Riding along the road to Agra that day highlighted another of the difficulties of traveling by bike in this country, namely the heat. While in India the monsoons which had reached the south never got as far north as we were with the effect that it was tremendously hot all the time. That day on the road to Agra the gauge on the computer hovered at 50 for a long period and in Varanasi the day we arrived there I saw over 51 which is hotter than we experienced in North Africa. For all that though and while I wished for the monsoons to arrive while in Nepal I think that the heat was better than the rain for you get used to coping with it whereas the torrential rain would have made the already dangerous roads even more hazardous.
Like everyone else when we got to Agra we naturally made for the Taj Majhal. There is no question but that it is a spectacular and inspirational building that goes beyond a mere structure yet I somehow found the Red Fort there to be even more memorable. The entire legacy of the Mogul empire whose architecture dots this Northern Indian and Pakistanian landscape is awe inspiring and the ghost of its greatness lingers on in it still. From Agra there is a motorway linking it to Delhi and while not a motorway in the sense we have them in Europee, since you could meet traffic coming against you as an individual took a short cut, it nonetheless was excellent relevant to what we were used to with the result that we were in Delhi by mid-afternoon. Again India threw up another of its surprises for unlike the chaos and mayhem that greeted us on entering its other cities, riding into Delhi was a very easy affair traffic wise and the area we entered was not unlike around Hyde Park in London. As we were to discover this area was New Delhi and Old Delhi which lay beyond it was still your quintessential bustling Indian city which we were happy to leave to another day. Ensconced then in the luxury of the Metropolitan Hotel near Connaught Place we based ourselves in the new city for a few days while we toured its sights and saw to the very critical issue of getting visas for Iran.
As I mentioned Bob (West) had alerted us to the importance of securing visas at an early stage for both Pakistan and Iran. We had managed to get our Pakistani visas in Katmandu but there was no Iranian representative there so we were left with having to wait until New Delhi. Realising that it was difficult as well as time consuming to get tourist visas for Iran we opted instead to apply for the more readily available transit visa. This we were given in three days and while it limits our time in the country it at least lets us go through it which is more than some travelers have managed of late. The last thing we wanted was to have to fly the bikes again with all the attendant trouble of crating them and customs not to mention the cost and with the present student unrest there that was a very likely scenario were we to have gone down the road of applying for a tourist visa.