India: On the road

Agra itself is not an attractive city and so, after returning to our hotel for breakfast on the terrace with the Taj Mahal looming in the distance, we headed for the local bus station...



...to board a bus for the one-hour ride to Fatehpur Sikri and its long-deserted palace, a sight well worth seeing according to Val and Sue, new friends from Melbourne that we met in Delhi.

The journey was typical of others we were to make: rattling old bus, bearing the scars of encounters with assorted other vehicles,



road cluttered with aforesaid vehicles,



not to mention pedestrians, occasional cows, sheep and goats.



Buses, by virtue of their size, appear to take precedence over other road users, and the drivers take full advantage of this, sometimes to the point of taking to the wrong side of the road and challenging oncoming vehicles face to face. On at least two occasions we came to a sudden halt inches from the front bumper of a smaller truck or van.

Nonetheless, we arrived unscathed in the heart of Fatehpur Sikri, a small but bustling town not yet on every tourist's list of destinations.

India: The Taj Mahal

Of course, you can't go to India and not see the Taj Mahal, Shah Jahan's monument to his beloved wife Mumtaz who died giving birth to their fourteenth child. As you would expect, security around the Taj is tight, so tight that even Michael's sketchbook and paints had to be left at the gate.
The marble tomb is so often photographed alone, that it was a surprise to enter through the huge red sandstone arch and see the two flanking buildings also of sandstone.





We arrived just after dawn and watched as the mists rising from the grounds and the river below enveloped the building in a mystical haze. Unfortunately, our photographs look no different from thousands of postcards and other images taken of this amazing place.

India: Delhi to Agra

The trains of India are famous, so travelling at least once by train is an essential experience. We have chosen this method of transport to get from Delhi to Agra - and as it turns out, this is the only time we will take a train.

Fighting through the crowds of porters, hawkers, loiterers and other passengers to the ticket counter, obtaining a ticket and finding the right platform is an exhausting enterprise. There's a train at the platform when we get there, surely not ours, as there appear to be no second-class A/C carriages which is what we have booked. This one is entirely open carriages with barred window openings and wooden slat seats.

All signs are in Hindi and a couple of hikes up and down the long platform reveal no apparent railway official, but fortunately I eventually strike up a dialogue with an intelligent-looking woman in western clothes who speaks faultless English with a California accent and who assures us that, indeed, it's not our train, which will arrive after this one departs.

(Lin turns out to be a delightful acquaintance: a Major in the Indian army, she is returning to her unit based in Agra. As of this moment she is preparing with 5 colleagues to climb the fifth-highest peak in the Himalayas as part of an army promotional exercise.)

While we wait, other passengers come and go or settle to wait on our platform, and trains pass by on adjoining tracks.








Minutes before our train is due to arrive, the one occupying our platform pulls slowly away. Ours chugs in, but we are still trying to find our carriage when, without any warning such as a flag being waved or a whistle blown, it begins to move. Following Lin's lead, we run for the nearest door and leap in. Michael, who is last, barely manages to haul himself aboard as the engine gathers speed.

It is already evening and very soon dark, which is just as well since we can make out little through the double-glazed and amber-tinted windows. During the 4-hour journey we are entertained by men passing regularly through the carriage carrying large canisters of tea, sold by the plastic cup.

It's ten o'clock by the time we reach Agra. Fortunately, at our request, our hotel has sent an auto-rickshaw to pick us up, as we have no idea of the layout of the city. The hotel is not very prepossessing and our room, though clean, is cell-like with a barred window opening onto a light well. However, the great advantage of this particular hotel is the view of the Taj Mahal from its roof terrace, which compensates for its other deficiencies. Michael happily spent time up at this vantage point with his sketchbook, and the results can be seen on his website.



As we arrive, we encounter an unexpected bonus: in the street below, under a light-strung canopy, a wedding celebration is winding up.



In the morning, the revellers are gone, and the area is deserted except for a cow picking through the remains, and couple of parked auto-rickshaws.

India: Delhi

India is an assault on the senses.
The colors are exhilarating.
The smells vary from enticing to repellent.
The tastes are tantalizing although sometimes so hot that you don't taste anything but the heat.
Touch can be sensuous as when you run the finest Kashmiri cashmere through your fingers, or cringe-inducing as you recoil from the clutching hands of beggars, or just shoulder your way through sidewalk crowds.
Sound is constant and deafening, whether it's the blaring of horns in traffic, the electronically delivered and amplified call of the muezzin five times a day, or the radios churning out their daily quota of Bollywood pop songs.
In Delhi, you live twenty-four hours a day with this plethora of sensations and you learn to adjust.
Photographs inevitably fail to capture the onslaught of bodies, vehicles, noises, dust, heat and pungent aromas. The best we could manage were shots of the Sunday book market in Old Delhi, with booksellers crowding the pavement with their wares, forcing pedestrians into the nightmare traffic of auto-rickshaws, bikes, motorbikes, cars, buses, camel and donkey carts.
Interestingly, the Indian owners of the upscale and serene pension where we were staying were awed by our venturing to this market; they had never gone there themselves.
That's me, bottom right in the hat, in the third picture. (I didn't actually buy, but Michael purchased a paperback novel by Peter Ustinov. Who knew he wrote a novel? It's called The Loser and is a story about a German SS officer who does everything wrong and is eventually brought to justice, whereat he commits suicide. Odd.)





