March 14-22, 2012: Mumbai (Bombay)

I left Nasik for Bombay (renamed Mumbai in 1996) on the morning of the 14th.  My train left shortly after 9 and about 10 we reached the city of Igatpuri and began our descent through several tunnels through the Western Ghats.  The descent was quite sharp at first, though I missed much of the scenery because of all the tunnels.  The lower countryside we reached seemed as dry and brown as the higher scenery.  The train moved at a good pace.  I took it rather than a bus as I figured a bus would likely get caught in traffic entering a city as big as Mumbai, with 18 million people.  (Maharashtra, by the way, is India's second largest state, with 120 million people, one-tenth of India's total.  However, it produces something like 25% of India's GDP.)  Nonetheless, it took us something like an hour going through Mumbai and its suburbs before we reached the huge Indo-Saracenic train station formerly called Victoria Terminus and now named Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus.  The Shiv Sena, a right wing Hindu party led by a self-admitted admirer of Hitler, took power in Bombay and Maharashtra twenty years ago or so and proceeded to rename almost anything with an English name after an Indian.  Their hero, Shivaji, got all the big stuff.

I really only saw the station from the inside as I hopped into a taxi and took it to the hotel I had booked.  On the way we passed the Gateway of India and the Taj Mahal Hotel, icons of Bombay.  My hotel is just a few blocks south of the Taj Mahal Hotel, though considerably cheaper.  My room, on the fifth floor and up 88 stairs, is only 600 rupees a night, about 12 dollars.  However, it is very small, about five by nine feet, into which they managed to pack a comfortable bed and two little tables.  It even has a television.  It is clean and comfortable, despite being a little stuffy.  And it is quiet.

After lunch, I walked through the stately old buildings north of my hotel towards the Taj Mahal Hotel, stopping at the site of the hotel I had stayed in in 1979.  I remembered where it was, just behind the Taj Mahal, and even had retrieved its name and address from an old aerogram.  It has been replaced by a far nicer hotel, with rooms at about $100/night.  I stopped in and the guy at the reception desk told me it had opened in 1991.  He remembered the old one, though, the Stiffles.  I walked around the Taj Mahal Hotel and to the plaza leading to the Gateway of India, built in the 1920's to commemorate the visit of King George and Queen Mary in 1911.  The security is, of course, much stricter than it was in 1979.  In fact, I think there was no obvious security in 1979.  Now there are many ugly barriers and only one passage, manned by police, through them to the plaza.  I walked around and sat in the plaza for a while.  There is now a giant statue of Shivaji facing the Gateway.  It felt quite warm, compared to Nasik, with temperatures in the 90's and more humidity.  I've switched to wearing shorts rather than long pants.  (Indians almost never wear shorts.)  There were lots of people milling around.

Eventually, I continued north into the heart of the city center, passing grand old colonial buildings in much better shape than they are in Calcutta.  I reached the Maidan, the grassy area that once was the waterfront on the Arabian Sea, before landfill to the west, and watched the cricket players, some very good, in the late afternoon.  Fronting the Maidan are stately colonial buildings, the old Secretariat, the buildings of the University of Mumbai (including a clocktower modeled after Giotto's Campanile in Florence that used to play, among other tunes, "Rule Britannia"), and the High Court.  I crossed the Maidan and went by the spectacular towers and domes of the Indo-Saracenic Western Railways Building and reached a tourist office.  Walking back towards my hotel, I took a street a block further east than I had come.  I passed more old buildings from the Raj, including the huge Indo-Saracenic former Prince of Wales Museum, now also named after Shivaji.  This area is called Kala Ghoda, which means "Black Horse," after an equestrian statue of Edward VII that has been removed.  Just to the north is the area called Fort.  The British built a fort here in the 1670's, but demolished it in the 1860's and over the subsequent decades built the stately center that still largely exists.  Bombay really began to grow in the 1860's, after British direct rule ended the monopoly of the East India Corporation, the American Civil War stimulated cotton growing and cotton mills in India, and the Suez Canal opened.  The downtown is all very nice, I think, and relatively clean.  No autorickshaws in Mumbai, only taxis, and I've seen a few cows.  However, there are lots of beggars near my hotel and elsewhere.

I made my way back to the Gateway of India and sat in the plaza until dark.  I had a cold coming on.  I had awakened that morning with a sore throat and stuffed nose and wondered where I could have caught a cold.  At breakfast at a restaurant where I had eaten several meals in Nasik, one of the waiters was sniffling heavily, so I have a possible culprit.

I was tired from my cold the next morning, but nonetheless decided to walk around the city.  I probably should have just rested for the day, but I was looking forward to seeing the city.  I walked past the Taj Mahal Hotel and the Gateway of India and then to the city center.  I walked to the whitewashed cathedral, finished in the early 1700's and filled with interesting plaques, and to the grassy circle just east of it, with the neo-classical Town Hall, dating from the early 1800's, on the other side.  The Asiatic Society Reading Room, filling the cavernous central hall, is a little run down, but interesting.  It has a statue of a former Governor of Bombay in the early 1800's with the great name of Mountstuart Elphinstone.

