Round the World 2015: April 2015

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Julie Sundell

Julie Sundell, Ann-Kristin's mother died Saturday night (April 25, 2015). We will miss her. She was a wonderful person and loving mother. The kids have been fondly remembering their grandmother. Julie stayed with us and provided a helping hand when both Zoe and Jack were born. She will always be with us in our hearts and in our memories. Ann-Kristin has travelled to Nashville to be with her family and will be rejoining us later. I hope Ann-Kristin and her family find strength, comfort and peace in their time together. My thoughts are with them.

Agra -Taj Mahal

We left Delhi for Agra, home of the Taj Mahal, in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Traffic, noise, and the crush of humanity improves immensely just by leaving Old Delhi (the old formerly walled city) for New Delhi. We are told most taxi drivers refuse to take fares in Old Delhi. Depending on who you talk to/check with there are between 16 and 20 million people in metropolitan Delhi. Most of whom display true compassion and great patience. I'm not sure you would last long here otherwise.

We travelled by taxi approximately 230 kilometers south to Agra via a new (3 yo) private expressway. We passed through the new suburb of Noida where a vast planned community is being scratched out of the earth. There are hundreds of high-rise, multi-family structures under construction, many of them with several thousand housing units each. India's urban areas keep growing.

We got a taxi and guide for 2 days in Delhi, a taxi to Agra, a day with a taxi and guide in Agra, a taxi from Agra to Jaipur (230 km), a day with a taxi and guide in Jaipur, and a taxi to the airport in Jaipur all for less than the price of first class AC train tickets for the four of us.

The smog improved as we left Delhi, but two sources of air pollution became apparent, the wheat harvest and brick ovens. Wheat was being cut by hand, sheaved and stacked. Threshers pulled by tractors are moving field to field separating the grain from the chaff and kicking up great clouds of dust. The wheat is shoveled up and placed in sacks. The chaff is either placed in thatch huts for storage as fodder or moved on the roadways for centralized storage.

There were also hundreds of brick ovens along the way, many spewing black coal smoke. Vast areas have had 10 to 12 feet of clay removed and turned into bricks. The clay is formed into bricks and placed to dry in the same place it is cut from the earth. After what must be a few days, the bricks are stacked loosely in piles for further drying before transport to the brick ovens to be fired. In many places, there are acres of formed and fired bricks. Wheat is planted on what soil is left. Bricks are used everywhere, even for walls in 20+-story high rises.

Agra is a city of 1.7 million on the southern banks of the Yamuna River. It is known for its leather goods, mostly shoes. We saw many rickshaws piles with impossible (I'd estimate 500+) loads of shoe boxes.

In Agra, we visited the Taj Mahal! Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal between 1629 and 1651 in loving memory of his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal (he had 3 wives). It is a beautiful structure constructed of white marble inlaid with onyx, malachite, jasper and coral. Over 20,000 Persian stone artisans worked at any given time on its construction. In the right light the whole thing seems almost luminescent. The outer pillars are not vertical, but actually all point slightly away from the main structure in anticipation that they may settle inward in an earthquake. What a coincidence! An hour after we left, the large earthquake in Nepal shook the region and guests were asked to leave the Taj Mahal. We only felt the aftershock. No earthquake damage to the Taj but several buildings in Agra received damage.

Shah Jahan is the same fellow that built Old Delhi and moved the capital there from Agra. Unfortunate for Shah Jahan, his son Aurangzeb, deposed him and placed him in house arrest after killing all of his other sons.

We also visited the Agra Fort and at sunset, viewed the Taj Mahal from the opposite side of the river at the Black Taj (never completed).

We have nearly recovered from our bouts with Delhi belly. I don't recall being that sick in the past 20 years.

Impressive private toll expressway between Dehli and Agra (traffic was light, but varied)

Piles of wheat chaff after threshing (also wild antelope)

Wheat chaff being placed in straw huts

Unattended herd of water buffalo in the fast lane

Entering the Taj Mahal

Jack and Zoe

Example of marble inlay

Zoe!

