February 13-17, 2012: Junagadh and Sasan Gir

On the morning of the 13th I walked through the narrow lanes of the old part of Junagadh to the Victorian style Darbar Hall Museum, former palace of the nawabs.  Junagadh was Saurashtra's largest (though at about 4000 square miles only slighly larger than Jamnagar) and richest princely state, and had precedence over all the other princely states of Saurashtra, receiving tribute from some.  At partition in 1947 India's princely states could opt to join either India or Pakistan.  The last Nawab, a Muslim, opted to join Pakistan.  (Muslim princely rulers were usually called nawabs, while Hindus were usually called rajas or maharajas, although there were exceptions like the Nizam of Hyderabad or, my personal favorite, the Gaekwad of Baroda.)  His overwhelmingly Hindu subjects objected and a plebiscite was held, which overwhelming chose to unite with India.  The Nawab fled to Pakistan, taking his hundred or so dogs with  him.

The former palace was fairly interesting, with a large darbar hall with silver furniture.  It also had weapons, textiles and other interesting stuff.  A portrait gallery had an interesting collection of prints of 28 of the princely rulers of Saurasthra in the 1890's, with some great robes, turbans and mustaches.  There are also paintings of the Nawabs.  The ninth and last one is depicted along with a rather ugly dog (one of his hundred or so) wearing a jeweled necklace.

From the palace I walked east past several old and derelict weed-covered buildings along narrow streets thronged with vendors towards the Uparkot Citadel on a small plateau just east of the city.  Junagadh means "old fort" and was a capital of Chandra Gupta of the Mauryan Dynasty in the four century BC and his grandson Ashoka in the next century.  There has been a fort here for at least that long.  I entered the gates, passing orange colored Hindu idols, and walked along the walls, with great views and a few langur monkeys along the way.  There are a few Ottoman cannons on the walls, sent to help defend Diu on the coast against the Portuguese and moved to Junagadh after the Portuguese captured Diu in 1535.  There are great views of Mount Girnar to the east from the walls.

After walking about halfway atop the walls of the fort, I descended to visit the Adi Chadi Vav stepwell, believed to have been built about the 15th century. It is undecorated and without inscriptions and therefore hard to date.  It is an impressive circular well, about 135 feet deep, with a staircase of 172 steps leading down to the water, 172 steps in all.  The staircase, about 15 feet wide, was cut right through solid rock and you can see the wavy striations in the rock on the way down.  Pigeons were nesting in some of the recesses in the rock and green parrots were flying around, too.  It's quite an impressive view both up the well and up the rock lined staircase once you get to the bottom, but the well itself is filled with an incredible amount of garbage.  Despite garbage covering the entire surface of the water, people were taking handfulls of water to wash over their heads and faces.

Nearby is an even deeper and older stepwell, about 170 feet deep and dating from the 11th century, called Navghan Kuvo.  It is of entirely different construction, a square well with a staircase winding around it with openings in the walls to let in light.  Nevertheless, it was quite dark in places.  It, too, was filled with garbage.  Also inside the fort is the 15th century Jama Masjid, a mosque converted from a Hindu palace.  Its columned hall, with three large openings in the roof, provided some respite from the now hot sun.  I walked around inside and sat for a while.  You could climb up to the roof and there were good views of Mount Girnar both from the roof and from the east facing openings inside the mosque.  I could pick out the Jain temples a little below the summit.  Outside the mosque were multiple graves covered with colorful Islamic fabrics.  Nearby, also within the fort, were rock cut Buddhist monastic quarters, three stories deep and dating from the 3rd or 4th century AD.  The sculpture within was quite worn, though.

I spent most of the afternoon in the fort, with great views, especially late in the afternoon east towards Mount Girnar.  The town to the west is perhaps 150 feet below the fort and reached by a sloping street.  About 6 I walked down that street back into the city, passing sellers of fruit and vegetables and much else.  For dinner I had a great Gujarati thali at a restaurant full of friendly waiters and no customers but me until they started to pour in just as I was finishing.  Waiters brought me helping after helping, plenty of food for only 80 rupees, about $1.60.  For dessert I had delicious pureed mango for an additional 20 rupees.

I was up the next morning at a quarter to 6 and left soon after 6 in the dark in an autorickshaw heading to the foot of Mount Girnar, passing some pilgrims on foot heading the same direction.  I started hiking up the steps about 6:30 at about 700 feet elevation, still in the dark but with a quarter moon out.  There were quite a few pilgrims beginning the hike, the first part with a thin forest of big leafed teak trees along the way.  A Jain man told me there were 3950 steps to the temples.  The sky began to lighten a bit after about 15 minutes and langur monkeys were beginning to stir in the trees.  It wasn't very cold and I began to sweat and so took off my windbreaker about 7 and walked up in my tee shirt.  The steps were in good shape and not too steep, with a few more or less gently rising portions at first.  We passed tea shops selling not only tea but all sorts of food and drink as we climbed the ridge past teak trees and monkeys.  People along the way were friendly and I didn't see any other westerners until I got near the top.  Here and there a person was being carried up the steps in a dholi, a small platform hanging from two poles carried by four men.

Soon the thin forest of teak trees disappeared and we ascended a steep rock face, zigzagging up on very well built steps.  Later, on the way down and looking up at it, I marveled at how they built the steps on that rock face.  The mountain hid the sun to the east, so it was not too hot.  After a little more than two hours, I entered a gate through a rock wall and arrived at the Jain temples.  There are several of them, ten or fifteen, I think.  I visited the oldest, dating from the 12th century.  Others date from the 16th century and many had mosaic covered domes.  These Jain temples are on a little plateau at about 3000 feet elevation.  The sun finally appeared while I was there and I continued up beyond the Jain temples to reach the Hindu ones further up, climbing steeply up to the first peak and the first Hindu temple.  A guy was selling tomatoes, grapes, oranges and guavas.  It was very sunny by then and I could see the highest peak a little further to the east.  I descended a bit, walked along a ridge, still all covered by steps, and finally up to the peak at 1117 meters, about 3665 feet, I think.  There is a small temple on the top and great views.  You can see Junagadh to the west and hills all around.  One guy told me there are 21 sacred peaks and 350 caves.

From the summit you can see that there are further peaks to the east, with the steps continuing to the closest one, which is almost as high as the summit.  You have to descend quite steeply and then ascend quite steeply to reach the top of that next, very rocky peak, but I decided to do it.  Starting a little after 10, it took me about an hour and forty five minutes to make the round trip.  The views were great and the people friendly.  At one spot where we both were taking a breather, an old guy, perhaps even older than me, waxed poetic about the spiritual nature of the place and I courteously refrained from mentioning all the garbage on the way.  At the top of the rocky peak is an incredibly ugly little structure of rough concrete with corrugated metal in the openings blocking the views.  I talked to an ethnic Indian couple from Virginia up there who asked me what I thought of it and I said with more than a little understatement that I found it disappointing.