I had a little breakfast and then walked north to the huge train station, the former Victoria Terminus, the masterpiece of Indo-Saracenic architecture.  It dates from the 1880's, with a statue of Progress atop the central dome.  Quite a spectacular building, I think.  I went inside and it was full of people.  Both long distance and city and suburban trains arrive and depart. After looking around, I was tired and sat for a while among all the people waiting for trains.  A young woman with her mother waiting for a train back to their home in Kolhapur, to the south, sat next to me and struck up a conversation.  Her English got better as she spoke more.  Besides the usual questions, she asked me what caste I belonged to (she is a Jain, which is not a caste but a religion) and how many rooms I had in my house. (She had nine, she told me with some pride.)

Tired, I must have sat there an hour or more before walking back slowly to my hotel, passing more interesting old buildings, including another Indo-Sarcenic gem, the Municipal Building, and a political rally for a small party started in the '50's by the dalit leader Ambedkar.  I got back about 5:30 and read newspapers until dinner at about 7.

I felt better the next morning and about 9 began walking north along Marine Drive, the six lane road that fronts Back Bay, Mumbai's western sea shore.  I walked on a wide pedestrian pavement next to the sea, with the curving bay in front of me.  It was very hazy, and hot in the sun, but eventually with a cool breeze off the sea.  Following the arc of the bay, I reached a dirty beach and continued past it towards the point, where the British governor had a home that is now the home of the governor of Maharashtra.  That is off limits, but I did pass some nice old mansions and reached Walukeshwar Temple near the point, where Krishna is supposed to have built a lingam out of sand to honor Shiva.  I backtracked and reached a colorful Jain Temple and then Kamla Nehru Park (named after Nehru's wife) on Malabar Hill, with good, but hazy, views back the way I had come in the morning along Back Bay.  I sat there for a while.  There were a lot of friendly school kids and several bus loads of European tourists.  I've seen a lot more westerners here in Mumbai than I have in months.

Little kids, and young adults, in India often call me "Uncle," a term of respect, I'm sorry to say, for the elderly.  I was a little puzzled when I first got to India about this, especially since at times it sounded like "Nuncle," almost Shakespearian (although it did occur to me that perhaps they were saying "Numbskull").  But then I read a newspaper article by a guy of 35 distressed that young women of 25 were now calling him "Uncle."

In the park I had a lunch of dried fruit and nuts that I had bought the day before, and then continued past the Parsi Towers of Silence on Malabar Hill, surrounded by walls and trees.  I have read that the Parsis are having trouble disposing of their dead in the towers, as vultures in Mumbai aren't as plentiful as they used to be.  I walked to the Mani Bhavan, a three story mansion where Gandhi used to stay during his visits to Bombay from 1917 to 1934.  It is now a museum with photos and some dioramas.  I asked the man at the front desk where he stayed after 1934, but he either didn't understand or didn't know, or both.  Walking further north, I reached the sea again and passed the very heavily fortified U.S. Consulate.  A bit further is the Mahalakshmi Temple.  Lakshmi is the goddess of wealth, so this is an important temple in Mumbai, India's commercial center.  Just north is the Haji Ali Tomb and Mosque on a rocky island reached by a long causeway full of beggars.  I don't think I've ever seen so many crippled people in one place.  Lots of pilgrims were streaming in and out along the causeway.  I arrived about 5 and stayed until 7, just after sunset.  Sometime before sunset, a group of qawwali singers began to sing under an arcade next to the mosque and I listened until they finished just before evening prayers began.  There were seven of them, three with instruments, two drums and a harmonium.  An older, lead singer was quite theatrical, raising his arms dramatically, while a younger one had a great voice.  One of the singers was a boy of about ten.  I very much enjoyed it.  I took a taxi back to near my hotel, for only about two dollars despite it being about four miles away.  Taxis are cheap here.  The one from the train station to my hotel had only been about sixty cents.

My cold had resulted in a sinus infection the next morning.  After breakfast and reading the newspapers, I took a taxi for two dollars north to what formerly was called Victoria Gardens.  I walked through the zoo there, which wasn't too bad, with big cages and some spectacular birds, including huge pink pelicans, about twice the size of the brown pelicans in California.  It also has the Kala Ghoda, the statue of Edward VII removed from downtown.

However, I had gone there not for the zoo, but for the museum in a recently restored Palladian building that was the Victoria and Albert Museum, now renamed for an Indian.  It is beautiful inside, with a statue of Albert and below him a statue of David Sassoon, a rich Baghdadi Jew who had fled Baghdad during a Turkish persecution in the early 1800's and remade his fortune in Bombay.  He also established a library in downtown Bombay.  The museum has silver, ceramics, laquerware and many other beautiful things.  It also has hundreds of little figures made in the 1920's of typical Indian people of different castes, religions, and professions.  Also, there are models showing the growth of Bombay from seven islands when it was given to the King of England by the Portuguese in 1661 as part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza until the early 20th century.  There's been quite a bit of landfill over the centuries.  Outside the museum is the stone elephant from Elephanta Island in Bombay's harbor and statues of British colonial figures, including Queen Victoria and a headless Lord Cornwallis, who after his defeat at Yorktown served with more success as Governor General in India.

