Jaipur & Agra ... Taj Mahal

Our longest and much awaited trip came last weekend! Wednesday morning we started towards Jaipur. Once we got there we were instantly blown away by the mass amount of people in the big capital city of Rajasthan. We knew we had to try and see as much as possible before dark so we rushed to our first destination...City Palace. It was beautiful to say the least. Next, we headed to Birla temple. Built in 1985 was the newest landmark we had seen in our whole trip. As you might have figured out from the picture below it was made completely of marble. No big deal! haha...We crashed in Jaipur for the night and head towards Agra the next day. Agra was a smooth 3.5 hour journey. We first arrived at Agra fort where we met up with a couple of our friends from IIT who live in Agra. We saw Agra fort which was massive with a great view of the one and only...Taj Mahal. The fort's history and architecture was phenomenal! All our excitement however was channelled towards Taj Mahal so we decided to head straight there next. I'm not even going to bother describing it... Definitely deserves to be one of the wonders of the world! Taj Mahal is built by Mughal king, Shah Jahan in the memory of his wife. Lucky wife! We spent several hours here and exhausted our cameras. Finally, unwillingly we all decided we had seen enough of the wonder before us and decided it was time to go. We then went to a local market, where we were able to try some local snacks. And then...it rained, haha i don't mean just normal rain, crazy Indian monsoon rain. For some reason we thought it would be a great idea to play in the rain! For the first time in India we actually started to get a little cold so we went inside a Caffe Coffee Day (popular coffee shop) to enjoy a nice hot coffee! The driver was pretty displeased when he saw the condition we were in and almost didn't let us back into the car. That night we crashed at our friend Aman's house. His mom cooked us a delicious meal.

The next day, said our goodbyes to Aman's family and went to Sikandara, which held the tomb of famous king Akbar. It was beautiful here and inside the gates there was a lot of wildlife. We saw peacocks, parrots, deer, antelope and various other animals. We then went to a couple of other locations like I'timād-Ud-Daulah and Jama Masjid. We then travelled to Mehtab Bagh which was a garden across the river from the Taj Mahal. We spent several hours just relaxing enjoy the beautiful view of Taj Mahal for the second time. It was sad parting from Taj Mahal but we had to move on. We got on our way headed back towards Jaipur. On our way we stopped at another tourist location called Fatehpur Sikri. 

We got to Jaipur late and were tired so we directly went to our hotel. The next morning was a big day. We saw several locations in Jaipur, Amber fort, Narhargarh fort, Jaigarh Fort, Hawa Mahal and Jantar Mantar. The Indian Institute of Technology got its logo from the Jantar Mantar which is a collection of architectural astronomical instruments. At Amber Fort we got a chance to ride elephant! It was pretty amazing... After the jam packed trip we were all travelled out and head back home to Jodhpur. 

It was kind of a sad car ride home because we all knew it was our last travelling trip together here in India.