Mumtaz Mahal

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In hindsight it turned out that December 1992 was the best possible time to visit the Taj Mahal in Agra. The curfew after some riots, when tourists were forbidden to go to Agra, had just been lifted, but the big tour operators had not resumed operations yet, so no busloads of tourists on daytrips from Delhi, in fact, no crowds at all.
I had read that normally it would be a circus there with lots of crowds and touts, making it almost impossible to have a nice experience there.
But now we encountered none of the hassles I so wildly imagined before coming to Agra.
I guess everybody was still recovering from the civil-war like scenario unfolding in Agra after the Ayodhya incident. Not that we saw much evidence of riots and destruction, I guess the touristy areas around the Taj Mahal had been heavily guarded by police and protected from rioters at all cost, which in India means that from a certain moment on police will open fire and shoot to kill in order to disperse rioting crowds.

But now while doing my research, I found out that Agra which had not seen communal violence since the horrors of the Partition, had been hit quite hard. As one leading shoe manufacturer of Agra put it:
"My relations in the town feel as if we are back in the days of Partition.
The riots have pushed us all at least 20 years behind economically."

After a few days without tourists, the rikshaw drivers were desperate, one guy even offered to drive us for free to some restaurant, because he would get a tea there, but since I have always prefered walking to some bumby ride in a noisy autorikshaw, we thankfully declined.
When we finally visited the Taj, well, what can I say, I was tremendously disappointed, I had built up quite some expectations and it just did not live up to them.
Not many people whom I told that and who have been to the Taj, can understand my view there.
Yes, the Taj is beautiful from an aesthetic viewpoint, but picture-perfect postcard beauty never really interested me, for me it is all about the vibes, and maybe I am utterly unromantic, but for me, there were no vibes. Plus I thought it was rather smallish. As a building, as another example of Mughal architecture, I liked the Red Fort in Delhi much better, that vast, wild complex where you could go on a discovery tour of your own, finding sandstone carvings overgrown by vegetation, finding treasure among ruins, much more adventurous than looking at the Taj. I also like the red sandstone style of the Mughal periods before Shah Jahan more than his use of white marble, so I´m a bit of a contrarian there.
Anja, of course, was very happy to have visited the Taj Mahal, so I did not regret having gone there.

A Taj too much

Ok guys, I´m just fucking with you. This is the copycat Taj in Bangladesh. Haven´t been there, but it has caused some serious outcry by Indian officials.
"You can´t just copy national monuments!" 🤣
The guy who had it built, some rich dude, said he built it for poor Bangladeshis who can´t afford to go to India to see the real deal. Ain´t that sweet?
I like how even the one picture I could find of it is kind of twisted and crappy, because the building itself is apparently some ugly, out of proportion bastard child of the real Taj, but maybe those Indian critics are just too pissed to play nice.
Anyway, I think the whole thing is actually quite funny.
Looks a bit like an overly ambitious wedding cake to me.

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The real deal

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After eight months of travelling alone, sometimes of course travelling with people I met on the way, like Yannick and Eve, but if they would have gotten on my nerves, I would have just left, I had to relearn the noble art of compromising again.

Anja, for example, was not prepared to rough it the way I was used to. So in typical German upfront fashion she told me at the very beginning of our journey, that she would not want to sleep in some dump, after all this was her annual holiday. She held a well-paying job as a chemical engineer in Germany and had money to spend. So we kind of reversed gender roles and agreed on staying in some better accommodations during our trip together, but she would pay two thirds of it and me only one third. Do I need to tell you that my one third of the bargain was still more than what I would have paid for accommodation if I would have travelled alone?

So for me it was a bit of a luxurious holiday from my normal life in India, though it cost me more than normally, it also gave me some experiences, I would not have had otherwise, so all good.
And anyway, my time in Pakistan, India and Nepal had cost me much less than I had expected. In those days I had planned with a monthly budget of 500 Deutschmark and I think my average spending was less than 400 DM at the time, so like 2 days of working in construction in Germany gave me a whole month of travelling in some really cool places. Those were the good old days before the Euro ruined everything.

Nowadays there is a posh word for that, geo arbitrage, apparently popularized by Tim Ferriss.
It means you work in a high wage region and spend in a low cost region, or now with the internet you can work from wherever you want, so you work and live or travel in a low cost area, but sell your products and/or services to people in a high wage/ high cost area.
But I still earned my money the old-fashioned way, with bricks not with clicks.
And later on during my travels, instead of pestering people with a boring Youtube channel, I earned money as a diving instructor, with chicks not with clicks.

I have now combined all my Pakistan travel stories into one chapter, which can be found here.

For more adventurous stories check out my blog @likedeeler

For more inspiring stories and a group of inspiring and supportive people check out @ecotrain.