We were told that the Taj Mahal opened from sunrise to sunset, so we wasted no time and left really early, our guide said that it was good that we got here early since it will get really crowded later. We visited the grounds, as well as the mosque and really enjoyed this architectural wonder which took 22 years to build. The workmanship was fascinating and I got some really good pictures.
We then went back to the hotel, had breakfast, and checked out going on to Lucknow. We decided to take a side road for part of the journey since we didn’t want to re-enter the town and it's traffic, and it was an opportunity to experience a new type of road and see how people lived.
The road was tight and had many speed bumps at times going through crowded local market places; we did an average 40 Km/h on that road for about 2 hours before we hit the NH (National Highway).
We managed to stop for lunch and prayers at a nice rest stop, before pushing on.
We reached Kanpur around 4:30, and took us along time to find the road to Lucknow, when Ali noticed an alarm from his bike, it was the electronic tire pressure monitor which was indicating that his rear tire was deflating. Once we stopped we inspected the tire and found the nail. Luckily we were still in town so he went from repair shop to repair shop looking for someone to repair a tubeless tire. Most of the motorcycles here have tubes in them, only the cars are tubeless.
He finally found a repair shop, and Husain and I found the way to Lucknow, however by the time we were ready it was 5:30 which meant that we would have to ride at night and that was dangerous.
So we decided to stay in Kanpur instead. We knew of a hotel here and once Husain asked about the hotel a fellow biker who spoke good English volunteered to show us the way.