Ann-Kristin

Note: This post took 5 hours to upload.

Friday, April 24, 2015

India

This post seems to have been removed from the blog so I am reposting it. I was a little delirious at the time so I'm not sure why some of the photos were selected. I've tried to add captions.

Before this trip I had read and heard a lot about India. I thought I was prepared, but I was wrong. India has been a sensory overload. The combination of heat, sights, smells, noise, filth, poverty, air pollution and traffic are overwhelming.

Our direct flight from Singapore to Delhi was replaced with a flight stopping in Chennai (formerly Madras and the 4th largest city in India). We had to check through customs and get to our domestic flight in the next terminal by going outside and walking down the road, through a construction site, with very minimal signage. This required showing our boarding passes at eleven places, usually to 2 and 3 men. The man watching the x-ray scanner was completely asleep. The girls have to go through the walled-off "Female Frisking" area.

On arrival in Delhi, the first thing to notice is the brown haze the plane is descending through. Traffic in Delhi makes Thai traffic seem like some kind of Zen orchestrated dance. We were in 3 minor collisions that I was aware of. The honking is incessant. There are pedestrians, 2- and 4-wheeled hand carts, bicycles, bicycle rickshaws, tuk tuks, cars, big and small lorries, buses, bull (ox) carts, donkey carts and horses all sharing the same travel space. A taxi driver told us that to drive in Delhi you need three things, a good horn, good brakes and good luck. Honking was apparently outlawed last year and it is now quieter. I can't imagine it.

It's been a challenge, Zoe was sick in Singapore before getting on the plane and again on our second flight. Jack passed out, hitting his head on a table in the hotel lobby (they have both recovered) and I'm in my second day without eating due to illness.

Two weeks before we arrived, the government quit licensing cars over 10 years old to reduce air pollution. The air quality index was 250 (very unhealthy) on the PM2.5 scale. It hurt to breath.

Poverty is everywhere. The UN says more than 1.1 million people in Delhi live in extreme poverty.(roughly less than $1 per day. The poor work the intersections begging by scratching and tapping on windows. People sleep under parked cars to avoid the heat and being kicked. Groups of small children (2 to 4 years old) reside in the Metro stations. A person I saw get tripped over on the street I was afraid was dead until his eyelids twitched.

We are staying in Old Delhi. The first night we ordered room service and didn't leave our room. We gave some consideration to moving to a Holiday Inn. The next morning I ventured out and arranged for a cab to drive us around while we are here and then drive us to Agra at the end of the week. The first day we visited the Red Fort completed in 1648 by Shah Jahan, the Mughal empower that moved his capital to Delhi in 1639. A mile and a half of the red sandstone walls (60 to 105 feet high) surrounding 250 acres remain. The fort was inside of the 1500 acre walled city of Old Delhi. We also visited the Mahatma Gandhi memorial park and Humayun's Tomb (another Mughal emperor). Afterward, I went on a several mile walk on my own. The area I was in was the hardware district with streets so narrow very few motor vehicles entered in mostly hand trucks and rickshaws.

We are a novelty in India. The blonde kids, especially Zoe attract attention. I'm the tallest person I've seen. Several people have told me so. Dozens of people have had their picture taken with us.

The second day we went on a guided walking tour of Old Delhi. We went places we would have never gone on our own like unlit narrow alleys, a Hindu temple where we were blessed, roof tops and a private haveli (home) for lunch. W also went to the largest spice market in India. I don't know what it was, but in one alley everyone, not just us, we're coughing and sneezing.

We've seen rats, cats, monkeys, lots of dogs and cows, donkeys and horses in the streets of Delhi.

Water in Delhi flows 1 to 1-1/2 hours per day. Every building has a cistern to store water.

Red Fort palace