Fatehpur Sikri

After we successfully arrived in Agra and checked into our hotel, we caught a bus out of town to visit Fatehpur Sikri, which had been a Mughal capital for all of 14 years, 4 and a half centuries ago. They built it on land prone to drought, so the palace and fortifications were abandoned before too much living in them, or a good old fashioned sacking, could create too much wear and tear; it's beautifully preserved.

The bus left us off in the marketplace of the small, living, town of Fatehpur Sikri. After picking our way through some tiny, fly and refuse-filled alleys with adorably dimpled children squatting over the open sewer, we reached the hillside where this magnificent mosque, the Jama Masjid, rose above us.

After checking out the mosque we wandered through some abandoned ruins behind the hillside, including this tower covered in faux elephant tusks which now sits, somewhat forlornly, in the middle of a field.

Finally we walked along the ridge to enter the royal complex itself.In that last, fabulous, room, the king would stand on the center platform and have four experts stand on each elevated corner platform and he'd debate them all in whatever their subject of expertise was!

On the bus ride back to Agra we saw peacocks wandering the fields like a few stray chickens might on a farm back home.