I had dried fruits and nuts for lunch and then took a taxi to the Mahalakshmi Dhobi Ghats.  From an overpass I looked down on the area where Mumbai gets its laundry done.  There are many little tubs for beating dirty clothes clean, though only a few were being used this late in the afternoon.  There were, however, lines and lines of drying laundry, much of it very colorful, and other clean and dried laundry wrapped in bundles ready to be returned.  I took a commuter train from a nearby station back to the center for all of 4 rupees, or eight cents, and walked back through the center to the Gateway of India.  On that late Saturday afternoon it was packed.

The next morning I entered the former Prince of Wales Museum, now named after Shivaji, when it opened just after 10.  It is housed in a magnificent Indo-Saracenic building completed in 1924.  The collection is magnificent, too, and well organized.  I think it is the best museum I've been to in India, better than the National Museum in Delhi.  An audio tour came with the foreigner's admission ticket and it was very good.  The collection of Indian painting, specifically the miniatures that became popular under the Moghul Empire and spread also to Hindu kingdoms, was particularly good, and there was a very interesting section on Vishnu.  I learned quite a lot.  The museum also contains much beautiful Indian sculpture, Chinese ceramics and dozens of beautifully decorated tiny snuff bottles.  (Snuff became popular in China after it was introduced by Europeans.)  Much of the collection came from the Tata family.  Weapons included those used by the Moghul Emperor Akbar and Shivaji.  I even enjoyed the stuffed animals, including a white tiger (not really white, but a much lighter yellow than normal tigers).

I was there for over six hours, until about 4:30, and then walked to a nearby synagogue, built in 1884 and painted sky blue on the outside.  I then walked to a camera shop and bought a new camera, one that I had been pondering buying for a few days.  It is much better than my old one with its flickering lens.  I should have bought one like it before I left for India.  Walking back to my hotel that Sunday afternoon, I saw young men playing cricket in some of the quiet Sunday streets of the downtown and passed the Bombay Stock Exchange, with considerable security arrayed all around it.  The Gateway of India area was packed with people.  As usual, I had dinner in a restaurant near my hotel.  There are several Muslim ones, with good chicken and much of the clientele in white Islamic robes and caps.  One guy I keep seeing in such dress sports bright henna-orange hair and a similarly orange beard.

The next morning I walked south to the Sassoon docks, where fishermen unload their catches.  That happens early in the morning and I was there about 10, so I missed that.  I did see, however, some fish on sale and hundreds of women sitting in the shade of open air arcades peeling shrimp.  Sometimes as many as thirty women would be sitting in an oval around a huge pile of shrimp and peeling shrimp before placing them in baskets to be taken to nearby coolers filled with ice.  These women a Koli people, traditionally fisherfolk and the inhabitants of Colaba, this part of Mumbai, for centuries.  They were very friendly.  Unfortunately, no photos are allowed because of Indian paranoia about photos of docks.  I walked further south to the "Afghan Church," built in the 1840's and '50's in memory of those who served and those who fell in the first unsuccessful British foray into Afghanistan.  It looks like an English country church, but was closed.

In the afternoon I took a taxi north to the mid 19th century Crawford Market, with friezes over some of the entrances produced by Rudyard Kipling's father.  I walked around inside and then headed further north through the crowded street bazaars past the gleaming white Jama Masjid, dating from 1800, to the Mumba Devi Temple.  The Shiv Sena claimed Bombay was named after this goddess, although I've read the more likely derivation of the name is from the Portuguese "Bom Bahia," meaning "Good Bay."

I walked back the way I had come and then continued to the former Victoria Terminus and sat there for a while eating dried fruit and nuts while watching the crowds.  Leaving the station a guy tried to pickpocket me. I pushed him away forcefully, but he tried again a few minutes later.  This time I really pushed and shoved him away, and he barely reacted.  I walked slowly back to my hotel, passing the afternoon cricketers on the Maidan and the great buildings along the Maidan.  I stopped in at the Taj Mahal Hotel and looked around that beautiful hotel, built in 1903.  There are no signs of the 2008 terrorist attack, except for the strict security upon entry.  President Obama's photo held center stage among those of visiting dignitaries and celebrities, as did his comments in a hotel autograph/comment book on display.

The next morning I took a boat soon after 9 from the Gateway of India to Elephanta Island, about six miles to the northeast.  The trip took about an hour and it was very pleasant to be out in the harbor.  There were lots of boats, pleasure craft near the Gateway and commercial ships out further. A couple of Indian Navy ships were docked north of the Gateway.  The views were hazy, but upon reaching the forested island we could see the skyscrapers of Mumbai through the  haze.  In the hot sun I walked along the long jetty and up about a hundred steps, past little shops selling all sorts of junk, to the caves, dating, they think, from the 8th century.

There are five caves, but only one has much in it.  It is not really a cave, but a chamber cut into the rock for a temple dedicated to Shiva.  It is quite a big chamber, with perhaps twenty or so pillars.  The walls are covered with beautiful sculpture depicting him and other Hindu gods.  The centerpiece is a three-faced Shiva, said to have in fact five faces, one facing the wall behind and one invisible.  The forward facing face is serene and meditative.  To its left is a female representation of Shiva, with flowers in her hair.  To its right is a scowling, mustached Shiva, with snakes in his hair.  These representations are said to represent Shiva as creator, preserver and destroyer.  There are other representations of Shiva in other panels, showing him dancing, with his consort Parvati, and other gods and demons.  Many are very well done, but some are in very poor condition.  The Portuguese, who named the island after a stone elephant they found on it, are supposed to have used some of the sculpture for target practice.