I returned to the summit and enjoyed the views and people walking by for a while, then walked back to the first peak.  A couple of families that I had seen here and there as we were walking up had settled down in a circle under some trees on some newspapers for a picnic.  They invited me to join them and as I had been subsisting on bananas, cookies and water on the way up, it didn't take much persuading to get me to join them.  It took a little effort to get my stiff legs to bend enough to sit cross legged on the newspapers with them, but the lunch was delicious.  They served me a very good potato dish along with sweet and spicy mango chutney (mangoes are a speciality of Junagadh), curd and a mound of chapattis.  Four adults and four kids, including two in college and two probably still in high school, they were all very friendly.  After lunch we all drank what in Gujarat is called buttermilk, a thin mixture of water and either milk or yoghurt.

After that interlude, I walked down slowly as my left leg was beginning to hurt.  It hadn't bothered me much on the way up.  My left leg is weaker than my right, resulting from the damage done from a ruptured disc in my back in 1998.  It wasn't too bad, though.  The walk down was a little warm, in the face of the sun.  At one point a pilgrim bought a lot of watermelon, cut up in pieces, and fed it to a group of about twenty langur monkeys.  Usually shy, they approached quite close to the crowd of us watching to get the watermelon and it was fun to watch them eat it.  Later on he did the same with peanuts to another group of about twenty langurs.

I made it to the bottom about 3:30, 7000 steps up and 7000 steps down.  On the way back into town by autorickshaw I stopped at a structure that covers a big rock covered with inscriptions by the Emperor Ashoka in the 3rd century BC.  There are fourteen inscriptions, advising people to live in harmony and be kind to women and animals, along with other admonitions.  Ashoka put these inscriptions all over his empire.  There are two other later inscriptions on the rock, from the second and fifth centuries AD.  The letters were easily legible.  I got back to my hotel about 4 and rested my weary legs until I went for dinner a little after 6.  I'd been looking forward to that all-you-can-eat Gujarati thali followed by pureed mango for dessert all day.

My legs felt okay the next morning as I walked back to the late 19th century mausolea, or maqbaras, that I had visited my first afternoon in Junagadh.  They face east and therefore were facing the sun in the morning.  I found an opening in the smaller one, that of the wazir, and went inside to look around.  It was dirty with pigeon droppings and feathers.  I also climbed one of the thin minarets at the corners of the maqbara.  The narrow staircase is on the outside and reaches up to the top and fifth story, more or less level with the domes of the maqbara.

I then visited the city's older maqbaras, those of the earliest nawabs in the 18th century.  They are right across from my hotel and in considerable ruin.  Grass was growing everywhere, including on the several tombs.  Goats were grazing in the grass-choked graveyard around the maqbaras, and in a small courtyard a woman was using water and her hands to mash goat dung and then make round balls of maybe four or five inches diameter to dry in the sun.  Many of the graves had colorful Islamic fabrics on them and there were some beautiful jali windows and other decoration on the tombs.

I walked through the narrow streets and the bazaars of the town again to reach the fort to get a good view of Mount Girnar and pick out my route up and down.  It looked a lot steeper than it seemed at the time I was ascending.

About 1:30 I took an autorickshaw to the bus stand and about 3 left on a bus bound for Sasan Gir to the south.  The bus was crowded and I had to stand for the first hour of the two hour ride.  Sasan Gir is just a small town, more like a village, just inside the Sasan Gir Lion Sanctuary and National Park.  The hotel in Junagadh had recommended a homestay and the guy, Nitin, was waiting for me when I got off the bus.  It was a nice place to stay, in a comfortable room off the dirt and grass courtyard with his home on one of the other sides.  I took a short walk around the town and to the narrow gauge railway station just outside of town.  Langur monkeys were in the trees and occasionally on the ground near the station.  I walked to the big government hotel in town, full of Indian tourists (who far outnumbered the few westerners coming to see the lions).  Its grounds are very nice, with crows, black ibises and other birds in the trees at dusk.  I had a good thali dinner at Nitin's, in the company of two little kids (not his, I think; maybe his brother's) who were making a model of a computer with paper and styrofoam.

Sasan Gir is the last refuge of the Asiatic lion, with only about 400 left, all in and around the sanctuary.  They once roamed from Syria in the west to Bihar in eastern India and were down to maybe 20 to 50 a century ago (a census in 1913 found only 18) when the Nawab of Junagadh, formerly a hunter of them, decided to preserve them.  They seem to be thriving, with their numbers increasing.  The lions are a bit smaller and paler than African ones, and the manes of the males are a bit less hairy, especially on top.  There are a few other minor differences.  For foreigners it costs $40 a jeep load (six seats maximum) for entry, plus about $20 for the jeep, for each three hour trip in search of the lions.  Each person has to pay a camera fee of about $10, too, if you have a camera of more than seven megapixels.  (Indians pay about one fifth of these charges.)  Fortunately, Nitin found me two others, an English couple on a week's trip to India, to share the jeep expenses, though they had already paid for the safaris and I think Nitin largely pocketed the thouand rupees or so (all except  the camera fee) I paid him per safari.

I got up at 5:30 the next morning and walked with Nitin in the dark to a tea stall on the main road of town.  He went off to arrange things while I waited and about 6:30 an open jeep with a driver and guide came by which I boarded.  We drove out of town a bit to pick up the English couple, Sam (for Samantha) and Mike (two primary school principals from near Manchester who were great companions) staying at a very nice hotel and headed into the park.  Thirty jeeps are allowed into the park at a time, on seven different routes which can intersect and overlap.  The area is hilly and dry, with grass and trees.  About seventy percent of the trees are teak, with big leaves but not many of them at this time of the dry season.  We soon spotted a big male sambar deer right next to the road in the dark.  It was cold in the early morning, and dusty, and I was cold even wearing my fleece and windbreaker.

Despite the cold, I enjoyed riding up and down the hills through the teak forest in the early morning light in search of lions.  We did see scores of the white-spotted chital deer (smaller than sambar), more sambar deer and even a large rabbit (so I could cross "rabbit" off my wildlife list).  Many of the deer were near the road and not too frightened of us, though they would generally eventually run off.  Our guide identified some male lion prints in the dust of the road.  The sun appeared about 7:30, which cut the cold a bit.  We saw wild peacocks and peahens, plus parrots and kingfishers and lots of other birds.  There are ponds and creeks here and there, plus wells.

Tribal people also live in the park, herding cattle and water buffalo.  We passed some of their little villages.  They are said to coexist fairly well with the lions, even though the lions eat their cattle and water buffalo.  The main food of the lions, though, are the chital, which number in the tens of thousands and, like the lions, are thriving.  We got back to town about 9:30, with no lion sightings.  I shook the dust off me as best as I could and sat out in front of my room in the sun to warm up.  Soon I was quite warm.  I walked to the very good exhibition center at the government hotel in town.  The information on the park and animals was very well presented and interesting.  I had a good thali lunch at the homestay about 1 and then read on the porch of my room until the afternoon safari.

