Taj Majal - Shut up and take my money

We booked a trip to Agra - Taj Mahal to take some pictures at sunrise. The booking agent said it will be no problem from Delhi when we start at 3:30 in the morning. We arrived 2 hours after sunrise. This was the first downer. Second came in place as we noticed that our driver is so tired that he fells asleep while driving so we needed to keep him awake even though we are crazy tired.
We were able to avoid a „guide“ for Taj organized by our driver but we somehow got trapped with another guide from the government which was free but really unnecessary because we wanted to discover it ourselves!
At least we got a few good views and pictures sadly without nice light setting
Of course the Taj is really beautiful but also quite overcrowded and filled with scams which are often hard to avoid or identify.
Our guide brought us to some craftsmen who are showing how the marvel carving works and of course we were pressured afterwards to buy something. We wanted to give him just some money to leave us alone but he insisted to sell something so we picked a very cheap one which we actually didn’t want to buy. Afterwards the guide brought us to another craftsmen for jewelry but this time we insisted to leave and don’t buy anything. A too high tip in the end for this service from the guide was the cherry on top of it and we where happy to leave this place finally. Seems like a big rip of machinery when you are not all the time aware and got your guard up.
The drive back to Delhi appeared to be the same as the drive to Taj because the driver fell asleep all the time. 😂
After we arrived in Delhi he was VERY unpleasant with our tip which was actually a very good one of 1.000inr and he didn’t really earn it with a good service!
The drop of to the hotel was managed by some booking agent helper who also wanted to have some tip and got also too much because we didn’t had any small amounts left and he couldn't change of course 😏

This was one of the worst days so far and really shakes our opinion on the Indian people in Delhi. As a foreigner you can’t trust anyone and always need to assume to be ripped ofLeia mais