I explored the four other, unfinished caves, and then had a not so good thali lunch before climbing up to the top of the island, perhaps 400 feet above sea level, where there were two big cannons that must be from the World War I or II era.  There were good views over the hazy harbor.  I left on a boat back about 3:30 and spent the rest of the afternoon walking around the town doing some errands.

The next morning I made a day trip to Mumbai's closest hill station, Matheran, in the Western Ghats.  It is less than 30 miles to the east as the crow flies, but you have to make a great arc to the north to get there.  I took a taxi to the former Victoria Terminus about 8 and bought a ticket to Neral on the city and suburban train network.  These trains leave constantly and can be incredibly crowded.  I've read they carry six million passengers a day and 3500 people die each year from accidents, including falling out of the always open doorways, getting electrocuted when riding on the top of cars, and getting hit while crossing the tracks.

After a quick breakfast at the station, I left on a train shortly before 9 that took almost two hours to reach Neral.  There were still empty seats as we left, but none after the first stop.  Soon the train was jam packed, with incredible pushing and shoving to get on and off.  I was glad I had a window seat away from all the turmoil.  We passed trains with people hanging out the open doors.

At Neral I hopped on the waiting narrow gauge ( a little more than two feet) railroad of six small cars and a diesel engine (they retired the steam engines in 1980) that chugs up to Matheran.  The small cars were full of passengers, including a rowdy group celebrating a birthday.  Matheran is at about 2600 feet elevation, which is about 2400 feet above Neral.  The two are something like four miles apart, but the twisting railroad route, with something like 280 curves (numbered along the way), runs almost 13 miles.  It took us more than two hours to go those thirteen miles, though I enjoyed the trip.  The railway was built in 1901-1907 and is an impressive feet of engineering.  There is only one tunnel, on a curve on the steep rock face, and great views down from the narrow train bed to the valley floor a thousand feet and more below.  With no guard rail, you hope the carriage doesn't topple off, because it would fall and roll all the way down.  A sign in the carriage warned not to close the windows in a storm, as the wind could blow the carriage off the bogies.

The dry countryside got greener near the top, with a nice forest on the plateau.  No cars are allowed in town. There are lots of horses, though, and human rickshaws.  I got there shortly after 1 and had a little more than three hours before the last train down left at 4:30, though I could have taken a share taxi down.  The town center has shops and is busy, but the dusty red dirt roads beyond are quiet and tree-lined.  I stopped in at the colonial Lord's Hotel and talked with the manager.  I walked into the woods and found another hotel that formerly was a colonial home, built by a Colonel Barr, the friendly manager told me.  He showed me around and even gave me a glass of lemon ginger water.  The rooms are huge, with four poster beds and bathrooms  the size of some hotel rooms.  A veranda surrounds the building, with chairs to sit on and watch the monkeys in the trees.  The main sitting hall has a ceiling 45 feet high, with a dining room with a long dining table in the room behind.

I walked to one of the view points looking west, but the bright afternoon sunlight and haze made it difficult to appreciate the view fully.  A herd of ponies carrying sacks passed by with a cloud of dust as I walked to another viewpoint, this one looking southeast.  Friendly dogs followed me, one chasing a band of langur monkeys he spotted on the ground.  They quickly ascended trees.  The viewpoints would be much nicer in the early morning or late afternoon.  I had considered spending a night in Matheran, but two of my guidebooks said hotels are reluctant to rent to single men, because so many come to Matheran to commit suicide.

The 30 rupees second class seats were all sold out, so I bought a 210 rupees first class seat for the 4:30 train back down the mountain and enjoyed the trip.  It was about twenty minutes faster going down than going up.  From Neral I soon caught a train heading back to Mumbai, although I had to stand for ten or fifteen minutes before a seat opened up.  I was glad to get one as the train was full all the way back to Mumbai, an almost two hour trip.  We got there at 8:30 and I took a taxi back to my hotel.

The next day I slept late, or relatively late, till 7:30, had a leisurely breakfast and then walked along the Maidan, already full of cricket players, to Churchgate Station, the city and suburban train station furthest south.  (The massive former Victoria Station, now usually called CST for Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, has both city and suburban and long distance trains.)  The sky was very hazy, an ugly brownish haze.  The newspaper that morning had a story saying that a dust cloud had arrived in Mumbai the day before, the dust coming from either Rajasthan or Arabia.

I got to the station about 11 and sat and waited for the dabbawallahs to appear.  These are the guys who deliver lunches prepared by housewives to their husbands working downtown.  Soon I saw men getting off the trains carrying racks on their heads full of lunches, perhaps thirty or more on each one.  Some were the old fashioned metal, cylindrical tiffin boxes, but most were newer models made of soft and often colorful fabric.  This is apparently quite an industry, and an efficient one, with thousands employed delivery lunches from homes to offices.  Some, but not all, of the men wore the traditional white pajama-like clothes and Gandhi caps.  In downtown Mumbai I've seen very few men so dressed.  And I would guess that perhaps half the women, and even more of young women, wear western dress, far more than any other place I've been in India.