We left about 3:30 on a different route into the sanctuary.  It was warm in the afternoon sun and I could get by with just a tee shirt.  It was very dusty, though.  We again saw lots of chital as we drove out to a dam and reservoir, with a big crocodile on a little island.  We drove through more hills and teak forest and finally a spotter, a guy whose job it is to find the lions, motioned our jeep onto a track off the main dusty road through a thicket of trees to a spot on a slight cliff where we got a great view of a male lion lounging in the sun on the other side of the little defile. He was lying on his back with his back feet up in the air and didn't seem too concerned with us.  He did have his eyes narrowly opened.  We had a great view of him, though we weren't that close to him, maybe 150 feet away.  I couldn't get a good photo with my camera, which has been giving me trouble since the day I arrived in India three months ago, with the lens flickering when I try to take a photo.  But I did get great views of him with my binoculars.  We watched him for only about five minutes, as another jeep was waiting for us to leave so it could enter for a look.  On the way out of the park we saw two chital mating.

I was up at 5:30 the next morning and entered the sanctuary with Sam and Mike shortly after 6:30 on a different route.  It was cold, but seemed a bit better than the previous morning, perhaps because we weren't driving so fast in the earliest part of the morning.  Again, we saw lots of chital and lots of peacocks and peahens.  It seems quite odd to see those very colorful peacocks, in groups of five or more at times, in the wild.  The females are less colorful, but do have some blue color.  I never saw a peacock in the park with its tail displayed, though.

We came across a line of jeeps, a half dozen or more, waiting to see some lions found by the spotters.  (The spotters go out on motorcycles and then search for the lions on foot, and if they find them telephone the guides in the jeeps.  The lions don't seem to bother them.)  We waited for a while, expecting that we were all being held back because the lions were on the move.  But eventually the spotters motioned us in (we were in the second or third jeep let in, I think) and we drove off the road into a thicket of trees and bushes and through the trees and brush I could see three or four lionesses and at least one cub eating.  I got quite good views with my binoculars.  (The guide told me there were seven all together, including two cubs, eating a nilgai, which is a large antelope, a little bit like an elk but without antlers.)  Again, they didn't seem concerned about us.  We were allowed probably not even five minutes to watch, so others could come see.  It's a little bit like an assembly line, but I enjoyed seeing them in the wild.

We drove back toward town, seeing lots of chital.  At one point the chital were making a leopard warning call (they make different warnings calls for leopards and for lions) and  we caught a glimpse of a leopard in the shadows of the trees before it disappeared into the trees.  There are about as many leopards as there are lions in the sanctuary, but they are much harder to spot and rarely seen.  We got back to town about 9:30 again.

At 3:30 we left on our afternoon safari on the same route we had traveled in the morning, said to be one of the best by our guide. It was much warmer and more pleasant in the afternoon sun and we saw lots of chital and sambar.  Suddenly, early in the safari, we got a good view of a leopard in the sunlight as it slowly sauntered away into the trees.  That was quite exciting to see, however brief.  We saw lots of nilgai, the most I've ever seen at once.  The males are a bluish black color (and are also called bluebucks) while the females are brown.

Further on, spotter directed us off the road to a spot where seven lions, male, female and cubs, were sleeping.  One cub was sleeping on his back with his feet in the air.  So was one of the adults, though his or her head was hidden by the grass.  I got quite good views of them with my binoculars before we headed away and continued on our route.  We came across a big line of jeeps, maybe ten or so.  Despite our late arrival compared to the jeeps already there, we were quickly waved in off the road by a spotter, while the other jeeps waited (maybe there is a benefit for paying the higher, foreigner rate), into a thicket with a good view, maybe only fifty feet away, of another seven lions sleeping.  I cursed my malfunctioning camera and gave it up to watch them with my binoculars, though they weren't doing anything but sleeping.  They say mornings are best for seeing the lions in action while afternoons are for seeing the lions sleeping.

We drove on and near the end of the afternoon we were again motioned off the road by a spotter to a place maybe only thirty feet from two sleeping lions, a male and a female.  We had an especially good view of the male, who again didn't seem the least disturbed by us.  Just before we left the sanctuary we saw a large group of sambar, maybe five or six males and several females.  Two of the males were fighting, butting heads.

That was a great safari.  I never expected to see sixteen lions and a leopard, plus another seven and another leopard in the morning.  That night I washed my very dusty trousers, tee shirt, fleece, windbreaker, cap and daypack.  The air was so dry that all were dry by the next morning.

February 8-12. 2012: Rajkot - Jamnagar - Dwarka - Porbandar - Junagadh

I finally left Bhuj on the morning of the 8th after eight nights there, more than I had planned.  I left shortly before 11 on a seven hour bus trip to Rajkot.  It was cold that morning, much colder than it had been on previous days.  A cold wind had come through the previous day, dropping both high and low temperatures by almost 20 degrees, with lows in the low 40's.  I've read that this has been a particularly cold winter in India, though it hasn't been as cold for me this year as last year when I was further north in Rajasthan.

The bus wasn't crowded as we retraced the route across Kutch I had taken upon arrival eight days earlier.  I quite like these Gujarat state buses, dusty and ricketty but with plenty of leg room.  Along the road I saw two groups of tribal people, about ten people (men in white, women in red) in each group, with about ten camels in each group, too.  The camels were laden with all their possessions, including narrow beds with their legs pointing skyward.  On one upturned bed were two little kids.  I saw another group camped in a harvested cotton field.  We had a lunch stop about 2 and shortly after crossed over the creek that separates Kutch from the rest of Gujarat and headed south into the Kathiawar peninsula, the bulging peninsula bordered by the Gulf of Kutch, the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Khambhat (also called the Gulf of Cambay).  This region is called Saurashtra.  We traveled on good roads (Gujarat is said to have the best roads in India) through flat and dry countryside, but with crops, including cotton fields being harvested by hand.  In Rajkot I got an expensive hotel (900 rupees, about $18) but a good one.  It was chilly that night, but fine in my room.

It was cold the next morning, low 40's again.  I walked to the house Gandhi lived in with his parents from 1881, a fairly big house for its time with a large courtyard.  He moved to Rajkot in 1876 when he was six (born in October 1869) and his father, an official in the employ of the Maharaja, built the house five years later.  It's full of interesting photographs but not much else.  I walked through narrow streets with shops just opening up on that chilly morning past the massive high school Gandhi attended to the Watson Museum, named for the British political agent for the area who started the museum in the late 1800's.  It didn't have a lot in it, though it did have a massive statue of Queen Victoria, looking (as usual) rather grumpy.  For lunch I had an absolutely delicious thali with six or seven dishes.  (A thali, which means "plate," is a meal served on a metal plate about twelve inches in diameter with vegetable dishes served in little three-inch diameter bowls, along with chapattis and rice and other breads.  Gujarati thalis are sweeter and not as hot as others I've had in India.

After lunch I took a two hour bus ride to Jamnagar to the west, only a few miles from the Gulf of Kutch.  I talked to quite an interesting guy on the way.  He was born in Tanzania and now lives in London.  His grandfather and father (then 8) emigrated from Gujarat about 80 years ago.  I got to Jamnagar about 3, got a hotel and walked to the lake in the middle of town, with a palace on a little island in the center reached by two causeways.  The palace was built about 1840 as a famine relief project, at which time the lake was deepened and walls built around it.  There wasn't much to see in the palace, and it was windy and a little chilly in the wind.  One of the maharajas of Jamnagar was a famous cricket player, playing for England before India had it own team.  There is a photo of him in 1897 with the English team (he is the only Indian) when they played Australia.  Born in 1872, he ruled from 1907 until his death in 1933 and is said to have been an enightened monarch.  He served as India's League of Nations representative for a while.  Saurashtra had an incredible number of princely states, 222.  India as a whole had something like 582.  (Britain directly ruled only about half the territory of India: the rest was ruled by the 582 maharajas, nawabs and other princely rulers, under the protection of Britain.)  Some of the princely states in Saurashtra must have been very small.  Jamnagar was one of the two biggest but was only 3800 square miles in extent. 

