Now I won't go into details about my experiences with trying to book a ticket online via the Indian Railways website. Miraculously, and after no small amount of effort, I actually succeeded in booking two tickets from Delhi to Agra, but alas was unsuccessful in repeating the process for the return trip and was forced instead to go down to the Delhi station to the foreign ticket desk and book down there--a story which I will spare you, for now.
So we booked our Uber and arrived at the Nizamuddin train station in plenty of time. Nizamuddin is not the main Delhi train station, but it is where a lot of trains to Agra go out of, most notably the one express train to Agra that plies the distance in 1 hour and 45 minutes. Unfortunately because we were going up to Agra on a Friday, the one day the Taj is closed, the express train does not run, so we were forced to take a second class and notably slower train.
Immediately upon entering the train car, you knew you were on an Indian train. I think even if you had never been on an Indian train you would enter and say, oh yeah, this is what an Indian train looks like. It was a sleeper car, going somewhere, and so the seats were divided into upper and lower bunks, with four seats in a compartment. Because we would only be on it for three hours we did not have the opportunity to avail ourselves of the top bunk but sat on the bottom bunk.
The train stared only 15 minutes later--veritably on time for an Indian train--and deposited us three hours later at the Agra Station. Now, I had been warned about the craziness of the Agra train station. Immediately upon leaving you are besieged by people trying to get you into their cab. I had been advised to head to the prepaid taxi stand, even now I am not sure that I took the prepaid taxi, in part because all the denizens outside the station were pointing us to it and telling us to go to the prepaid taxi (why were they not trying to get us into their cabs?) and in part because we didn't actually prepay but paid when we got to our hotel. But there was a big sign saying "prepaid taxi" and it looked official, so I guess that was it. So it was 250 (about four dollars) for a taxi to our hotel which was near the Taj Ganj area.
Our hotel was called The Retreat, and was a nice enough three star hotel for about $45, but wasn't really a retreat from anything because there is no retreat in Agra, the home of the Taj Mahal, the most visited monument in the world, but rather a constant pounding of traffic, people, cows, you name it. We had, however, to arrive at a plan. It was around 1 p.m. by the time we checked in. We had the rest of the day and most of tomorrow, since our train departed at 5:45 p.m. Seeing the Taj Mahal was not an option, since it was closed on Friday. So we chose instead to visit one of the other three UNESCO world heritage sites in Agra, Agra Fort, for a few hours, and then to go to a park known as Muthab Berg, a green area in back of the Taj, to watch the sunset, and then to get dinner. Rather than try to get individual taxis, we decided to hire a single driver from the hotel to take us around to the sites, a practice I would definitely recommend in Agra. For the next day, we would start at the Taj Mahal earl, around eight a.m. (The Taj opens at sunrise, which is around 7:15). After a few hours on site we would go to the third World Heritage site, Fatah Sikri, the short-lived capital of the Northern India Mughal Empire under Akbar the Great (1542-1605). Since the site was more than an hour out of Agra, this too would require hiring a taxi.
All in all, everything went according to plan. I had purchased tickets for the fast train from Agra to Dehli, known as the Gaiteman Express, which was really no different than any Western train. Still, I was glad we had our ride up in the true Indian train to get a taste of what an Indian train experience is, but I think that may have been enough for both of us.
I won't supply the pictures here, because Jane has posted a ton of them on Facebook
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