Agra - "Agra-phobia"

After an over-night train ride from Lucknow, the capitol of Uttar Pradesh, I arrived yesterday morning in Agra, home of the Taj Mahal, the Red Fort and the "hard sell." Out of all the cities I have been in here in northern India so far (Varanasi, Alahabad, Lucknow), Agra possesses the most persistent of hawkers, touts, and rickshaw-wallahs. Wallah is simply an attachment to a task that shows it is your job; i.e. paan-wallah (read the last post for details on paan), chai-wallah, permanent-student-wallah.

The people here are insanely persistent, following you down streets for hundreds of meters, maniacally repeating the same offer over and over again. This has lead some guide books to coin the phrase "Agra-phobia," which is the fear of India and the "hard sell," as imbedded in tourists' psyches by visiting this city. My Hindi has progressed enough to tell people "no, thank you, have a nice day" in their own language, but now what I need to learn is "bugger off," or "get the hell away from me you freaking lunatic." The language books never tell you the useful stuff.

So, have I gone to the Taj yet? No. Nor the Red Fort. All this experience so far has been had at a distance from the major sites! I am preparing myself for the full-bore assault of numerous offers of guides, carpets, rickshaws, hash, chai, miniature Taj Mahals and so on. Dark sunglasses, rocking the long hair and wearing the baseball cap helps a little to deflect people, but it is still a lot of work just moving around here. I will be in Agra for a few days before I head back east to Patna and meet the radio journalists for the boat-ride down the Ganga to Calcutta (details backa couple of posts), so I can space out the sensory overload that each tourist site will be over multiple days.

I am also spending some time today trying to book a train ticket for that east-bound trip. Although it is a week hence, you have to get started early or you will end up with no seat or riding general class overnight and well into the next day (it's a long ride) with an entire family and their luggage real close to you. The Indian train system is quite cool. Read about it here at http://www.seat61.com/India.htm. If you scroll down you can see pictures, details and the different ways to ride. So far I have ridden on AC 3-tier (overnight to Agra from Lucknow, where I slept quite well, actually), Sleeper Class (day trip) and Unreserved Second (day trip).

Okay, I'm headed back out into the you-know-what for another tour of duty with my one-man platoon.