by Posted in: 2012 World Cruise | Cruising | middle east | Regent Voyager | Seven Seas VoyagerTags: |

This morning we woke up in our nice, new and very modern suite at the Park Hyatt Saadiyat Beach Hotel in Abu Dhabi.  We really are a long, long way from home but you’d swear we were at a new hotel in Newport Beach!

Today we’ll be taking the bus back to Dubai where we’ll visit the Dubai Mall and take the fastest elevator ride to the top of the tallest building in the world!

Click here for the detailed Dubai Photo Gallery.

I want to apologize in advance for all of the pictures of buildings…but I’m a sucker for beautiful buildings and there are a TON of them here in Dubai.

After a very nice buffet breakfast in hotel restaurant on the ground floor, we had some time to take a walk on the beach and check out the property.  At 10:00 am we boarded the bus for the 90-minute drive back to Dubai.

The bus dropped us off at a parking lot across from the Dubai Mall complex where the world’s largest shopping mall and the world’s tallest building are located.

The Dubai Mall has over 1,200 stores.  This is amazing considering it’s just a few miles from the Marina Dubai Mall, which is also one of the largest in the world and includes its very own ski slope.  We didn’t have time to get over to see and document that but some of the people on our bus had seen it previously.  They told us that it is freezing cold inside and they dress you up in parkas and other skiwear if you want to take a run down the slope.  Amazing to be in the middle of the desert and go skiing!

The mall looked much like any other high-end mall in the US.  Same type of food in the food court too, including Mrs. Field’s Cookies and Fatburger.  We only had 30 minutes to shop but Margaret and I managed to find a Manolo Blahnik store but she was disappointed to find that their Spring collection wasn’t the same as she had found at Neiman Marcus in the US.  Oh well!

The Burj Khalifa, the worlds tallest building, was constructed beginning in 2004 and was opened in 2010.  It was designed by a Chicago firm and built by a South Korean company.  The building cost $1.5 billion and the entire development in the area cost $20 billion.  That’s a lot of dough.

The office space was going for $4,000/sq ft and the residences were selling for $3,500/sq ft upon completion.  But, with the economic collapse, the prices plummeted 40% and the project had to be bailed out by Abu Dhabi, hence the name was changed to honor the UAE President.  At that time 90% of the apartments were still vacant.  Eventually, 25,000 people will live in the entire complex.

This building is the tallest in the world at 2,733 feet.  The last time that the tallest building was in the Middle East was the Great Pyramid which lost it’s standing in 1311.  The elevators are the fastest in the world at 40 mph and the observation deck we went to on the 124th floor was almost 1,500 feet tall, over a quarter mile up.  The building is designed to sway about 5 feet from side to side at the top.

The halls leading to the building are pretty extensive and include a couple nice escalators.  They show multimedia presentations constantly and there are educational displays and nicely lighted exhibit signs along the way.  Pretty cool.  The elevators had a light and music show, more exciting going up, more relaxing going down.   The ride was very smooth and fast.  I had to pop my ears at least twice.

The observation area was nice, not too crowded but the view was very hazy.  I was impressed with how Photoshop Lightroom was able to make the pictures look pretty darn good!  A little surreal, but good.

We walked back to the bus and drove to the port after waiting about 30 minutes for a couple stragglers to finish buying things in the souvenir store.  On the way out Margaret told me that a place had iPad 3’s in stock!  But, it was now too late to get one.  Darn!

Photography Comments:

Since we were in the bus most of the trip I figured I’d at least take pictures of the amazing buildings in Dubai.  Using the D7000 and the 28-300 lens for most of them.  On the D7000, a DX (half frame) camera, the 28 end becomes 1.5X that or 42mm, almost a standard 50mm lens.  So, it can be a challenge to get the entire building in but I did a decent job, especially considering that there is a monorail track in the way much of the time.  In the Burj Khalifa I used my 11-16 wide angle lens the entire time.  This worked out pretty well.  Pretty amazing really.  And, Photoshop Lightroom did a great job eliminating all the haze from the building and high altitude shots of the surrounding area.  I’m practicing switching from still to video with the D7000.  One of the challenges is the lens focusing motors make annoying noises so you pretty much have to go to manual focus mode.  Then, when you take stills you have to remember to manually focus which is a skill that is fading now that the auto focus genius built into the cameras is so darn good.  Eventually, I’ll train myself to remember this but who knows.  In the meantime, a couple great shots I had were slightly out of focus…part of the game.