I walked along the lake a bit.  There were all sorts of birds on the lake, including several species of duck.  Some city officials were removing a dead body found along the lakeside.  It looked like some poor old guy had died of exposure.  At one corner of the lake is a temple dedicated to Hanuman, the monkey god who was allied with Rama.  In this temple "Shri Ram, Jai Ram, Jai Jai Ram" has been chanted continuously since 1964, earning it a place in the Guiness Book of Records.  (Indians are always doing something to get into the Guiness Book of Records.  Recently there was a story in the newspaper about a guy who spent something like 25 hours in a bed of ice to break the old record of something like 24 hours.)  I sat in the temple listening to the group of men chanting, along with playing drums and cymbals, and it was mesmerizing, very pleasant.  They sang it various ways, and one guy, backed by the others, had a beautiful voice.  It was nice to hear some music rather than just the noise of bells and drums.   

Afterwards, I walked along the lake as the sun set, with birds everywhere.  People had put out food, birdseed and little bread snacks, and a flock of maybe a hundred terns was circling, then swooping down to grab food.  There was a continuous circling and it was fun to watch.  In the water below a hundred or so ducks waited for whatever the terns dropped.  Eventually, a cow came along and ate what the terns had missed.  Groups of droopy billed irises were arriving to nest for the night in the lakeside trees.  And there were massive flocks of some sort of little black bird wheeling through the sky.  There was a beautiful orange sunset.  I didn't sleep well that night, though.  Despite the chilly night, mosquitos in my room kept waking me up.  Generally, hotels in Gujarat have been far better than the Indian norm, but not this one.

It was warmer the next morning in Jamnagar.  I walked to some Jain temples, painted bright white outside but multi-colored inside, in the town center and then to the Willingdon Crescent, a big curved bit of late 19th century town planning.  Across from it is the Darbargadh, the former royal palace, now ruined and covered with weeds.  Nearby was a very colorful market, with friendly people.  On the way back to the hotel to check out before noon, I passed a wedding party, with a group of colorfully dressed women dancing in the street. Many had hennaed hands. 

I had to wait over an hour for a bus (quite unsual in Gujarat and in India as a whole: usually buses leave very frequently), but before 2 I left on a three and a half hour trip further west to Dwarka.  We traveled though what looked like a rich agricultural area near the Gulf of Kutch, though we never came within view of the Gulf.  Eventually, as we neared the Arabian Sea, the land became more desolate, with some cactus, the type I had seen in Kutch.  As we reached the Arabian Sea and headed northwest to Dwarka, I did catch glimpses of the sea, along with sand dunes here and there between the road and the sea.  I saw a few camels near the dunes.  There were lots of big, modern windmills along the coast, too.  Arriving in Dwarka about 5:30, I checked four hotels, three of which were full, before getting a nice room for 750 rupees. 

Dwarka is famous as the city that Krishna fled to with his clan, the Yadavas, from his birthplace in Mathura (which I visited just over a year ago), just north of Agra, and then ruled for something like 125 years.  Of course, all this is supposed to have happened 5000 years ago, so there isn't much, if any, evidence for this claim.  However, it does mean that Dwarka is a big pigrimage center.  It is one of India's seven holy cities and one of the four "abodes" that mark the cardinal directions of India.  It is the westernmost, and in fact it is the westernmost spot I will travel to in India.  The others are Badrinath in the north (which I visited in November 2010), Puri in the east, and Rameshwaram in the south.  I walked through town to the sea front, where quite a few people had gathered, and watched a beautiful orange sunset over the Arabian Sea at 6:47.  A small boat bobbed out on the sea before the sun set.  Dwarka is about 69 degrees east of Greenwich.  It is almost 20 degrees west of Calcutta, though both (and in fact all of India) are in the same time zone.

After the sun set, I walked to the town's main temple, the Dwarkadish, with a tower rising about 165 feet.  I was told it is 2500 years old by a pilgrim. but my guidebook says more like 900 at the most, and that only for part of it.  Most of it is supposed to be 16th century.  I had to check my camera and day pack before I entered.  The temple rests on sixty stone pillars, with a courtyard and other temples all around it.  The main temple was thronged with people for a 7:30 aarti, a ceremony with those fiery candelabras and lots of bell ringing.  I watched the crowds and noticed one of the temple minders was standing on the metal rails through which pilgrims approach the sanctuary and roughly shoving the women (this was a women's line) forward to move them along quickly.  I walked back to my hotel and passed another wedding group dancing. This time the bride was on a white horse.  Everywhere else, it's been the groom on the horse.  She was very heavily made up, with a sort of pancake powder on her face, to lighten it.  Her hands and feet were covered with beautiful designs in henna. I had another very good Gujarati thali at the hotel restaurant that night.

The next morning at about 9 I set off and walked past the temple to the bank of the river that passes the south side of the temple on its way to the nearby sea.  Pilgrims were bathing in the very low water, with cows nearby on the sandy exposed portions of the riverbed.  One cow was quite aggressive and I thought she might hurt someone.  The morning was bright and sunny and I went down to the sandy river bed, too, to watch the people and the cows.  High atop the tower of the temple two men were changing the big triangular pennant that flies from a flagpole at the very top.  They carefully pulled in and wound up a white pennant and unfurled an orange one.  A man told me they change the flags five times each day, three times in the morning and twice in the afternoon.  A little later, another man came out high atop the tower to refresh the color of the orange images near the top.  A man told me he uses ghee (clarified butter) mixed with the powder of a red stone, though it looks far more orange than red. 

I walked around town a bit, passing pilgrims and sadhus, before going into the temple again in time for the 10:30 aarti.  Again there was a big crowd waiting.  I wandered around and sat here and there and watched the crowds.  The bells started ringing for the aarti.  Soon a big group of people came marching through the courtyard, the lead man carrying a bundle on his head that I was later told was the flag to be hoisted above the temple. The men in the procession wore white, but with splashes of red powder that looked like it had been thrown on them.  Most had floppy wool hats and huge gold earrings stuck not in their earlobes but in the middle of their ears (both ears).  The women were mostly in red, but with tight fitting dark bodices that had no backs.  They wore huge amounts of gold jewelry, including earrings, bracelets and elaborate necklaces.  Their forearms and feet were heavily tatooed.  The flag was taken up to the tower while the men gathered in little groups and sang a low tune, somewhat like a Gregorian chant, something I have never heard in a Hindu ceremony.  It was very pleasant.  Most of the women sat together, a sea of red saris, but a group of about 30 formed a circle and began a slow dance.  It was all very interesting to watch and I wish I had been permitted to have my camera.  When the new flag, this one multi-colored, was unfurled high above, they all raised their hands to it and then fairly quickly dispersed.  I was told they are local people, and in fact I have seen men and women dressed similarly in other towns since I left Dwarka.

