Namaste!

We are in AGRA - home of one of the great Wonders of the World - the Taj Mahal. It is so wonderful to be here and we are both incredibly excited to see it :-) :-) Tonight we managed to catch a glimpse of the great monument to Shah Jahan's wife Mumtaz. We saw only a small part of the great dome and the upmost point of the minarets however the little that we have seen is already breathtaking. Tomorrow morning we shall get up for 5am and will head out of the door to the Mahal hopefully catching the dawn call to prayer from the mosques within the city as a double bonus. We have heard many horror stories about hawkers in Agra and tourists being hassled by aggressive touts, we do however feel better experienced to deal with this now and we hope that our early start we help us beat the crowds.

Talking of our experience, we have now been away travelling for three months, this is also the most amount of time that I have ever spent away from MK and the UK which means that I am personally covering a lot of new terrain. We celebrated with a nice long ride - just what we need :-) We rode 465 kms in one day from Bhopal to Gwalior. This was incredibly hard work despite the road conditions being better than they have been of late. We also encountered rain! There is a strange weather front across India at the moment, it is coming from Pakistan, there had been heavy snowfall in the north and freak storms around the country, this is very odd for this time of year apparently and is causing much mischief including damage to much needed crops. As we rode underneath a dark grey cloud it did not take long for the smell of rain to fill our nostrils. The smell was sweet and fresh, luckily we were passing open countryside so did not have to smell the dampness in the city. In the UK, rain is a part of our everyday constitution, the familiarity of it and now having been parted from it for so long bought in it's downpour many warm memories for me. I have spent a lot of hours in the rain riding bicycles, naturally my head filled with nostalgic thoughts of two wheels either on or off road. Surprisingly other memories were triggered such as playing out in the rain when I was young or walking home from school and splashing in puddles and having my plaited hair get all soppy and wet. I love the rain and I am not ashamed to say that I have missed it, in our busy lives we do not have time to appreciate it because of the inconvinience it causes. When I was a teenager, a friend and I used to run out into the rain to feel it on out faces, it was a pleasure not a burden, how different we become as we grow older.

We are fortunate enough to be able to go out into the rain, get wet then dry ourselves off in the warmth of our homes afterwards because.....

Another thought that I had was for all of the poor people that we have seen living on the roadsides in makeshift shelters. We have already shared some stories of the slums that we have seen but over the last few days we have also viewed tents, some luckily made of waterproof tarpaulin but we have seen some made with old sacks, pieces of sari, I even saw some that were made of twigs with gaping holes in the sloping sides/ roof. The rain brought coldness too, we both thought of the poor people who live in these shelters and how terrible the rain must have been for them, causing them to freeze, lying in dampness and in the dark. Even in the morning the sun took a long time to warm up the earth, K and I were shivering on the bike ride, these people have a lot less body fat than us and often very little insulating clothing, they must have been suffering....

On the ride yesterday we were also stopped by the police - and it was not because K was breaking the speed limit! We were flagged down by a cop who held his hand aloft in a "halt yourselves" position, we thought it wise to follow his order - he did have a rifle slung over his shoulder afterall. There were three cops, all wearing the military style uniform that is required which adds to the imtimdation. They wanted to check our paperwork, reassuringly they were stopping every single motorcyclist and tractor that went by so we had not been singled out. K, being the organised one pulled out more paperwork than the three guys could possibly audit with any efficiency and the result was that they were more baffled than anything else. Not only this but she also still had her earplugs in, which makes her louder than normal (and she being an American, is loud at the best of times), I think that the situation turned into the cops being intimidated and feeling the need to behave themselves instead :-) They flicked through our International Driving Permits trying to find a language that could be understood, passing all the paperwork between them out of curiosity more than anything else. Anyhow, needless to say we passed with flying colours (our license plates matched the paperwork) and we got a nice big tick next to our recorded details. I said thank you :-) and we sped on our way!

Another thing to acknowledge from yesterday is that my bike passed the 10,000 km mark and K's bike rolled over the 20,000 km mark - that means we have done 10,000 km on the trip so far.

Finally, I would like to let you know that I am keeping a list of all the things that we have observed and that we would like to share with you but have not had the time to do so. We shall therefore be posting these over time so do stay tuned. We also have some more photos to load up.

So, until tomorrow, goodnight from Agra!