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by Posted in: 2012 World Cruise | Cruising | middle east | Regent VoyagerTags:

Today we are taking an overnight trip to a place we knew almost nothing about.  It was just a name we’ve heard from time to time and it sounded pretty exotic.

Abu Dhabi is an amazing success story.  Maybe we’re just ignorant but there seem to be so many places in the world that we Westerners just don’t know much about.  So, let’s start by providing an overview of the United Arab Emirates.

Click here for the detailed Abu Dhabi Photo Gallery.

The United Arab Emirates or UAE is a country on the southeast of the Arabian Peninsula, bordering Oman to the east, Saudi Arabia to the south and sharing sea boarders with Qata and Iran.  It is a federation of seven emirates or principalities, each governed by a hereditary emir and with a single national president.  The emirates are Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Dubai, Fujairah, Ras al-Khaimah, Sharjah and Umm al Quwain.

Abu Dhabi is the capital of the UAE.  The current political structure was put in place in 1971. Abu Dhabi is by far the largest of the emirates with 87% of the land mass and the majority of the oil reserves.  Abu Dhabi alone takes in over $200 million/day net in oil revenues.  For more interesting information on the UAE, including the history of pirates in this area, click here.

The trip started out by exiting the Voyager and boarding the tour bus by passing through the Dubai Cruise Ship Terminal which was a very clean, decent sized but simple structure.  The buses were modern, reasonably comfortable and had decent air conditioning.  Our tour guide was about 70% understandable and, despite a bit of repetition, managed to give us a great overview of the area over the two days.

Our drive started out with the new Dubai and the interesting Palm Island area.  There are three man-made palm island developments going on.  The Palm Jumeirah was the first and, by far, the most developed.  It consists of 16 palm frond areas and a surrounding crescent island with a road and monorail going down the middle.  There are two other palm islands under construction as well as an off-shore group of islands called The World.  That project seems to be stalled and there are even rumors that the islands are sinking.  No time to include all that information here.

We drove past the Jumeirah Atlantis hotel on the top of the palm and then continued to Jumeirah Zabeel Saray Hotel on the crescent island.  This hotel reminded us of the Belagio-type hotels in Las Vegas.  This is an expansive hotel property making use of marble and crystal and throughout there are high-end retail stores.

After a great buffet lunch we headed past the Marina district and then onto the freeway heading to Abu Dhabi.

After about 90 minutes we arrived to Abu Dhabi.  Our first stop was the Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan Grand Mosque.  The mosque is named after the late President of the UAE and he is buried on the grounds.  This is the largest mosque in the UAE.  It can accommodate 40,000 worshipers and the inside hall can hold over 7,000.  The courtyard is the largest marble mosaic in the world and the carpet, which covers the entire inside area, is the largest in the world.  It was constructed by 1,300 people working for over a two year period and it weighs in at over 35 tons!  There are beautiful chandeliers throughout made from millions of Swarovski crystals.  Margaret had to put on a saree, including covering her head, in order to enter the sanctuary.  Of course, it was hot and she was fully clothed underneath…a veritable sauna.  That explains the sad look on her face in the pictures!  Everything about the structure was a bit overdone, including the amazing restrooms on the ground floor that you reach with dual escalators.  But, that’s the whole idea and it was very grand indeed.

Next, we took a bus tour of Yas Island which is a partially completed entertainment, business, hotel and residential development.  Already Yas has the Marina Circuit Formula 1 race track where international events are held.  It also has a professional golf course where a PGA event is held each year and Ferrari World, which is the world’s largest indoor them park.  This includes the fastest roller coaster in the world that goes 140 mph!  Check it out by clicking here.

Although it was dark by this time and all of us were ready to call it a day we still had to visit Manarat Saadiyat.  This is a learning center built to educate locals and foreigners alike about he future of Saadiyat Island.  Most of us referred to it as a high-end timeshare sales office.

It was a huge building with a variety of rooms that had state-of-the-art multimedia presentations.  Of course, they didn’t do a high pressure close on us…our time was very limited…but some of us thought it a bit of a strange tour destination, especially after dark on a full-day of activities.  All that being said, the development is a big vision and pretty interesting.  We could expect nothing less from the leaders in Abu Dhabi.