I walked through the narrow streets of the town to my hotel and had lunch before catching a 1:30 bus heading along the coast southeast to Porbandar.  On the way were hundreds of big modern windmills and several ponds with birds, including small flocks of cranes (demoiselle cranes, I think, like the ones I had seen in the thousands in Rajasthan last year).  The land was mostly barren, but with some crops.

Arriving in Porbandar after about two hours, I checked into a very nice hotel (maybe the best I've had in India, and for only 400 rupees, about $8, a night).  There was a bit of a fishy smell in that port city as I walked through the busy town center to the house where Gandhi was born in 1869, a three story house with 22 rooms, though the rooms are small.  Then a one story building, it was purchased in 1777 by his great grandfather and added to over the years.  A swastika on the floor in a ground floor room marks the spot Gandhi was born.  It is quite an interesting place, unfurnished but with some painting on the walls.  It has wooden shutters and very steep wooden staircases.  Next door is a museum and shrine completed in 1950 with many very good photographs but not much else.  Nearby is the house his wife Kasturba lived in as a girl.  It too has three stories and about 20 rooms.

I walked west through narrow lanes until I reached the port area on the river just before it flows into the Arabian Sea.  It was filled with fishing boats flying colorful pennants.  Dhows (the fishing boats) were under construction nearby and I stopped at one and talked with the workers.  One guy was using a sledgehammer to pound in a long nail while another guy held some sort of a tool between the nail head and the blows of the hammer.  They showed me around and held the rickety wooden ladder as I climbed up it onto the wooden plank atop the scaffolding and climbed over the gunnels into the hold of the ship.  I noticed that hundreds of once protruding sharp ends of nails had been pounded in so they would lie flat against the wooden planks.  One guy introduced himself to me as Alfonso Almeira and told me his grandfather had come from Goa.  He told me he couldn't speak Portuguese but was Christian.

I walked along the sea shore towards my hotel as the sun went down and was astounded by the amount of garbage dumped along the sea.  This could be a very nice seafront.  There are some old but mostly derelict buildings along the seafront road, along with cows, goats and dogs and their excrement.  I noticed that the sun set almost exactly one minute earlier than it had the night before in Dwarka.  I walked past a seaside temple with a herd of about forty cattle in front of it.  A bull trying to mate with a cow almost crushed a passerby.  I had chicken for dinner that night, a welcome change in mostly vegetarian Gujarat.

I was out before 9 the next morning and it was warm enough that I took off the windbreaker over my tee shirt shortly after.  A billboard near my hotel advertised innerwear (what the Indians call underwear), showing a guy from about the stomach up wearing a cowboy hat, a scarf and an undershirt while standing next to his horse.  I assume modesty prevented showing him below the waist in his briefs or boxers.  I walked along a cleaner, but not clean, part of the seashore than I walked along the evening before to the huge, late 19th century palace of the maharajas of Porbandar, which was closed.  There were few other walkers out, although there were a few guys taking their morning crap along the rim of the sea.  I walked back, passing the temple along the sea with the herd of cows.  Vendors had set up stands to sell greens to worshipers who wanted to feed the cows.

I walked back to the dhow builders I had visited the afternoon before and beyond to a sandy beach where the river empties into the sea.  There were lots of gulls on the beach, and at one point they and cormorants went after a school of fish just offshore.  The cormorants all dived in at once.  Further from the mouth about a half dozen elderly sadhus in orange were bathing or searching for shells along the sea's edge.  Later they gathered next to an upturned little boat painted bright blue and ate peanuts.  They were a friendly bunch.  Several had impressive long white beards.

Inside the river mouth a fishing boats tilted at about a 45 degree angle, stuck on a sandbank.  Ropes and pulleys were fastened to it and men were trying unsuccessfully to right it.  The water was still too low.  More men were arriving with ropes and pulleys and later I saw water being pumped out of the hold.  The tide was rising, so they must have eventually righted it and got it off the sandbank.  Fishing boats flying multiple colored pennants came past into the harbor while colorful smaller boats littered the beach.

I walked to the port where a fishing boat was being loaded with crushed ice.  Big blocks of ice were tipped into a machine that crushed the ice, which then fell down a canvas shute into the hold of the boat.  From there I walked through the town center again back to my hotel, passing a dilapidated former palace, older than the one on the sea, of the maharajas.

I had a chicken lunch and read the newspapers in the hotel lobby before leaving on a bus bound for Junagadh, inland to the east, a little after 2.  There were a few hills on the way and lots of wheat, corn, cotton, castor oil plants and other crops.  Some of the wheat was quite golden and looked ready for harvesting.  I saw lots of women with tattoos on their forearms and lots of gold jewelry in the towns we passed through.  My seatmate for a time had the forearm tattoos.

As we approached Junagadh I could see the almost 3700 foot high extinct volcano Mount Girnar, with Jain and Hindu temples atop it, just east of the city, rising more than 3000 feet above the plains.  We arrived about 5 and I got a hotel and looked around a bit, visiting the two elaborate late 19th century mausolea, called maqbaras.  The largest, built for the Nawab and containing not only his grave but those of his son and grandson, his successors as Nawab, is a combination European and Indian building with a profusion of little domes that seem to bubble up on the top.  It is quite unusual.  It is locked up and not being taken care of.  Nearby is a smaller maqbara, of a wazir (chief minister) of the Nawabs, that is nicer, I think.  It has four free standing minarets, each five stories high, at its four corners.  It, too, is not being maintained.  Boys were playing cricket with little plastic whiffle-type balls (but without the holes) in the courtyard.

January 31 - February 7, 2012: Bhuj, Mandvi and the Great Rann of Kutch

On the 31st I had a good breakfast prepared by Devji's wife in Dhrangadhra before catching a bus bound for Bhuj about 9:30.  Bhuj is the main city of Kutch, or Kachchh (the modern spelling), the arid region bordered by the Gulf of Kachchh on the south, the Arabian Sea on the west and the Rann of Kutch on the north and east.  When the Rann is flooded during the monsoon, Kachchh is in effect an island.

The bus, coming from Ahmedabad, was crowded and I stood for the first hour and a half before finally sitting on my pack.  We crossed the creek connecting the Gulf of Kachchh with the Rann after about two hours, with extensive salt works on both shores.  There were modern, power-generating windmills visible for miles.  About 12:30 we had a lunch stop in a town badly damaged by a 2001 earthquake and now almost completely rebuilt.  The earthquake registered 7.7 on the Richter Scale and killed something like 20,000 to 30,000 people in Kutch.  I finally got a seat at Gandhidham, a new city largely populated by Hindu refugees from the Sind, now in Pakistan.  Between 3:30 and 4 we finally reached Bhuj, passing a citadel on a hill just before the town.  Bhuj, too, was badly damaged by the earthquake and has lots of new buildings.

I checked into a good hotel and walked to the nearby Darbargadh, the walled citadel of the Maharao of Kutch.  The palaces inside were badly damaged in the 2001 earthquake and parts have been repaired, but extensive damage still is visible.  I walked around the dusty palace grounds, but didn't go inside the palaces.  I did buy a bag of potato chips, which induced a cow to go after me, but I managed to escape her clutches.  Later I walked through the town's bazaars, filled with people and shops.  I had dinner with an English guy about my age who regaled me with stories of his first trip to India in 1973-74, and his journeys overland to and from India, the return home with all of 20 pounds sterling.