I watched until just before noon, when the number of dabbawallahs getting off trains had dried up.  I walked north to Bombay Hospital, following a dabbawallah part of the way, until he stopped off at a State Bank of India office to deliver lunches.  At the hospital, after some looking, but really very quickly all things considered, I found a dermatologist to look at a small growth between my neck and shoulder.  It was a benign growth similar to one I had had a few years before on my leg.  She removed it with a local anesthetic and a radio frequency device, with no pain.  The consultation cost me about $20 and the surgery $30.  I walked back to my hotel in the early afternoon and the haze seemed to be worse.

March 9-13, 2012: Nasik

I left Daman on the morning of the 9th.  Originally, I had planned to head down the coast to Bombay, a little more than 100 miles away.  But I decided to go inland first, over the Western Ghats to Nasik.  I did take one last look at the sea before I left Daman.  The tide was way out, with waves breaking maybe a mile from the dirty beach.  I took the bus to Vapi, arriving about 11 and waited for the 12:30 bus to Nasik.  While I was sitting waiting and reading the newspaper, three or four guys in their brown bus uniforms came up to talk with me.  One spoke quite good English and invited me to have tea in the little bus terminal cafe.  When they heard I was heading to Nasik, they took me to the bus waiting in the yard before it was driven to the platform and got me a good seat before anyone else in what turned out to be a crowded bus.

We headed inland, going east through the flat terrain of the coastal strip.  After about 40 minutes, we turned more to the southeast and headed into the hills.  The Indian subcontinent is more or less a plateau (the Deccan Plateau), with hills a little inland on both coasts, called the Western Ghats and the Eastern Ghats.  The hills we passed through were golden brown, a little like the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in California, though the trees were totally different.  Some trees were full of green leaves, while others had almost no leaves, including some tall, thin, gnarly trees with stubby branches.  It was quite scenic.  The road was good as we rose to about 2000 feet above sea level and reached the border between Gujarat and Maharashtra.  The road on the Maharashtra side was considerably worse.  We drove along a plateau and then descended a bit and rose again to an even higher plateau before descending a bit to Nasik.  We had a twenty minute lunch stop about 3 and got to Nasik, at about 1700 feet elevation, about 4.  The last part of the trip passed through a rich agricultural area, with wheat, tomatoes, grapes and other crops.  It was interesting to see the vineyards along the road.  There are also wineries near Nasik, though I didn't see any.  But it's somewhat famous in India for its wine, which is a little odd because Nasik is also a major religious center.

After getting a hotel, I walked to the sacred Godavari River, one of India's seven holy rivers.  Nasik is not far downriver from its source in the Western Ghats (it flows across India to the Bay of Bengal) and so the river is not very wide at Nasik.  However, the riverside area, called the Ram Kund, is a wide area of concrete ghats (stairs) with narrow channels and wide pools, all of which are filthy, with lots of debris and filmy, oily water in places.  There are also temples and an open market.  This area is one of the four sites (the others are Haridwar, Allahabad, and Ujjain) of the  Kumbh Mela, the world's largest religious festival, held every three years, with each of the four sites getting its turn every twelve years..  In the late afternoon there wasn't much activity, but there were some pilgrims, along with sadhus and beggars and people selling things

I looked around a bit and then walked away from the river for maybe ten minutes to the Kala Rama Temple.  Rama and Sita are supposed to have spent some of their exile in Nasik and the temple marks the spot where Rama's brother Lakshmana sliced off the nose of the sister of the evil demon king Ravana.  She apparently had turned herself into a beautiful woman in an attempt to seduce the virtuous Rama.  In fact, Nasik derives its name from this incident, as "nasika" means "nose."  The temple is fairly nondescript, dating from the late 18th century.  Despite the antiquity of the site, none of Nasik's temples date from any earlier.  Women were sitting nearby and singing, and that was nice.  In the sanctuary are three black statues of Rama, his wife Sita and his brother Lakshmana ("Kala" means "black").  The statues were covered in flowers and white linens and looked rather odd. All three had big round white eyes with black pupils, and their mouths also were white and looked somewhat oval. I couldn't make out any other features.  Pilgrims were streaming in and out of the sanctuary.  I listened to the singing outside for a while, then walked the short distance to the Sita Gumpha, the cave where Sita is supposed to have hidden from Ravana.  The cave seems to be behind a relatively modern entrance which had a long line waiting to get in, so I passed up the view of Sita's cave.

Back at the Ram Kund (the ghats along the river) there were a few lighted, floating offerings at dusk.  I walked back to my hotel through crowded streets and had a relatively expensive chicken with yogurt and tomato sauce dinner (almost $7) at a fancy restaurant. I thought they perhaps would not let me in as my clothes were dirty (but my hands were clean and this was one of the best chicken dinners that I've ever seen).  No hot water at the hotel, so I had a cold water bucket bath.  The newspaper had had a story about an unusual March cold wave in Maharashtra, with some lows in the 40's (but highs still in the high 80's and low 90's), but the cold water wasn't too bad.  Nasik is relatively cool, perhaps because of the altitude.  Highs have been in the low 80's, about 10 degrees cooler than Bombay on the coast a little more than 100 miles away.