The island will be separated into five different areas including a Cultural district, Promenade district, Marina district, Reserve district, Beach district and Retreat district. The Cultural district, for example, will have five world-class museums that are to be completed in less than five years.  This includes the Zayed National Museum, the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the Maritime Museum and the Performing Arts Center.  All are intended to draw people from around the world and all will be within walking distance of each other surrounded by restaurants and housing developments.  To investigate Saadiyat Island’s development you can click here.

Eventually we were back on the bus and were taken to our hotel.  We stayed overnight in one of the first two hotels on the island, the Park Hyatt Saadiyat Beach Hotel.  It was very modern and trendy.  We had a buffet dinner that was served on a grassy area adjacent to the beach.  It was quite dark and you had to watch your step on the highly polished marble in the hotel and the steps going down to the beach.  The food was OK and, despite all of us being surprised to find ourselves outside in the heat, the nice breeze kept things under control and it seemed everyone enjoyed themselves.  We found our room’s air conditioning wasn’t working but the hotel got it going while we were at dinner.

We had dinner with a nice couple, Peter and Nancy who are from downtown San Francisco.  Peter was involved in developing the graphics in the Mac OSX operating system and was also involved with Next Computer and some other graphics companies that I had worked with in the early 90’s.  It was cool to meet a pioneer in the computer industry!

After dinner we fell asleep watching Arabic shows on the huge wide-screen TV in our room while figuring out how to turn out all the lights.  A full day!

Photography Comments:

I didn’t have high hopes for pictures today.  It was amazingly hazy due to sandstorms that had been in the area and the bus windows weren’t exactly spotless.  In fact, after seeing the latest Mission Impossible movie which was partly filmed in Dubai, we were lucky that we could see anything at all!  But, after looking at the pictures it is, once again, amazing what the black, contrast and detail sliders can do in Lightroom (e.g. Photoshop).  I love the buildings in Dubai!  The lighting was very challenging in the Grand Mosque, both inside and out but we managed to show you what it looked like and even got some interesting effects as the sun went down.  This was a day when you needed seats on both sides of the bus to get all the good shots but I didn’t feel like jumping around. So, some of the shots are less than stellar.  You do what you can do and try to enjoy the “real” world as you go.

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  • April 6, 2012 - 7:12 am

    Cheryl - I love the photo of the silhoutte. Stephen and Mark went to Dubai this last year. I remember looking in the exchange book when working at the resort to see where the most exchanges were… Dubai was at the top of the list!ReplyCancel

by Posted in: 2012 World Cruise | Cruising | middle east | Regent Voyager

We sailed into the port of Muscat, Oman this morning with a bit of blue sky showing through the typical haze.  The landscape appeared to be volcanic rock, eerily similar to the terrain around Lake Mead, NV where we had a ski boat for years.

Here is the Top Photo Gallery:

Click here to view the detailed Muscat Photo Gallery.

Oman is one of those places few people know much about but, upon doing a little research, found it to be an interesting place.  Let’s start with a few facts.  The Muscat metropolitan area consists of six province (wilayats) and has a population of about 750,000.  There is evidence of life here over 6,000 years ago and over the past 2,000 years Muscat has been an important trading port and was, therefore, controlled by its own tribes as well as the Persians and Portuguese.  It was a military power itself in the 1700’s.

In the 1960’s conflicts between tribal leaders and the Sulant Said bin Taimur caused him to seek the help of the British to quell the distrubances.  The Sultan moved his residence to Salalah (where we are going in a few days) and his son ended up doing a coup on his father.  This man, Sultan Qaboos bin Said has been very popular since he took over for his father in 1970.

Surprisingly, this area has some significant infrastructure including large a shopping mall, modern opera hall, stock exchange, many museums (other tour) and several large mosques including the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque (another tour went there and it was well received) and an international airport.

Today we are going on a dhow cruise.  Margaret wasn’t feeling well so I turned in our tickets with Paul and Kathy and joined them on the bus and boat.  The drive from the port to the pleasure craft marina showed old Muscat to be incredibly clean and almost sterile.  It seems that the architecture of the houses is controlled with only straight lines, white plaster, Persian-style windows and many had domes.  We passed a shopping center (souk) where we would return after our tour to do some shopping.  We certainly didn’t see the typical outward signs of extreme poverty as we have in most cities lately.

After a 20 minute drive we arrived in the marina which was quite modern.  Many nice yachts were docked at nice floating docks and we were whisked down one to board about a 60 foot wooden dhow.  This was strictly a motor boat purpose built to do about 40 person tours and it had areas that had pillows on the floor and bench type seating.  Paul chose to “reserve” the rear section so he could sit like a Sultan on pillows on the floor.  I took the opposite side of the bus and kicked back in my pillow stash.

