Situated on the meandering banks of the Yamuna, the Taj and her pristine white beauty has never failed to stun me. The sheer presence of this mausoleum dwarfs everything around it and her sombre majesty begs silence as the only form of appreciation. It is impossible to not spend a couple of hours walking around the hyper-symmetry of the Mughal garden and then a moment of silence in front of the sarcophagi of Emperor Shah Jahan and his beloved Mumtaz Mahal.
From Agra, it’s a straight run to the city of Kanpur, 270 km away on National Highway 19 (NH19). The road passes through Fatehabad, Etawah, Auraiya and Rania before you need to exit the highway for the entry into the city. As we head eastwards highway infrastructure, in terms of places to stop, clean wash rooms, etc. become ever fewer. The fast food joints and the food courts that we have seen in the West are gradually replaced with the local dhaba from before the days of the Golden Quadrilateral. The road surfaces also start to show signs of deterioration with the occasional rough patch and the odd pot hole beginning to show up. Thankfully, the Alto’s suspension is more than up to the task of soaking up the irregularities.
Despite the slower progress, Kanpur comes up just before sundown as a city where everyone seems to be in a great hurry to get to wherever they are going. It is also incredibly noisy and, on hindsight, is difficult to imagine without the near incessant honking. The noise however dies down fairly quickly too for in Kanpur, which is about 954 km east of Wagah, the sun sets sooner too.
In our next part, we travel to the Holy city of Varanasi