It was cool the next morning as I walked to the Ram Kund about 8 or 8:30.  I stayed there until about noon and enjoyed watching all the activity.  There were lots of pilgrims.  There were bathers in the early morning, and washerwomen.  I saw a group of woman sadhus, mostly older women and all dressed in orange.  I watched  several pujas (religious ceremonies) being conducted on the ghats.  Barbers were shaving heads and beards.  I seemed to be the only foreigner around.  A lot of the men, in fact maybe a majority, were dressed in white and wearing what are called Gandhi caps, those white caps that Nehru wore.  (Gandhi apparently wore them for only a short time in the early 1920's before he adopted his shaven head, dhoti and sandals look.)  The white clothes they wear are very simple, usually thin trousers and shirts that look almost like pajamas.  Some men wear white dhotis instead of trousers.

Many if not all the pujas were held in commemoration of dead relatives, often with a framed photo of the deceased on a chair nearby.  At one the husband, perhaps in his 40's, of a dead wife sat alone with a priest making the little offerings I've seen elsewhere, while men in white stood nearby and women in colorful saris sat nearby.  Some of the women were weeping, a show of emotion I have not seen elsewhere.  At the conclusion of the puja, the man took the offerings on a metal plate up stairs to a simple tower and placed them on a surprising ugly metal altar backed by a rusty piece of corrugated metal.  Others were making similar offerings and I climbed up the stairs to watch with others.  A crow picked at one of the offerings and then flew off with what looked like a little ball of rice in its beak.  I was later told that that is a good sign.  If a crow eats from the offerings, that means the soul of the deceased is at rest.  If not, it is still searching for something. (By the way, in the newspapers, death notices are often entitled "Sad Demise.")

At a pause in the action of another puja being performed by what looked like the son and brother of the man in the photo, both came up to me to ask me where I was from and happily posed for photos.  At another one, conducted by five middle aged brothers, with shaved heads and pot bellies (they were wearing only shorts or towels), for their father, with four wizened sisters of the deceased behind them, a man said to me, "My grandfather."  He said he had died ten days ago and this puja was for the tenth day.  I talked to quite a few people, all very friendly and happy to describe what was going on.  I spent about four hours wandering around and watching.  By noon the activity was diminishing and I soon walked through the interesting market and then through very crowded streets back to my hotel.  The day was the birthday of Shivaji, the 17th century Maratha chieftain, and there were banners and posters and statues set up on the streets, often backed by very loud music, to commemorate the event.  He established a Maratha state, fighting against the Moghuls and other Muslim states, and is a hero to the Hindu Marathas.  (The people in Maharashtra are predominately Marathas and speak Marathi.  Indian states are primarily arranged on a language basis, although in several states in the north Hindi is the predominate language.)

Back at the hotel I had a delicious all-you-can-eat thali lunch, including what they call "buttermilk" (a watery milk which I think is whey, as in "curds and whey") and a custard desert, and then rested in my room.  About 4 I headed back to the Ram Kund.  There was considerably less activity than in the morning.  I wandered through the market and saw grapes (I had some later and they were delicious) and pomegranates and lots of other fruits and vegetables.  I saw the longest carrots I've ever seen, a foot or so long.  I walked again to the Sita Gumpha and the Kala Rama Temple and heard the women singing again.  About 6 I went back to the Ram Kund.  There were a few bathers and a few people floating little, lighted offerings on one of the pools.  I talked to a guy from Tanzania, an ethnic Indian born there, with parents originally from Kutch in Gujarat.

About 9:30 that night I watched the parade for Shivaji's birthday, consisting mostly of raucous young men sprinkled with orange powder dancing to very loud music.  Some were banging drums and some were even banging big pans.  Anything to make noise.  There were trucks blasting the loud music, a few guys on horses, and a few floats depicting Shivaji.  It wasn't a very long parade, less than an hour, I think.

The next morning about 9 I took a bus about 20 miles to the west to Trimbak, site of the Trimbakeshwar Temple, holding one of the twelve jyotirlingas.  Trimbak is in a scenic location, with a semi-circle of steep cliffs to the west.  The temple has a tall black shikara (tower) but is not particularly attractive.  No Hindus are allowed in.  There was a long line of Hindus waiting to get in.

I walked fairly quickly through the town crowded with pilgrims to the foot of the hills west of town and about 10 began the climb up to Brahmagiri and the site of the source of the Godavari.  The path was fairly rough, not smooth steps like at Girnar and Shatrunjaya.  I probably should have worn shoes rather than sandals, though there were old women doing it in their bare feet.  If I had been in my bare feet, it would have taken me days.  There weren't a lot of pilgrims, but those along the way were very friendly.  Despite the time of day, it wasn't too hot.  There were trees here and there and a cool breeze.  The steep cliffs above were a little intimidating, though.  The first part of the hike wasn't too steep.  However, reaching the cliff face, steps went up steeply, rising about 150 feet, and then you entered an incredible cleft cut right into the cliff face, rising 200 feet to the top of the cliff and the plateau on top.  The cleft had two rock cut gates and a rock cut temple.  There were orange painted depictions of Hanuman and another deity cut into the rock walls of the stairway.  The steps were very steep through the channel cut into the rock.