After pulling away from the dock we sampled some local coffee.  Not bad once you get used to the interesting spices.  The boat chugged along at about 6 knots until we noticed the Dolphin Watching tour boat further out.  It seemed that they indeed had found some dolphins so our driver decided to speed up and let us join in the fun.  There were about 100 dolphins gently gliding through the water, showing us some fin and occasionally a little air.  I didn’t take any pictures but many of our group had fun doing so.

The tour continued on its way to the main port area where the Voyager was tied up.  On the way we went past the Sultan’s palace and capital buildings, saw a big rock and then, on the way back to the marina saw a 5+ star hotel that had recently been built on the South part of town.  That’s about it!  After a couple hours we pulled into the marina and jumped on the bus.  I checked out a scuba diving shop in the marina building just in case I could go when we return here after our Dubai stop.

Next stop was the Sultan’s palace.  Neuvo/faux Arabian palace architecture.  This place was pretty new and modern with the typical Arabian flair.  Huge central courtyard/parking lot between large buildings that went on for blocks.  We took pictures for about 30 minutes.  While this was happening Paul decided that we would just take a cab back to town to do some shopping and that’s just what we did.

The cab was pretty shabby but it ran well enough to get us back to old town Muscat.  The souk was rather interesting but incredibly clean. Reminded me of a small version of the bazaar we went to in Istanbul.  To make the story shorter Paul and Kathy shopped for about an hour finding various items to take home as gifts.  I figured Margaret and I would return in a few days so held off on any purchases.  The hightlight was Paul looking at 3 foot long carved “tusks” made from fused camel  bones.  He passed in the end but enjoyed posing under the 6 foot versions and then found about a 30” saber made from Damascus steel and in a engraved silver sheath.  He’s working on a complete Arabian outfit bit by bit.

I killed the fun by saying I had to get back to Margaret who I was sure was waiting for lunch.  We grabbed the free shuttle back to the ship and, sure enough, upon returning to the room found Margaret all dressed up and eating lunch in the room.  Oops!  I felt bad but grabbed a quick bite in La Veranda and settled back in the room for a relaxing afternoon.

Next stop is Dubai after a sea day.

 

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by Posted in: 2012 World Cruise | Cruising | India | Regent Voyager | Seven Seas Voyager

Another early day as we get ready to fly back to meet the Voyager.  Our group is again on a private charter 737, this time from Agra to Mumbai, India.  We had our bag outside the room at 8:30 AM and headed to our buffet breakfast in the restaurant near the lobby.  After Dale put steak sauce in his coffee, thinking it was milk, we ate a nice breakfast and boarded the bus for Agra’s military airport.

Click here for the detailed Mumbai Photo Gallery.

At the airport we went through the typical drill with security and, after a short wait in the terminal area we were ready for boarding.  While waiting, one of our fellow guests grabbed a bullwhip from the souvenir store, took it over to one corner of the room and let it rip!  The first time was OK, but the next one snapped the dust off the whip in a puff as it sounded loudly, waking all of us up.  Clearly, he had done this before…we joked with him later back on the ship and learned he’d used one as a boy.

The bus ride was uneventful now that we are used to the crazy scenes we’ve been seeing regularly in India.  The charter flight was good and we landed in Mumbai just after 1:00 pm.

It was hot (104 F) as we boarded the buses to take us to the main terminal but the process was smooth. The terminal was nicer than we expected and before we knew it we were waiting for our tour buses in the sweltering heat.  You’d think we would be getting used to the heat, but somehow you never do.  You do, however, get used to being covered in sweat.

Mumbai, the capital city of the Maharashtra Indian state is a very crowded and expensive cosmopolitan city located on the Arabian Sea.  It has 17 million documented people but the true number is said to be over 20 million.  It was originally seven islands but most of them have been joined together through landfill projects and all of them are connected by bridges.

The city was formerly called Bombay, having been given that name by the Portuguese after the area was settled as a fishing village over 500 years ago.  Following Independence from Britain in 1947, the name was changed to Mumbai after Mumba Devi, a goddess of the founding Koli Fisher Folks.