The next morning I visited the Aina Mahal, the Palace of  Mirrors, in the Darbargadh.  Badly damaged in the 2001 earthquake, it has been extensively repaired and rebuilt, though parts have been completely lost or left in ruins.  It was constructed in the 18th century by an Indian sailor returned from Europe with considerable knowledge of European design.  It is filled with mirrors and has blue, Delft-like tiles on the floors.  On the walls are Hogarth prints and paintings of European women, mostly aristocratic Englishwomen.  There is also a spectacular inlaid ivory door.  One room has a water channel, now dry, with fountains, surrounding a pillow filled seating area, almost an island, a place to cool the Maharao on hot summer days.

After lunch I walked to two closed museums and then to the Sharad Baug Palace, built in a big garden in 1867 for the Maharao.  The last Maharao lived there until his death in 1991, but it was badly damaged in the 2001 earthquake.  The third floor is gone and the two lower floors too dangerous to visit.  However, some of the Maharao's personal effects are in a nearby dining hall, now filled with furniture, elephant tusks, stuffed tigers and even the coffin that brought his body back from London.  Outside several of the trees were filled with fruit bats, and I enjoyed watching them hanging from the trees and occasionally stretching their long leathery wings and even flying from tree to tree.

I woke up sick the next morning and spent the day in my room, sleeping and reading.  Fortunately, it turned out to be a 24 hour (or even less) illness, the first time I've had stomach problems this trip in India, so I am grateful about that.  Also, my sinus infection seems to have gone, at last.

I slept past 8 the next morning and had a breakfast of porridge and plain toast.  I visited the Pragmahal, an 1865 palace next to the Aina Mahal, in the morning.  It is a big, European-style building, almost Romanesque except that the arches are pointed.  It also was badly damaged in the 2001 earthquake and is now dusty and decrepit.  Some of the painted ceilings have lost their plaster and on the walls are moldering hunting trophies, many of the tigers, lions and deer having lost bits of their skin.  A large durbar hall, that once must have been grand, is now pretty faded, although with some large chandeliers hanging from the ceiling and European statuary on the walls.  In one room were paintings on what appeared to be glass of European woman in dress that seemed to be from the late 1800's, men that appeared to be European royalty, and Indian scenes, perhaps religious.  There is high bell tower, which I climbed for a good view of the city.  Parrots and pigeons fluttered by.  The pigeons have made a mess of the outside corridors of the palace.  In the afternoon I visited the Kachchh Museum, which was pretty good.  It had some beautiful textiles, for which Kachchh is famous.  I had a normal dinner that night and felt fine.

I had hoped to make a tour of some of the weaving villages to the north the next day, but the autorickshaw tours organized by the curator of the Aina Mahal were full, so the next morning I walked to a new Swaminarayan Temple, built by the same outfit that built those spectacular temples in Delhi and Ahmedabad.  It has lots of marble, with peacock mosaics on the floors.  I got there just as an aarti began, with drapes raised to reveal idols while a mechanical drum, bell and cymbal device made an incredible amount of noise.  First time I've seen one of those, and I hope it's the last time I hear one.  It seems like whereas other religions like to have music, Hindus prefer just loud noise.

I then went to a police station for a permit for a town I may go in the west of Kachchh (and close to the Pakistan border) and then took a van about 5 miles out of town to the village of Bhujodi, famous for its weaving.  It was a pretty unattractive place, but with friendly people.  One guy offered me lunch (which I declined), gave me a glass of yogurt and water (which I drank) and showed me his loom and the shawls and other textiles he has weaved, which were beautiful.  He told me he had taught weaving at the Museum of Natural History in New York and at a university in Britain.  I got back to Bhuj about 3.  The sky had clouded up and it even sprinkled a bit.  Generally, though, it has been sunny, with highs in the mid 80's and lows about 60.  Very pleasant weather.

The next morning about 10 a German woman named Natalia staying at the hotel and I took a bus south to Mandvi, about 35 miles away on the Gulf of Kutch.  It was a Sunday and a holiday (Mohammed's birthday) and the bus was crowded.  It took about an hour and a half to get there, passing through scrubby hills with some cactus and dry flatlands.  On arrival we saw quite a few of the town's Muslims in festive dress, the men usually in white, though sometimes colored, robes and white skullcaps.  Some vehicles were flying Islamic flags.

We had crossed a dry river bed entering the town and further downriver, where there was water in the riverbed, huge wooden boats were being built along the river.  There must have been at least ten, in various stages of construction.  They look a little, or actually a lot, like Noah's Ark, or at least how Noah's Ark is usually pictured.  They are several stories high, with wooden scaffolding all around them.  Nobody was working on them this day, which was a shame, but they were still fascinating to examine, and nobody prevented us from going right up to them and even into some of them.  I've been told they take two to three years and cost about $800,000 to build, and weigh 800 tons when finished, able to carry an additional 1600 tons of cargo in their huge holds.  They are said to travel to the Arabian Gulf, bringing dates back from Iraq.  There are huge amounts of wood in them, including great big pieces for the keels and beams.  They are an amazing sight inside, and the outside is marked with huge iron nail heads and bolts.  We saw some of them lying on the ground and the nails are about a foot long, the bolts even longer.  I was told the outer surface is Malaysian wood, the inner Indian.  We also saw bits of cotton and lengths of thick rope used to waterproof the gaps.  A few completed ships were on the river, with huge rudders on the sterns.

We could see the Gulf down the river and tried to reach it, without success.  It was farther than it looked at first and we were prevented from getting there by the customs office on the river.  We couldn't find another way to get to the Gulf and so wandered back into the center of town past decrepit old buildings and streets festooned with little Islamic celebratory banners.  I suppose they said something like, "Happy Birthday, Mohammed!"  We walked through an old city gate and arrived at the Osho Hotel, where we had a delicious thali lunch.  We got there at just the right time, as people (we were the only non-Indians) filled the bare tables and were served identical thalis with five different vegetable dishes in little bowls, plus chapattis, puri, rice, salad, and some little pastry balls.  A watery unsweetened lassi (yogurt and water) was also served and they kept bringing you extra helpings.  The food was delicious, too, and we were stuffed, all for 80 rupees (about $1.60) each.  Dozens of people were waiting to be seated as we left.

We walked around a bit in the center of the little town and then took an autorickshaw about five miles west of town to Vijay Vilas Palace, a 1920's palace of the Maharao of Kutch.  It is magnificent building, often used for Indian movies, and on the walls were photos from Lagaan and an Aishwarya Rai movie.  Also n the walls were photos of a jaguar attacking and killing a crocodile, with the stuffed jaguar and crocodile nearby.  A Pyrrhic victory for the jaguar.  The rooms were beautifully furnished and from the tower on the roof you could see the Gulf, further away than we thought it would be.  The current Maharao lives in Bombay, one of the caretakers told us.  The palace was very crowded with Indian tourists, including a large group of surprisingly well-behaved children.  Back in Mandvi, we caught a bus back to Bhuj about 4.

