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.
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.
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