Like much of India, Mumbai is a combination of extreme wealth and extreme poverty. While it is the location of Bollywood, which makes 100’s of movies a year, it is also the site of the largest slums in the world. There were the typical village-type retail “outlets”, “restaurants” and people sleeping in gutters.  But, there were also high-rise apartments and office buildings as well a mile-long road along the ocean with very expensive Art Deco-style apartment/condos.  The strange thing about the apartment buildings was that, although they seemed like nice buildings, the outside surfaces were in an extreme state of disrepair.  It seems that no one paints or re-stuccos buildings here, they just don’t seem to care.

There is a large Shanty town population in Mumbai.  A Shanty town (also called a squatter settlement) is a slum settlement that is typically illegal or unauthorized populated by impoverished people.  They live in improvised dwellings made from scrap materials like plywood, corrugated metal and sheets of plastic.  Shanty towns, often don’t have proper sanitation, electricity or telephone services.

The bus that picked us up at the airport gave us a quick tour of the area including a drive by of the most expensive residence on earth.  Mukesh Ambani, Chairman of Reliance and India’s richest resident, built the world’s most expensive home here in Mumbai.  It is a 27-floor skyscraper home estimated to cost more than 2 billion US dollars.

We also stopped at one of the cities most popular photo stops, the open-air laundry.  It was shown in scenes from Slumdog Millionaire.  This is where hotels, restaurants and hospitals send their linens and towels to be washed and then air-dried.  Unlike in Agra, where they washed their things in the river, in Mumbai they have water piped in for this purpose.

While we could only look at it from the sidewalk above, our friend Paul, on his own private tour, managed to talk his way in and discovered that 5,000 people work here.  It turns out that only men are allowed to wash the 100,000 garments each day.  The men rent concrete wash stalls that include running water and a flogging stone.  They collect dirty laundry and beat it on the cement using water and soap.  Drying takes place on long, brightly colored lines and heavy wood-burning irons are used for pressing.  Paul’s on-site research also showed that they are starting to use regular irons and electric dryers.  However, with the low prices they must judiciously avoid anything that raises their expenses.  It must work because this is the main way you have laundry done in Mumbai.

A significant feature of the city is the amount of smog.  We were driving over an expansive bridge and our guide was talking about the striking city skyline.  It was hard to make it out through the haze, but as we drew closer it was clear that there are many skyscrapers and high rise apartment buildings in Mumbai.

We then drove by the Taj Hotel that was one of the locations bombed by terrorists in 2008.  This attack was part of a coordinated shooting and bombing assault on 11 sites across Mumbai.  Another location bombed was Mumbai’s port area…that is where we were dropped off to re-board the Voyager.

Needless to say we were happy to be safely back on board our home away from home with another bucket item checked off the list having paid homage to the glorious Taj Mahal.

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by Posted in: 2012 World Cruise | Cruising | India | Regent Voyager

This post includes all of the Taj-related activities from today.

Ir was a very early day with the iPhone set for 5:00 am.  A few minutes later our back-up wake-up call came from the front desk.  We dressed quickly and meet the rest of the group for a cup of coffee and some Oreo-type cookies.

Click here for the detailed Agra Part 2 (Taj Mahal) Photo Blog.

We were on the bus by 5:45 am where we were driven to a marble factory parking lot, where we were moved into small electric buses.  They don’t let any gasoline-powered vehicles near the Taj to protect the marble from pollution.

There were other options to take electric golf carts, electric buses or even some horse-drawn carriages.  It was about a mile to the Taj entrance and we had to walk the last two blocks.

The line to get in had already started to form by the time we arrived at 6:00 am.  The sunrise was supposed to occur at 6:15 and we were all anxious to get into the area.  Unfortunately, this was India and they open for business when they are ready, not according to the clock.

The line started to move and we got through around 6:40 at which point the line behind us was many blocks long.   They performed an airport-type inspections…no food, gum, no bags larger than a small camera bag, etc.  A pat down search was mandatory with men and women in separate lines.  The women were inspected behind plywood walls.  It was a pretty thorough search.

Once inside we met as a group and were given headsets and amplifiers so our tour guide could talk to us all without yelling.  The entrance was very high walls with a gateway and before we knew it we could see the Taj come into view in the stylish opening as the people crowded through.  Then, “WOW!”.

The Taj was incredible…so big, so perfect.  Very clean and symmetrical with smooth lines.  Dale was almost immediately “found” or, more appropriately “hunted” by one of the “photography consultants” who wander the grounds looking for serious photographers…or ones who think they are.  They know all the good spots to take pictures of the Taj and they walk you around to those spots (for a fee of course!).

While Dale was off doing that, I stayed with our group of about 20 people as we walked through the grounds and learned about the background of this magnificent structure.

