The next morning there was a thick fog blanketing Agra - pity anyone who was planning to sightsee anytime this morning. We hit the road back to Delhi.
There has been a good toll road from Delhi to most of the way to Agra for while now, and 3 days before we used it, they opened the final section,
which hooks into Agra to the east. Previously the expressway stopped short, and there was a tedious last 45mins or so through the old road into Agra. Unfortunately due to the thick fog, we were limited to about 80km/hr for most of the way to Delhi.
For anyone that's wondering, it would be easy to visit the Taj in a day, using the toll road - but I'd strongly advise against it. There is much more to Agra than the Taj Mahal.
Amazingly, they opened the new section before the toll booths were finished :shock:. Along the way there was road house, a good loo stop, although the India roads authority may wish to brush up on its 'weak' spelling.
I was spending the night and the following evening at the Pullman Delhi Aerocity (ie at the airport), as I'd heard good things about it on AFF. My flight to Hong Kong was leaving at 1:30am, so I contacted the hotel to see if I could negotiate a (very, very) 'late' check-out. No problem - they charged me about 1.25x the single night 'members rate', so it was a good deal.
Aerocity is home to a number of hotels - a large Accor Ibis, a Novotel, an 'Aloft' under construction and a Holiday Inn, that I saw, but there are probably others. There is a metro station at Aerocity, so easy to get down, town, although the only tourist sight that's close to a metro station is the Parliament precinct. The others would require a walk/taxi. You can buy a token for a single ride, or a card with value on it, good for multiple trips and top-uppable. The latter is recommended, as queues at the ticket counters at the stations can be very long. I bought a card with 150 rupees on it, cost 200 rupees (A$4) which got me to the Parliament area station and back, with change to spare. You can return the card and get your 50 rupees back, but I didn't bother.
The Pullman is quite a big hotel, and the part of the hotel they assigned me to was apparently only opened recently. I was on the club lounge floor (6th), and the room was really good. Typlicallyof most modern hotels, it had a 'peeping' style bathroom - ie window/open to the bedroom area.
In spite of my usual (and repeated on check-in) request for a quiet room, they put me in a room probably as close as the hotel could get to the runway, where the jets turn onto the runway to take off. I monitored this for a while and concluded that the triple glazing kept all but the noise from the biggest jets out, and they seemed few nd far between, seeming to usually use the runway on the far side of the airport - so I kept the room.
The club lounge was actually better (and bigger) than these pics show. A number of comfortable chairs, with power points etc. Within an hour the staff knew my name and wine preferences
Grover Zampa is based in the west and south-west of India and I took a liking to their Sav Blanc. The 'La Reserve' is a cab-sav / shiraz blend and pretty good, too.
I should mention one other thing I got at the Pullman Aerocity - a fantastic response to an e-mail problem I was having. Like in some other localities previously, I was being blocked form sending e-mails from my 'Bigpond' e-mail account. In Canada, I found that this was usually caused by the office/hotel's ISP blocking all e-mails from Bigpond as spam. I reported this to the hotel, more-or-less for info, as I didn't expect any fix while I was there. Within an hour one of their IT guys had joined me in the lounge. When he couldn't fix it (as I expected), his boss joined us. I convinced them that it was an ISP problem and again, just hoped that they might contact their ISP so the next Bigpond guest may not have the problem. Wong - within an hour, they had contacted their ISP and together came up with a 'work-around' and my e-mails were sending again. That's worth a '5' on Trip Advisor, just in itself!
