The Beauty of Lies has moved to KirkKittell.com (Subscribe to the RSS feed). This post has been copied to http://kirkkittell.com/2008/03/25/photos-from-agra-dec-2005.
Listen. The Taj Mahal is awesome in the true sense of the word: inspiring awe. The pictures you've seen before, and that you see in this set of photos, are just a taste of what it is like in person. I mean, it looks big and majestic in images, but when you walk in the gate from the south and the Taj Mahal swings into view -- amazing.
Three of us -- Megha, her cousin, and I -- started from New Delhi at four in the morning, taking the bus to Sikandra, just on the outskirts of Agra. (The bus ride to and from Agra is another story altogether -- both the outrageous video game-like ramble down to Agra and the broken down bus in the night on the way back to Delhi. Oh yes, you must wait for the book, Train Cancellation Party.) In Sikandra we visited the mausoleum of Akbar the Great [wikipedia.org].
Next -- and maybe I'm too simple, blame it all on my roots or whatever -- was an auto ride to the Taj Mahal. It's like nothing else I had ever seen.
Then: the Taj Mahal [unesco.org]. I'm not going to try to describe it anymore. See the pictures here, and sometime in your life see it in person. From the Taj Mahal we traveled to Agra Fort [unesco.org], capital of the Mughal empire.
Photos from Agra
The map below displays the photos were they were taken in Agra. Click on the camera icons to open a display for each picture. Alternatively, you could view the photos in: Picasa; Flickr; or Panoramio.
(If it's hard to see the photos in the window below -- and don't forget to click the icons to see them... -- open it in a larger map)
As always, if you use Google Earth and download the network link file for this trip to your My Places, your placemarks will automatically be updated when I add photos to the rest of the trip.
This is set #2 of my photos from India in 2005-2006; the other sets are: (1) New Delhi; (2) Agra; (3) Chandigarh; (4) Allahabad; (5) Kolkata; (6) Ambala.
If you don't want to wait, you can see the placemarks and the photos in separate states:
- Most of my photos from India are in a Picasa web album.
- Map placemarks are posted on my wiki.