In short, The Taj Mahal is a white Marble mausoleum.  In 1631, Shah Jahan, emperor during the Mughal empire’s period of greatest prosperity, was grief-stricken when his third wife, Mumtaz Mahal, died during the birth of their 14th child.

As a loving tribute to her, Shah Jahan began construction of the Taj Mahal in 1632.  The principal mausoleum was completed in 1648 and the surrounding buildings and garden were finished five years later.  It is the finest example of Mughal architecture, a style that combines elements from Persian, Turkish and Indian architectural styles.

After our group went through the inside of the Taj, I started looking around for Dale.  We had been told to meet the group at 8:00 am in a designated location.  I found Dale where we were supposed to meet and together we waited for the rest of the group.

Unfortunately they didn’t show up and by 8:15 we realized we were on our own.  As we made our way out to the area where the electric cars where located we found a couple from the cruise and then found our guide!  It turns out two other folks had joined the group and when he did a head count he thought he had everyone.

Back at the hotel we had a nice breakfast and then, after 30 minutes to relax, we were off on our next tour.  We had multiple options on what to do next, so we opted for the tour to the Itmad-ud-Daula’s Tomb, widely known as the “Baby Taj” (see separate post for Baby Taj and Agra Fort write-up).

At 4:30 pm it was time for ANOTHER bus tour!  This time back to the Taj for a sunset viewing.  It was the same drill we went through in the morning, except this time, when we got on the electric bus, we discovered there was a fair going on and the streets were packed with cars, people and horse drawn carts.

Our driver had is hand on the horn most of the time…many times for absolutely no reason other than to express his frustration at not getting the entire road for himself.  Finally, after a few near missed, we broke through the traffic and had clear sailing the rest of the way.   At the Taj entrance we were able to go through the line quickly.  There are lines for men and different lines for women.  And, those lines are then broken down to Indian and “high value ticket holders”, which are basically tourists like us.  Our line went quickly as most of the volume at this time of day are locals.

As this was Saturday evening our guide prepared us by telling us it would be very crowded.   Once inside the complex we saw that there were approximately 100,000 Indians and a lot of them were young school children in navy blue and white uniforms.  They were very cute.

We took some pictures of us and others on our tour then broke away to take some pictures hear the mosque on the left side of the complex where the light from the setting sun was now shining.

We took off our shoes and put on some disposable booties so that we could walk in the mosque area.  In the mosques you can’t wear shoes and in the Taj you have to either go barefoot or where booties over your shoes.

Along the way some Indian girls wanted to take their picture with me.  Dale thought they might have mistook me for a movie star, but I think it was just that the locals don’t see people with white skin very often, as there aren’t a lot of tourists in the rural areas of India.

We only had about 75 minutes in total, so when we had 30 minutes left Dale decided that he wanted to go inside the Taj, he didn’t have a chance this morning on his “photography” tour.

Unfortunately, it was much more crowded than it had been this morning; the line now wrapped twice around the entire structure…there must have been 50,000 people waiting to get in.  So Dale, having been well trained by his mother, went up to one of the armed guards and asked if we could avoid the line.  He said, “Yes, you have a high value ticket and can just go up to the front of the line”!

So we went to the entrance where we stood with 10 other tourist.  After 1,000 school children had been sent up they stopped the flow of locals and let us squeeze in.  We walked up the narrow, steep steps and then followed the procession into the main chamber that is the tomb that houses the false sarcophagi of Mumtaz Mahal and Shah Jahan; the actual graves are at a lower level.  The surge of people went pretty quickly around the dark room.  The detailed carving, inlaid semi-precious stones and the hand-cut marble walls surrounding the tomb area really blew us away.

Round and round we went, from one room to the next until we finally had some light and exited…at about 6:10 pm.  We had only five minutes to make the long walk back to the entrance to meet up with our group.  We removed our booties and successfully made the hike back, walked out the gate, past the persistent salespeople, and boarded the electric bus.  Again we fought our way past the fair, which was now in full-blown chaos mode…great fun!

Back at the hotel we quickly showered and made our way to our buffet dinner that was basically the same food we had the night before.  The Kathak dancer who performed last night showed up to deliver the Kathak ankle bells Dale wanted to buy from him.  On our walk back to our room we found a local hotel worker who showed us how to use the bells.  Of course everyone in India is fairly thin so he could wear them around his waist…we were thinking they would work wrapped around our ankles!

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