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.
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.
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