For spring break this year we decided to go to India. But not to the beach as we have the past two years in Thailand and Sri Lanka. We decided to go and visit the Golden Triangle (Delhi, Agra, and Jaipur). There were a few reasons for this, but the main one was that some new friends from the Embassy just finished a tour in Delhi and they said good things. Yulia, as always, did all of the planning and booking and I was along for the ride. In the next few days we'll put up posts about the different things that we did, but before that, I'll give a bit of an overview of the entire trip.
Overall the trip was a week, although we were in India really for six days. Our flight left Astana for Almaty on Friday night at 10:30. Once in Almaty we had to wait until 5:30 in the morning to check in for our flight to Delhi which left at 8:30. We arrived in Delhi on Saturday morning at around 11:45 local time (the time in India is a half hour behind Kazakhstan - which was weird). We left Delhi on a flight that left at 12:30 on Friday (March 24) and we arrived at the airport in Astana at about 10:30 p.m. In between, we drove from Delhi to Agra to Jaipur and back to Delhi and saw a lot of interesting things, poverty, and farmland. We ate all Indian food while we were there and no one got any intestinal problems, so we were ahead of the curve there. Now on to the events of our first day.
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| At Astana Airport waiting for our flight to Almaty. |
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| Our flight from Almaty to Delhi was in the morning so we had to spend the night at the airport. The kids managed to fall asleep though. |
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| A beautiful view while flying over Kyrgyzstan |
After we got through passport control and customs we met our driver who took us to our hotel. The initial drive through Delhi was a bit shocking for me - even though I've been in some hard places (specifically Iraq in 2003-04), the poverty of people on the streets (not everywhere, but persistent) was hard to witness. Traffic was crazy, and when we got to our first hotel - it was the wrong place: it was owned by the same company, but a different address. It was close, so we were settled in quite quickly. Yulia settled things with the car company we had hired to drive us on our journey and we settled in with the kids. We were traveling with some friends from church in Astana, so we had 9 of us - me, two women, two teenage girls, and my four daughters.... I think we were quite a sight during the whole trip!
We had a little snack at the hotel kitchen, and then our driver picked us up and took us to Humayun's tomb. It was the tomb of the Mughal emperor Humayun and was built in the late 16th century by his wife. It is a beautiful building and is very similar to the Taj Mahal in its design - just different stones. The whole complex was very nice and peaceful. It is a UNESCO heritage site and had a small fee for adults to attend (children under fifteen are free). There were a lot of large birds flying around and we saw some parrots and other smaller birds as well.
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| Gateway to Araba Sarai |
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| These trees are very interesting and they are everywhere in India. Look at that trunk! |
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| About to walk through the gateway into Araba Sarai, south to the pathway towards Humayun's Tomb |
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| Char Bagh (Four Gardens), a Persian-style garden with quadrilateral layout and was the first of its kind in the South Asia region in such a scale. |
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| Humayun's Tomb |
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| A view of Char Bagh gardens from the Humayun's Tomb |
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| Humayun's Tomb |
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| Cenotaphs of Hamida Banu Begum, a wife of Emperor Humayun , and other royalty |
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| More graves right outside of the Humayun's Tomb |
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| Persian-style gardens. Very peaceful. |
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| These steps led from the tomb down to the gardens. Very, very steep. |
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| Isa Khan Niyazi's Tomb, dating 1547. Isa Khan Niyazi was an Afghan noble in Sher Shah Suri's court of the Sury dynasty, who fought against the Mughals. |
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| Resting on the steps of Isa Khan Niyazi's Tomb |
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| The details on the arches are amazing! |
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| I guess it was so peaceful there that the girls decided to do some meditation, or so they thought. |
From Humayun's tomb, we went to the India gate. It was much more crowded (no admission fee) and had a lot of pushy street vendors. We didn't stay there for too long. On our way back to the hotel we stopped at a little restaurant and had dinner. Our first day in India was in the books!
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| At the Indian Gate, New Delhi |
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| The guards at the eternal flame at the Indian Gate |
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| This was the park across from the Indian Gate and like many parks we've seen in Delhi it was beautiful, peaceful, and fenced off from people. |
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| View of the gate with all the vendors in the foreground. |
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| The restaurant our driver took us in for dinner was very small (it is exactly what you see: the picture is taking from one side of the room pointing to the other) and from the outside looked like a shack (inside too) but the food was delicious. |
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| The kids fell in love with Indian bread called naan. |
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