The next morning at 9 Natalia and I left on one of the autorickshaw tours arranged by the curator of the Aina Mahal.  We headed north and it was quite cold in that open vehicle at that time of the morning.  We reached some hills north of Bhuj, and then flatlands and eventually a big wetland, unconnected to the Rann, full of rainwater our driver told us.  There were lots of birds, including large white pelicans, cranes, egrets, herons and others.

About 30 miles north of Bhuj we reached the village of Bhirendiara and stopped at a group of round huts called bhungas.  These are the typical houses of this area, called the Banni grasslands.  They used to be made of mud walls and thatched roofs, but since the 2001 earthquake few of those remain and bhungas now are made of concrete and red tile roofs.  The ones we saw still had the typical exteriors painted with designs in bright colors (on a sort of plaster of mud and cow dung) and interior walls full of little mirrors which gleam when the bright sun pours in through the doorway or windows.  The people are called Harijan (dalits, formerly called untouchables), although Muslim people also live in the Banni grasslands, and the women wear very bright colored clothes and lots of jewelry.  They produce beautiful textiles and we were shown plenty of examples.  A man and woman were working on the ground between the bhungas, paving it with a mixture of dirt and cow manure.

At Bhirendiara we had to get a police permit to head further north to the edge of the Great Rann of Kutch.  Passing the villages of Hodka, Gorevali and Dhordo and lots of scrubby countryside that seemed to contain just one type of low tree and lots of water buffalo and cattle, we reached the edge of the Rann after another 20 miles, at about 2 in the afternoon.  There was another police post and then we drove a mile or two to the edge of a vast white expense, called the Rann Utsav (the "White Desert"), covered with salt.  It was white as far as we could see, all the way to the horizon.  We walked a bit on the salt, but it quickly became wet and your footprints filled with salty water.  You couldn't go very far in without plunging into the salty water.  I didn't see any birds around or any other sign of life.  (Lots of litter at the edge, though, left by Indians.)  I was told by the guide I had in the Little Rann of Kutch that the water in the Little Rann is about 75% river water and 25% sea water while the water in the Great Rann is 75% sea water and 25% river water, so I suppose that explains why the Great Rann is a salt desert while the Little Rann is a mud desert.  No salt works on the Great Rann, though, because it borders Pakistan, something like 30 miles north of where we stood.  It was quite a view, with nothing but the white of the Rann, the blue of the sky, and a hazy whitish strip of sky just above the horizon.

We headed back south and stopped in the little Harijan village of Gorevali to have a very good, simple lunch of rice, dhal, chapattis and very watery lassi.  The people there, including lots of curious little kids, were very friendly.  Men and boys were making charcoal and showed us how they do it.  After the wood from the thin local trees is cut and hauled together, it is stacked in a pile maybe four feet high and fifteen feet in diameter.  The pile of wood is covered with burlap sacks and dirt and set on fire for five days or so.  Then a hole is made in the top and water poured in to cool it before the charcoal is dug up after another day or two.  They said they get about ten to twelve big burlap bags of charcoal per pile and 225 rupees (about $4.50) per bag.  They sell it to a big company, they said.  They were all covered with charcoal dust.

Charcoal is used like mascara in India to decorate the eyes of little children and women.  I've often been startled to see a very little child with masses of charcoal around his eyes. After our lunch at Gorevali one of the men had showed us a metal container with a metal implement three or four inches long used to apply the charcoal to the eyes.  He told us the charcoal is also used by men to relieve their eyes after exposure to so much dust.  He demonstrated by wiping charcoal with that little metal rod on the whites of his eyes.  I don't think I will try that remedy.

We also stopped in Hodka on the way back to see some beautiful bhungas in a hotel complex, renting for about $40 a night.  There were some beautiful Harijan paintings and photos of the film star Amitabh Bachchan, who had been there about two weeks before.  We got back to Bhuj before the sun set.

I didn't do much the next day.  I spent time on the internet, visited the bus station and bus offices to get information on future travel, again visited the  police office to get a permit to visit a town close to Pakistan, and generally pondered where to go next.  In the late afternoon I walked to the royal chattris (memorial cenotaphs of deceased rulers) of the Maharao of Kutch and his family.  They are in a ruinous state from the 2001 earthquake and probably weren't worth the walk.  

January 27-30, 2012: Patan, Modhera and the Little Rann of Kutch

I finally left Ahmedabad on the morning of the 27th, on a three hour bus trip north to Patan.  Patan was the capital of Gujarat until Ahmed Shah built Ahmedabad in the early 15th century.  We passed farmland on the way, but not much wheat.  I recognized cotton and mustard, and a plant I was later told produces castor oil, used in Ayurvedic medicine in India.  Ahmedabad was a big cotton textile mill town, starting in the 1860's, called the "Manchester of India," and in fact some of the big textile tycoons financed Gandhi's efforts.  There is a very nice hotel in the city that was the mansion, built in 1924, of a textile tycoon.  We also passed camels here and there on the way, including a big group of perhaps thirty munching on the leaves of trees alongside the road.  I saw one camel with an egret perched on his head.  He didn't seem to mind.

Arriving in Patan, I got a hotel and then took an autoricksaw just outside town to Rani-ki-Vav, a stepwell built in the 11th century by the Solanki Dynasty, which ruled Gujarat until the Muslim conquest about 1300.  It is the largest, and the finest, stepwell I have seen.  It had been filled in and covered with sand and was only rediscovered in the 1950's.  It is six or seven levels deep, about 90 feet below the surface, and about 210 feet long and 65 feet wide.  It is mostly open to the sky, with the well at its west end.  The sculpture on its lower levels is fantastic (preserved by the sand, I suppose), very similar to that at Khajuraho, which is about the same time. The well and lowest level were closed, but I walked up and down the main staircase a couple of times and all around the area.  I spent most of my time just admiring all the sculpture.  There are hundreds of figures.  There were lots of tourists there, all Indian but me. One guy, a dentist whose last name is Patel from Baroda (he gave me his card), told me the Patels come from the area between Ahmedabad and Baroda in Gujarat.  I left just after 6, as the sun was setting, and the autorickshaw passed the old city walls and gates on the way back to the center of town.

I left about 9 the next morning by bus on an hour ride south to Modhera, with another big group of camels on the way.  In Modhera I spent about two hours at the Sun Temple, dating from the 11th century, another construction of the Solanki Dynasty.  There are two temple buildings, with a large tank of water, about 165 by 65 feet, with steps and shrines, in front.  The sculpture in and on the temples is similar in style to those in Patan and Khajuraho, though more worn. The temples have been damaged by time, earthquakes and Muslims.  The central tower, the shikhara, is missing.  Even though worn, the sculpture was interesting, including elephants and erotic scenes.  Again, there were hundreds of figures.  In the sanctuary there were perhaps a couple of hundred bats, about 4-5 inches long, clinging to the ceiling.  Outside there were langur monkeys in the trees and lots of birds, including parrots, flying around.