One of the things we noticed in India, and that is evident in these pictures, was the immaculate dress of the average Indian. Apart from the beggars, who have perhaps a motive for looking unkempt, most people on the streets put us shabbily-dressed tourists to shame. The men were all in crisply ironed shirts and long pants, the women, with a few young jeans-and T-shirt-clad exceptions, in their vivid saris.

Our home-away-from-home while in Delhi was the Thikana, a lovely, well-decorated pension with a rooftop terrace, where we recovered somewhat from the jetlag with a cup of tea among the cushions.



As well as breakfast, they offered delicious evening meals, where we met other interesting travellers who, like us, had found this little haven on the web. Thikana is in a leafy suburb of south Delhi, and the meals were welcome as finding a restaurant at night meant venturing out some distance into the unceasing hubbub of Delhi streets. Delhi is not a walkable city, and is even less so at night when the poorer denizens of the city bed down on the sidewalks, obliging you to step into the traffic to go around them.

During the next couple of days we visited some, but not all, of the standard tourist attractions:

Lal Gila (Red Fort):









(In this last image, the men are hoeing up the lawn, presumably to renew it although to our eyes it looked perfectly fine.)

Chandni Chowk, the picturesque and crowded heart of Old Delhi:









India Gate, designed by Lutyens and a vestige of colonial rule:



Delhi Museum of Modern Art, housed in a splendid building, formerly the residential palace of the Maharaja of Jaipur, which should draw more visitors than it does:




We ate delicious food everywhere, but best of all was the take-out chicken tikka roll from Khan Cha Cha at the Khan market - so good we went back for more on the following day.



The most moving experience of our time in Delhi was our visit to the Delhi War Cemetery, where my father, who died on the Burma border in a RAAF plane crash when I was a baby, is buried. In sixty years, I am the first member of my family to visit his grave. The cemetery is beautifully maintained, and is a serene and silent oasis in noisy, bustling Delhi. There were no other visitors on the morning of our visit. A worker mowing the grass between the graves stopped respectfully and waited until we were departing before he re-started his machine.

Mudgee to Gulgong

After three days socked in by mountain mist, we opted to escape for a day to the dry western plains, specifically the towns of Mudgee and Gulgong. Mudgee lies at the centre of a thriving wine industry and the roads around it are lined with orderly rows of vines and large signs inviting passers-by to drive in and sample at the cellar door. We resisted all invitations and continued along on the Gulgong road, passing this Ned Kelly mailbox en route.



On the roadsides in this area there were many pink scabious plants in full flower, and I salvaged a few seedheads. If they grow this well in such inhospitable gravel, they will, I hope, enjoy the poor, sandy soil in our garden.




Much of Gulgong's commercial centre was built during its brief heyday as a gold rush town between 1870 and 1880, when more than 10,000 people flocked there to try their luck. A local brochure says that the town saw "the last of the small man's gold rushes" with gold close enough to the surface to be mined with hand tools rather than heavy machinery.
An image of Gulgong appeared on Australia's first 10-dollar note behind a portrait of Henry Lawson, one of the country's most famous bush poets who spent his childhood in the area during its thriving goldrush days.
We found it to be the most attractive small town we've visited in years. The buildings are very much in the Australian vernacular with wide verandahs and sweeping corrugated iron roofs. Note the palm tree in the second photo; Gulgong has a balmy climate for an interior town.




While we were there, we could not resist driving up onto Flirtation Hill, which has panoramic views over the town and surrounding grazing land. It seemed a good place to have lunch, and so we chose a convenient bench and unpacked the sandwiches we had brought with us. Immediately, a small flock of magpies materialised, and one cheeky bird managed to seize Michael's sandwich from his unwary grasp. Not the kind of flirtation we were expecting.

Mud Wasps

From butterflies to wasps! As we sat on our front porch eating lunch, we could hear a distant buzzing. On investigation we found mud dauber wasps making nests in two holes drilled into the top of the window frame which had obviously once held the ends of a dowel or curtain rod.

The first photos below shows one hole with a partially constructed nest.The dark-coloured wasp is barely visible at the lower left of the picture. The second photo shows the other hole with a completed nest inside.





A little research tells me that these are solitary wasps, not aggressive, only stinging if they are under threat, so we'll leave them be.
They use their sting to paralyze spiders, carrying them back to the nest and laying an egg on top of each one. When the larva hatches, it eats the spider. Seeing that most Australian spiders are dangerous to humans, mud wasps would appear to be on the whole beneficial insects. Adult wasps prefer nectar to spider meals.

Butterflies

My latest enthusiasm is butterflies. There are so many this summer, fluttering through the garden - way more than last year when we had cooler, wetter weather. I've borrowed a book from the library to help me identify them, but may have to splurge and purchase my own copy if my interest doesn't wane.

Photographing them is difficult as they just refuse to pose for the camera. This one I discovered dead in the (empty) laundry tub. There was a large chunk missing from one lower wing, which perhaps was responsible for its demise. According to my new-found knowledge, it's a Varied Sword-grass Brown.