Sicckkripur

August 13th part 2-

It was off to the Taj Mahal. Unfortunately as Friday the 13^th would have it we found out that the Taj is closed on Fridays. What a bummer. This really threw a monkey wrench in our plans since we’re short of days already. We finally decided to check out Fatehpur Sikhri, which is Akbar’s palace, the Agra Fort, and spend another night in Agra so that we could catch the Taj early.

In Fatehpur Sikhri, or Sikhripur (that’s what my dad calls it) we came across some of the best hustlers the world has ever seen. The first hustler was this little kid who tried to sell my mom some colorful pens for 100 rupees, which isn’t much, but my mom pulled the classic “no hablo ingles” line and the kid busted out with fluent Spanish. There were no excuses after that, my mom promised to buy a pack from him later. Then some tour guide came up to us went on an Ace Ventura spiel where he talked for 3 minutes non-stop until my dad said, “alright, let’s go.” The little kid hopped in the back of our auto rickshaw to make sure the deal went down eventually.

We headed to Akbar’s palace. From what I understood from the tour guides broken English Akbar was this king who was a total Bad Ass. He stood at 5 foot 3 inches tall and wielded a 24-kilogram sword; it weighed in the area of 56 lbs. Akbar had 3 wives, but had girls everywhere around his temple. When he went to bed he had four girls who he made sure bathed in Rose water before he allowed them to fan him with big peacock feathers. Talk about the good life.

The red stone temple displayed his three wives’ religious beliefs and was definitely pretty cool. The day was pleasant, lots of overcast, so it wasn’t too hot. We finished the palace, and it was time to head back to Agra for the fort. On the way over though, a really creepy monkey trainer came up to our window and had his monkey do backflips and other cool tricks. We gave him 20 rupees to which he said, “This only buys the Atta, what about the daal?” True. We shot him another 20.

The trip back took about an hour, but once we got there I realized how massive the fort really was. The Indian government decided to take over 2/3rds of the fort. You can do that when you’re the Indian government; just declare 2/3rds of a national monument as their property. There’s a white marble section in the Agra fort that overlooks the Taj Mahal. The story behind this white area according to the tour guide was that Shajah’s son imprisoned him into this white marble area for spending too much money. Also he mentioned that Shajah was going to give his power to somebody else other than his son. That might’ve been another factor for the imprisonment. The fort had an impressive moat area for crocodiles and a jungle area right beside it, which held tigers and other animals.

After a long day of tour guides we went to Jaypee palace and spent the night there.

Here I show off my photographic talent. The model in the picture is probably a homeless person just hanging out enjoying the day.

Our tourguide was multitalented apparently, he obviously knew what he was doing in this picture. Not bad for a tour guide. He also spoke 4 other languages including japanese.

This is a good family pic, notice the rolled up jean cuffs for airability and the callaway golf cap with 50 spf.