always ended in a sales pitch and a massive guilt trip if nothing was bought from the shop. 

At first it’s kind of bewildering; you wonder if everyone is in on some sort of secret agreement to get as much money out of you as possible.  But after a couple of days of it you start to really get fed-up with it.  It got to the point where I would view practically anyone coming up to me suspiciously.  Rather than enjoy casual conversation with people I met on the street, I was always apprehensive, waiting for the moment when they would start asking for money.

However as the week progressed, I recalled an article that my boss had me read when I first started working as a study abroad peer adviser 1.5 years ago.  It’s called The Moral Ambiguity of Study Abroad (link here: http://bit.ly/1qGakhZ).  The article brings up a lot of the things I’ve been grappling with as a Westerner studying in a developing country.  I highly recommend anybody traveling abroad to read it.

One of the things the author talks about is his experience in an Egyptian market where, much like in India, a seemingly friendly shopkeeper turns sour when nobody shows any interest in buying things from him.  At the end of the article he talks about how in hindsight it might have been better to simply purchase a small trinket from the shopkeeper, at least for the sake of improving international relations.

I remember that article playing back in my mind as I sat in one of the “museums” in Agra listening to the shopkeeper’s sales pitch.  I decided then that it would be best if I just purchased one small trinket from each of these shops that we visited.

I may be on a student’s budget, but I agree with the author in that a few dollars is a small price to pay for a little less hatred in the world.