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Having taken the long way to Agra – meaning missing the train and our hotel reservations etc, we were pretty tired once we finally got there. The guide book forewarned us that it is a dirty grimy city filled with scams…and a warning like that in India means more than in Switzerland. Nonetheless, Shiva or Ganesh or some other Gods were truly working in our favour to bring us to the little oasis of tranquility at The Arayans Hotel. It looked very different than any other place we had seen. First it was set back from the road and they used the little setback to actually grow a tiny lawn ringed with flowers and shrubs. Seeing green in Rajasthan is exciting. We had only seen desert since arriving and the promised lake communities had not exactly lived up to their billing. Arayans was also really really small yet spacious.
Space in India is a completely different concept. With over a billion people, the idea of personal and public spaces is foreign. The streets teem with humanity. People walking, rickshaws, bicycles, cars, trucks and buses overflowing with bodies. Add the cows and monkeys and pigs and water buffalos and thousands of dogs and garbage and color and fun and somehow it just all seems to work. The people create the garbage – many live on or very close to the street: they tidy their own little piece of the planet each morning, sweeping away the sand and the trash into piles. There is no room for the garbage truck we know as westerners to come and pick these up – and where would all those loads fit anyway? So each corner has a pile and the cows and the pigs and the water buffalos and the dogs and the monkeys pick through to find their own individual chunks of nirvana before heading out onto the roadways to play in the traffic and tempt fate every moment of their lives. It has a rhythm that I have come to discover is my India. It is these sights and sounds and color that I will take from this place. Everything is shared, life is consumed and it seems to work.
So to find a little patch of green and a one storey building in a prime location just outside the East Gate of one of the Wonders of the World was jarring in the same way seeing piles of garbage and cows everywhere was only a few weeks ago. Somebody made some very deliberate and unusual choices here. We would have been just happy to find anyplace with space as we were both not feeling very well. Carrie had developed quite a chest cold or respiratory thing – something very common for new travelers to heavily polluted countries. She had been coughing and feeling a little run down for a couple of weeks. Me? I think I had developed enough lung coating in Cambodia and Laos last year from visiting during the annual burning of the forest scrub– I got the same kind of respiratory infection she had. My little bit of misery was self inflicted from eating way too many unshelled raw peas. We were so tired from traipsing all over the s*** city of Ajmer looking for relief from our own stupidity that we just decided to grab stuff from the food stalls next door to the hotel we finally agreed on. The chips and the kumquats were fine but….not the peas. My delicate, not so new anymore, system rejected those damn peas and lodged a work stoppage. The result is pain and nausea. Sometimes a little sometimes a lot. This time a little and combined with the 48 hours of wakefulness, by the time we hit the bed midday at the Arayns I was down and out for the best part of a couple of days. Our initial plan was to arrive in Agra in the morning, see the Taj Mahal, cross that off our bucket lists, stay the night and head off somewhere else in Incredible India. Uh Huh.
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