Driving Lessons in India

We took a tour today by car to see some of the sights we knew we would not see on the organized tour scheduled for next Monday. Our driver was certainly competent, which was a good thing. Hurtling to a full stop is not my strength but he did it so well. How do the people fit their cars into such tiny slots? With the ubiquitous yellow and green tuk-tuks, the bicycles, the bicycle rickshaws, the paving equipment (yes, driving on the road, not paving it), the buses, the trucks, it's a wonder anyone gets where they are going. But we saw only one minor accident, and as Geordie pointed out, in Vancouver that accident would have created a traffic back up of kilometers where here it just meant we swerved around it.

Apparently the lines on the roads have been painted as decoration. How else to explain the fact that we often drove straddling the line or as happened just a few minutes before we got back, driving on the far side of the yellow line and then taking a right turn before the intersection proper started!

Our tour took in some quite fascinating sights, including the Qutb Minar which is the site of the oldest mosque in India and the site too of it's tallest victory tower, and immense brick structure with Islamic characters around it. Some of the details were borrowed from the Hindu temples which were there first we asume - how else to explain the figures on some of the pillars - Islam does not allow human representation.

We made a pilgrimage to the Bahai Temple which welcomes all faiths for prayer and meditation. There we had to give up our shoes, but luckily the stones we walked on were cool, even in this heat. It's a huge temple designed to resemble a lotus flower, and it does a good job. It is very white - so I used the snow setting on my camera to capture it. I think it adds a blueness to counteract the intensity of the white.



At the Akshardham Temple we were overawed by the amazing carvings of elephants which ring the main temple.They were all so wonderful - and in many different poses, many representing lessons to learn. Surprisingly, this is a very new temple, built as recently as 1969. I knew it had to be when I saw the statues of little boys in short pans wearing belts. Not quite the Indian garb of the distant past.

We finished up at the Humayun's Tomb which is the forerunner of an inspiration for the Taj Mahal and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is built in pink brick so not as powerful a statement perhaps as the Taj, but we will have to wait and see when we tour the Taj later.



All in all an interesting day. We are glad to have survived the traffic and were surprised late in the afternoon when we realized that we could actually see that the sky is blue. In the morning it was white and it was the air that was blue - a blue thick enough to cut with a knife.

I'm sure I will think of something else to say about our tour. I know that I even missed one of the sites we toured, but really, surviving the trip was so much more memorable that any temple. Now we think we may be ready to brave the Metro tomorrow to see the Red Fort in Old Delhi.

(A little note: I have attempted to add some links for you to the sites we saw, but this computer has been hijacked so that all the links take me to an area which is not exactly what I hoped for. So if you want to see more, you might do a google search. I did find the two links that are highlighted but failed to get a link to th Qutb Minar. It's an interesting site, also part of UNESCO's World Heritage sites and you will no doubt have more luck finding it than I have had.)