The top of the cliff was about 1000 feet above the valley below, with great views of Trimbak below and the mesa-studded countryside in the distance.  Apparently, the top of the plateau was once a fort, conquered at one time by Shivaji's father.  There wasn't much evidence of it, other than the fantastic rock cut entry through the cliff.  A further ascent of about 200 feet took me to the crest of the ridge on the plateau, from where I descended the other side about 200 feet to a temple on the cliff edge.  The temple wasn't much, but next to it was a little cement pavilion over what seemed to be a small square well, with three trees around it.  This is supposed to be the source of the Godavari, seeping out of the roots of the trees.  I later asked a couple of guys how that could be the source of the Godavari when the water in the well doesn't lead to the river and they told me it's just mythological.

A young Brahmin priest sat up the pavilion next to the well and conducted prayers for those who wanted them.  He would draw water up out of the well in a pail and then pour it into a bowl to use in the puja.  Some pilgrims brought plastic bottles to fill with Godavari water.  After looking around a while, with stupendous views over the cliff to the mesas in the distance, I sat under the trees next to the pavilion and watched as pilgrims came and went for maybe an hour.  Monkeys (macaques) and goats hovered nearby to eat up the offerings (coconuts and flowers and other things) when the chance arose.  The priest had a long stick to ward them off when he felt they merited it, though they were quite successful.

I walked along the cliff face to the north to another little temple, with more fantastic views, and then ascended the ridge to head back to Trimbak.  The wind at the top of the ridge was very strong now.  After a leisurely walk down, with a stop for some cookies and corn nuts, I got back to Trimbak about 4.  After drinking a liter of water, I spent about an hour and a half wandering around town.  There was still a long line to get into the Trimbakeshwar Temple.  Another temple had a pool of green Godavari water in front of it.  Apparently, even being a non-Hindu, I would be permitted to bathe in it, but I chose not to.  About 5:30 I took the bus back to Nasik and, after the hike with no lunch, particularly enjoyed the all-you-can-eat thali that night.

I had another two days in Nasik.  I had made a hotel reservation for one of the few well-regarded budget hotels in Bombay when I was in Daman, but couldn't get a room until the 14th.  The next day was pretty relaxed, and I was tired from the ascent of Brahmagiri the day before.  About 11 I went to the Railway Booking Office to buy a train ticket to Bombay.  There were four or five lines of maybe ten people each and I got in one. After almost half an hour, when I was third from the window, the ticket seller put up a sign that he was taking a half hour lunch break. Luckily, a very kind young guy in the next line who was the second in line motioned me go in front of him.  I asked him if he was sure and he waved me in.  No one behind him objected.  I got my ticket for 83 rupees (about $1.75) for the almost four hour journey.  The autorickshaw to and from the booking office cost me 100 rupees.

About noon I walked to an internet cafe to find it was closed and to find four guys sitting in front all covered in colored powder.  I asked a guy why and he told me they celebrate Holi five days later in Nasik.  They seemed happy to have me take their photos.  A group of young girls, wet and covered in colors, came by and I took their photos, too.  They threw powder at each other and I got a little on my feet.  One poured some colored water on another's head, but they didn't target me.  Nonetheless, I decided to spend the day at the hotel.  In the afternoon, most shops were closed and I did see guys coming past the hotel all covered in colored powder.  The receptionist had some on his face.

The next morning about 9:30 I took a city bus about five miles southwest of the city to Pandav Lena, a somewhat conical hill with Buddhist caves carved into it about halfway up.  It is a steep climb of maybe 300 feet elevation to get to the caves, 24 of them. The earliest are from the first century BC, while most are from the second century AD.  Some are just small rock cut cells, but many are quite large and have wonderful carvings in them, though many are worn with age.  Some of the rock cut chambers are huge.  One was about 50 feet square, I think, and another maybe 60 by 40 feet, with cells cut out off the central chambers.  The earliest cave had a stupa to represent Buddha, at the end of a nave with 18 columns.  The later caves had Buddha represented in human form, along with many other human forms, bodhisattvas and the like.  Some caves had pillars on their entry, with animals (elephants, lions, cows) represented on the capitals.  I enjoyed wandering in and out of the cool caves, looking at the sculpture.  The views out over the dry countryside were nice, too.  I spent about two and a half hours there, and eventually took an autorickshaw back into town, after giving up on the bus.

March 3-8, 2012: Vadodara, Surat, and Daman

About 9 on the morning of March 3rd, I took the bus down the mountain from Pavagadh to Champaner and soon caught a bus heading east to Chhote Udepur, a couple of hours away through mostly level terrain, with some  hills.  I was hoping to get to a village called Kawant, south of Chhote Udepur.  The management at the hotel at Pavagadh had told me there was a hill tribe festival going on there.  In Chotte Udepur I looked for a hotel and sought some information about the festival.  It was a Saturday, the day of the town's weekly market around the town's central lake, or tank, with many very colorful hill tribe people in town.  I enjoyed walking among them despite the hot noonday sun.  I had trouble finding a place to stay and finally ended up talking with some men in a shop.  Most wore Muslim skullcaps but one wore western clothes and gold jewelry and spoke good English.  Their considered opinion was that the festival in Kawant was not until Monday and that I would be better off staying in Vadodara than Chhote Udepur.  The western dressed guy said he was heading to Vadodara shortly and offered to give me a ride.

