Wednesday 18th December ’24
Today was also another early day; we were heading to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. My stomach is still fucked, by the way. We got ready and left at around 8 in the morning. Now, when we left, the air was literally grey. They were not lying about the pollution in Delhi, it is fucking bad. I don’t know how people even live in this place.
But moving on, it was a 4-hour drive there, and I slept for most of it. We got there and hired a tour guide who actually knocked on our car window while we were driving to get business. Now, bear in mind it is foggy the whole way to Agra, and I have gotten an alert on my phone on how bad the air quality is today. We start to enter the Taj Mahal, and it looks like a fucking painting. It is beautiful. We snap a lot of pictures, and I mean a lot of pictures.
We are done after an hour of going around the Taj Mahal, so we head towards the market outside to do some shopping. Now, the tour guide tells us that he knows a better market called Meena Bazaar, which is a bit further away, where we will get better items. So we listened to him, and he came to our car and came with us to show us where it was. He takes us to a fucking shop. My mum literally flipped out as she wanted to buy some stuff from the market, and he stopped us to take us to this rinky dinky looking place. The same goods here were twice as expensive as the market outside the Taj, and cause of this, my mum started to fight with the tour guide; bear in mind my stomach was still fucked throughout this whole thing.
We tell him that we don’t require his services anymore, pay him what he’s owed, and send him on his way. Now, we decide to head for lunch and eat at some overpriced joint (the tour guide’s recommendation). We curse him once more and start to head to the holy city of Mathura.
Mathura is the birthplace of Lord Krishna, and we were going to visit a temple there. We got this tour guide there again to take us around the area, and he was this little kid—bless him—he did a good job. We went to the temple, did some shopping, and went to the next place, which is Gokul.
Gokul is an interesting place; it has a population of about 5000 and 10,000 cows and is 100% Hindu. We visited a temple and met a guy who guided us to the temple, and we were the last visitors there for the day. We got fucking bamboozled here. They asked for a £120 donation and made it seem we wanted to give them that much money. We don’t even know what happened, but the sweet-talking priest did a ritual on us and said that the donation must be 120 quid. Bro was moving mad. Donating to God only matters when it is given from the heart and not asked of you.
Well, my stomach is still fucked after all this but I will see you tomorrow.