From Modhera I took a crowded auto rickshaw about ten miles south to Becharaji to find that the bus heading further south was full.  However, a student gave me his seat and shared a seat with a friend.  They were part of a group of four heading to an IT competition in Rajkot.  I took the bus for maybe an hour and a half to an intersection called Thori, just south of the city of Viramgam, on the new highway from Ahmedabad heading west.  I soon caught a bus heading to Dhrangadhra, my next stop, but it was crowded and I had to stand until I decided to sit on my backpack.  I did get a seat for the last twenty minutes or so of the two hour journey.

Arriving in Dhrangadhra about 5, I took an auto rickshaw to the house of a guide for the Little Rann of Kutch named Devjibhai Dhamecha, and found him and six tourists (two Italians, one Taiwanese and three Indians) preparing to head towards his "Eco-camp" on the edge of the Little Rann of Kutch.  I had time for a quick cup of tea that his wife gave me before we all left in two jeeps for the camp.  It took us about an hour and a half to get there, through very dry countryside, but with some irrigated crops.  In places we had to edge past big flocks of sheep and goats and herds of cattle and water buffalo on the road.  The sun set about 6:30 and we arrived about 7, just at dark.  The camp was quite nice, with comfortable huts of mud walls and thatched roofs.  The site is about 25 miles northwest of Dhrangadhra, near a little village called Jogad.  We had a great dinner under the stars.  In the early evening, Jupiter, a quarter moon and another planet (probably Venus), were all aligned.  There was hot water for a bucket bath and I slept well, with the wail of jackals in the distance.

I remember as a kid seeing the Rann of Kutch on a map and wondering what a rann of kutch was.  (There are both a Little Rann of Kutch and a Great Rann of Kutch.  The modern spelling is "Kachchh" rather than "Kutch."  Kutch is derived from a word for tortoise, as the peninsula of Kutch is somewhat tortoise shaped.)  Ranns are salt deserts, low lying areas that are flooded by both river water and sea water during the monsoon, from July to September.  The strong monsoon winds push the sea water inland into the rann while rivers brings freshwater from the rains of the monsoon.  After the monsoon, the Little Rann dries out and becomes a stark, mud desert, with little vegetation.

I was up the next morning about 7, with sunrise soon after.  After a good breakfast, I left about 8:30 in a jeep with three others and our guide Devjibhai, to explore the southern edges of the Little Rann.  We passed through scrub vegetation and cracked soil (like the bed of a dried up reservoir), with some white salt residue.

The Little Rann is a sanctuary for wild asses, about 3800 of them.  They are brown and white and a little bigger than domestic donkeys.  There are only something like 25,000 Asiatic wild asses left, with others in Tibet, Mongolia and Iran.  We saw solitary males, groups of juveniles and groups of females and offspring, dozens of them all together.  I never thought I would be so pleased to spot donkeys. We couldn't get too close, though, as they are shy.  We also saw lots of birds:  common cranes, harriers and the larks that are the prey of the harriers.

We drove further into the Rann to a salt works surrounded by nothing but cracked soil.  The ground looked a bit like a bizarre mosaic.  Our guide told us that about 5000 families make their living making salt in the Little Rann.  He said the Little Rann is at most 3-4 meters (9-13 feet) above sea level and that the water table below is salty from intrusion by the nearby ocean.  They dig a well, pump out water, and then evaporate it in ponds.  Piles of blaringly white salt were around the ponds, and in the saltiest ponds, appearing almost like ice skating rinks, men and women were raking the crystallized salt into piles.  There are hundreds of these simple salt works in the Rann, with trucks coming in to cart off the salt.  Our guide told us the salt workers are all from a Hindu tribal group, of which he is a member.  There is another tribal group, this one Muslim, who during the monsoon, fish in the shallow waters of the Rann for shrimp, from about July to September.  They establish camps on little grass covered islands, called bets.  We visited one, almost deserted and with several wooden canoes resting on the bet or on the cracked soil of the Rann.  Devji said the salt workers work from the end of the monsoon until April and that the Rann is deserted in May and June because it is too hot, with temperatures regularly at 118 degrees and sometimes up to 131 degrees.

We went back for lunch at the camp about 1:30 and then set out again about 4. We saw some more wild asses, common cranes, and also saw a big eagle (a tawny eagle) and nilgai, which are large antelope also called bluebulls, because the males are somewhat bluish.  We watched the sun set over a salt pond, with cracked soil all around. The soil there was particularly deeply cracked, with cracks about two inches wide and five inches deep.

Up again before sunrise the next morning, we headed out about 8 or 8:30, first going east to Kuda on the edge of the Rann, with massive mounds of salt and some derelict buildings, before turning north and heading into the center of the Little Rann. We soon lost sight of all vegetation and traveled for miles over nothing but cracked soil.  Except for salt works, there was almost nothing to be seen.  White painted stones marked the way.  We did stop at a little, one room school, with about ten pupils.  On the walls were drawings, including one of Mickey Mouse.  The kids were friendly and curious, though one little girl cried and clung to her brother.  Some more students arrived while we were there and the teacher began a lesson, which we watched for a while.  This school room  was surrounded by nothing but cracked soil for miles and miles, with salt works in the distance.  The salt workers live in temporary little huts next to the works and this school is for their children.

From the school room we headed further north with not much more than the cracked bed of the Rann and the sky visible.  At one point we did see a hawk perched on a white painted rock at most a foot high, so maybe there was some prey around.  Devji asked directions at several salt works until we found the place we were looking for, a flamingo hatchery.  The flamingos had fled, and all that remained were the low dirt mounds that are their nests and the eggs and even the carcasses of a few chicks that they had left behind.  It's unclear why they left.  Perhaps there wasn't enough food in the area (they eat the shrimp that breed in the monsoon) or something disturbed them.  There were hundreds of eggs left behind, each about four inches in length.  The chick carcasses, and I only saw about five of them, were extremely dessicated.  There is now a salt works next to the former breeding mounds.

From the abandoned hatchery we headed east and southeast, again asking directions at salt works.  A long, relatively high bet became visible to the north.  Eventually, we saw a bush, then a scrubby tree, and then grass.  We spotted wild asses and nilgai and finally reached a big lake, a reservoir I think, at the eastern edge of the Rann, where we parked under one of the few big trees and had a very good lunch that we had brought with us.  The lake was full of birds, including common cranes, ducks, and a few flamingos, but they were quite distant.  After lunch, we drove along the lake to a spot where the huge flock of cranes and other birds were somewhat more easily visible.  Next we headed into the ugly town of Patadi and then into the southeast corner of the Rann, passing wild asses on the way to another lake, this one full of flamingos, though they were far off, a line of light pink in the blue lake.  I got fairly good views with binoculars.  The land around the lake was more cracked soil, with many pinkish flamingo feathers littering the wet rim of the lake, which was clearly receding fairly rapidly.  V-shaped flocks of cranes flew over the lake, but landed elsewhere.  We watched the sun set over the lake and then drove back to Dhrangadhra, arriving just before 8.  We stayed at Devji's house, where his wife prepared us a very good dinner and I could wash off the day's dust and sweat with a hot water bucket bath.  The Little Rann excursion cost me 4500 rupees, or about $90 (2000 for two nights in the huts, 2000 for the two days of jeep safaris and 500 for the night in Dhrangadhra, and this included very good meals).