March 23rd-28th - Incredible India

The Birthday girl!

The glorious Taj Mahal!

Oh…. how will I ever describe India??? I just don’t know where to start. I’m not sure I have the words to present a cohesive picture of such a complex society so I’ll just ramble a bit….

Our onboard lecturer, Dr Rami Seth, told us a little bit of what to expect before we arrived. He said that India is a land of extremes…. a land of immeasurable wealth and a land of poverty like you can’t begin to imagine. It is a land where you can be killed by a tiger…. or by lettuce. It is a land of religious tolerance…. the President is a Hindu lady, the Vice President is a Muslim, the Prime Minister is a Sikh, and the Chairman of the Ruling Party is a Christian. And those white lines down the center of the roads?? Just something the British left behind.

Well, he was right about those white lines….being on the roads is absolutely terrifying! (Way scarier than the tuk-tuks in Bangkok!) It is total chaos! Automobiles share the road with camels, water buffalo and motorbikes…. often traveling the wrong way down the center of the road! The deafening din of honking horns is constant. Then there are the “holy cows” who amble about wherever they please…. and woe to anyone who messes with them in ANY way!

We left the ship in Cochin, in the southern part of India, for an overland trip to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. We flew to Mumbai and then on to Delhi where we spent the night. (I refused to be on India’s roads after dark!) Before dawn, we took an early morning train (2 hours) to Agra. The Taj Mahal is one of the Seven Wonders of the World…. you’d think it would be easier to get there!! (I was amused to see that there is a separate security line at the airports for women with a curtained area for patting them down.)

The Taj Mahal was built by the Moghul emperor Shah Jahan as a memorial to his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal, and it was breathtaking to be there on my birthday! I don’t know if we could ever possibly top this experience. We did our homework before we went… read books, looked at photographs, and learned the history and family tree of the Moghuls. But you just can’t grasp the magnificent scale of the building and grounds until you see it in person. Our guide, Preshand, was superb! When National Geographic came to Agra to do a piece on the Taj, he was their guide. He has been giving tours for eleven years and he says he still feels a sense of awe when he looks at it. He also had a darling sense of humor and looked just like Tiger Woods, complete with dimple!

We were surprised to see wild monkeys running around the grounds of the Taj! Preshand told us they can be rather aggressive and mean, so to just look the other way and walk slowly past them. (We couldn’t help ourselves… we did take a few photos of them….) And mongoose! Or is it mongeese?? Anyway, they were frolicking about on the lawns with chipmunks and colorful tropical parakeets… a veritable wildlife preserve!

The Taj Mahal was built to represent paradise on earth, but our hotel may have surpassed even Shah Jahan’s plans. We stayed at the Oberoi Amarvilas, which means “immortal luxury”…. and it was not a misnomer! We were greeted at the door by a sari-clad hostess who put an official red dot, or “bindi”, on our foreheads and presented refreshing glasses of watermelon juice while they registered us. The resort is 600 meters from the Taj Mahal and we could sit on our balcony terrace and gaze at this truly stunning monument. And this is funny… the property has a “guard monkey” to keep the wild monkeys from bothering the guests! He is a species that the other monkeys are afraid of and he is walked around the property all day on a leash. It seemed to work!

Somehow during various visits to the Taj (so that we could see it in different lights) we found time for a surprise visit to Kohinoor Jeweler, whose ancestors were the jewelers to the Moghuls. Here I was able to pick out a lovely emerald birthday bauble for my ring finger! (Getting old isn’t nearly as bad as I thought it might be!!) Birthday dinner was at the Indian restaurant at the hotel. It was the first time I’ve had “Happy Birthday” played for me on a sitar and a tabla (a kind of drum). Our day in paradise ended far too soon and before we knew it…….

We were on the road the next morning for a frightening 4½ hour drive (I had to bite off a few fingernails) back to Delhi to catch a flight to Mumbai, where we would catch up with Queen Victoria. Things were a little bit tense at the Delhi airport when our flight kept being delayed. But everything worked out and we pulled up at the dock in Mumbai (minus a few more fingernails!) with about 20 minutes to spare! You can’t imagine how ecstatic we were to see that Cunard smokestack and to hear the Captain say, “Welcome back…. and welcome home!” There was a fabulous band on the dock right below our balcony playing “Satisfaction” and we quickly poured two glasses of wine…. yes, yes… a final little birthday toast…. but mainly to celebrate the fact that we had arrived back in one piece!!!!

This is a very brief and sanitized version of our experience in India. We are still trying to absorb much of what we have seen. It doesn’t touch on the persistent and heartbreaking beggars, on the filth and litter that seems omnipresent, or on the horrible living conditions endured by those at the bottom of this society. India seems to be a country at odds with itself and it evokes a wide spectrum of emotion. And it has left us thirsting for more information so that perhaps we can begin to make some sense of what we have seen.