Agra, India

At the Gateway Hotel we were introduced to Rais, our guide for the next two days. A considered and rather slow-moving individual who obviously had the exact spiel worked out for each visit, and did not like to be deviated from it, he suggested we head straight for the Taj Mahal, to avoid the coachloads of tourists who would be arriving around noon.

Sound advice, for indeed we arrived at the little terminal for the battery-operated buses that take you the last kilometre and boarded the bus within moments. Apparently at peak season you can wait an hour just to board, let alone the queue to be frisked on entry and then the queue for the actual tomb. It can take almost all day just to get your photo taken doing a silly pose. The horror.

The little bus, used to prevent the usual polluting traffic getting too close to the Taj Mahal, delivered us to the entrance and we passed through to be confronted with one of the most spectacular and familiar buildings in the world. Sadly, the downside of getting in ahead of the hordes (and there were still a fair few thousand people milling around at this point), was that the mist still hovered meaning our crystal-clear photos were somewhat hazy. The horror.

But nevertheless we traipsed around, ooh-ing and aah-ing at appropriate places. Rais, sticking to his script, prefaced almost every utterance with, "Would you believe, sir…" and so we learnt all about masonry, doomed love, imprisonment, the ever-changing marble and a million other things as though we were at Ripley's Believe It Or Not. Maybe we were not fully reverential but there’s no denying the beauty of the place.

I felt compelled to honour our visit by bartering hard with an urchin outside and buying a fridge magnet. Rais was horrified. Apparently I shouldn’t encourage such inappropriate behaviour from these “vandals” who can “turn nasty” at any moment. Hey ho, our fridge will be duly adorned with a cheap piece of ceramic art and an urchin will eat. Everyone’s happy, except Rais.

From the Taj Mahal we skipped across to the Red Fort, where we were warned against going near the “rabid monkeys”. They’re almost as diseased as the street-sellers apparently. So hand sanitiser clenched tightly we ventured into the fort. It’s a massive construction, the prototype for its sister in Delhi, and quite beautiful. Poor old Shah Jahan, who built the Taj Mahal, was imprisoned here by his own son years later, when he decided he was going to build another Taj, this time in black across the other side of the Yamuna river. His son thought that he’d spent quite enough money. I say the same thing to Coman all the time.

Shah Jahan spent eight years gazing from the Red Fort across the river to the Taj Mahal, pining for his poor dead wife, and wondering what it would have looked like in black after all. It’s a good job that he wasn’t still there today though, as the mist meant you had to peer really hard just to make out the outline. In fact, black would probably have stood out a bit more. His son obviously had no foresight.

By this point, our stomachs were rumbling so Rais took us to his favourite “government approved” restaurant, Shivakash, where lily-stomached Westerners could eat without fear of effects. Strangely, the only other guests were busloads of Japanese tourists who all politely queued to take a photo of the, frankly ****, little shrine to Ganesh in the corner. A candle, a gaudy little picture, and some beads, From their reaction you’d think it was the Taj itself.

Rais told us how he’d spent 14 years as a guide, All guides are employed by the government and just seconded to private tour agencies. This is why he hates street-sellers; they con tourists into believing they can guide them around and that puts Rais out of work. It’s war on the streets of India it seems. We happily consumed our set-menu and nodded, safe in the knowledge we had the Indian government seal of approval.