We left sometime before 1 o'clock in his air conditioned Ford sedan, driven by one of his employees, with another employee and me sitting in the back.  He was an interesting guy, General Manager for Sales and Marketing (he gave me his card) for Vimal Dairy, one of India's big dairy companies.  He told me how the dairy industry operates in India (small farmers bring their cow and water buffalo milk daily to collection tanks, where it is picked up daily by trucks for delivery to the processing plants) and about his three years working in Saudi Arabia for another company about ten years ago.  He also told me that Baroda, the old name for Vadodara, is the mispronunciation, of Vadodara by the British.  I had suspected that, but couldn't quite see how the British got Baroda out of Vadodara.  Once he taught me the proper pronunciation of Vadodara, I could see it.  The accent is on the second syllable and the third and fourth syllables are slurred together, more like "dra."  So it's pronounced "va-DO-dra."  Many still call it and write it "Baroda," though.

We made relatively rapid progress over the sixty miles from Chhote Udepur to Vadodara in his car, even with a stop for a very good lunch on the way.  We arrived about 3:30 and he dropped me off right near the hotel I was aiming for.  He asked me what my budget was for hotels and I said, "500."  He, quite seriously, asked, "Dollars?"  I assured him it was rupees.  The hotel I was aiming for, however, was 780 rupees a night, about $16, but it was a very nice hotel, maybe the best I've had in India, so I took it.  The toilet seat even had one of those paper strips with "Disinfected for your protection" on it.

I spent a couple of hours in my room relaxing and then walked to the nearby very large, relatively modern train station to look around.  I then walked to the nearby Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, with late 19th century domed buildings in the Indo-Saracenic style.  It is quite a large campus and there were many students around.  I noticed a much higher percentage of the women, maybe half or more, than you see ordinarily were wearing western clothes.  Usually in India, a large majority of men wear western clothing while a large majority of women wear Indian clothing.  Nearby was Sayaji Bagh, a large park with a huge Indo-Saracenic style museum building in it, along with a zoo, a planetarium and other places.  It seems quite a nice park and was full of birds just before dark.

The next morning I took an autorickshaw to Laxmi Vilas Palace, the palace of the Gaekwads of Baroda, built from 1878 to 1890.  Sayajirao III was the greatest of the Gaekwads, ruling from the age of 12 in 1875 until his death in 1939.  The Gaekwads were one of the five ruling clans of the Marathi Confederacy (others included the Scindias of Gwalior and the Holkars of Indore), which ruled west central India from the early 1700's until they were defeated by the British in the early 1800's.  They were called the Gaekwads of Baroda, not the Maharajas of Baroda, though I'm not sure why.  The audio tour of the palace said Gaekwad means "Protector of Cows."  (As opposed to "wad of gaek."   Actually, the two syllables are "gae," pronounced like the English word "guy," and "kwad.")  An early ancestor had saved a cow from slaughter.  The Gaekwad was one of the five Indian princely rulers meriting a 21 gun salute by the British and was fabulously rich, as evidenced by the palaces and the other buildings built in Baroda.  Sayajirao is said to have been a particularly progressive prince, the first in India to decree universal, free primary education in his dominions, in 1906.  I do remember, however, seeing a letter somewhere from Motilal Nehru to his son Jawaharlal, then in university in Britain, saying that the Gaekwad had acted like an ass at the Delhi Durbar of 1911, the grand gathering of princes to acknowledge the ascension of King Emperor George V.

The palace is huge and very ornate, a triumph of Indo-Saracenic architecture.  It was designed by a Major Charles "Mad" Mant, who committed suicide soon after construction started.  The Gaekwad and his family still live in part of it.  The current Gaekwad is the great grandson of Sayajirao III.  The audio tour was very good, guiding you through about ten rooms on the ground floor. The outside view of the building is spectacular and you can see the four styles melded in its construction.  The southernmost portion, which was the zenana (the women's quarters) and is were the family lives now, is in Hindu style; then to the north is a portion in the style of a Sikh gurudwara; then a tower in Christian style (Gothic and Venetian); and finally at the north end a portion in Islamic style.  There are lots of European style statues, including in a prominent position outside an Egyptian holding the baby Moses.

Inside are stained glass windows with Indian themes, mosaics, allegorical western style statues, and busts of former gaekwads and their ministers, plus beautiful furnishings.  There a beautiful staircase, with a moldering stuffed tiger under it, several palm filled courtyards, and a courtyard with fountains and Roman style statues.  The huge Durbar Hall is spectacular, with chandeliers, mosaics on the floors and a balcony for the ladies all around it.  An armory has all sorts of weapons, many very famous.  The throne room has a simple white pillow for the Gaekwad to sit on and paintings of Hindu themes in a European style.  Outside there is a stepwell dating from 1405 and a golf course, with quite a few golfers earlier in the morning, but none once it got hot around noon.

I walked slowly through it, enjoying the audio tour, and around it, and spent about four hours there before walking towards the center of town and making a stop at the former home of the Diwan (Chief Minister) of Baroda from 1849 to 1854.  It is mostly in ruins, but the front four story portion is better preserved while the sections on the other three sides of the central courtyard are really in ruins.  The second and third stories have halls with painted walls and ceilings.  They are very detailed and colorful, though not always well preserved.  They show scenes from the Indian epics the Mahabharata and the Ramayana and battle scenes of the British-Maratha wars, with red-coated British depicted along with their cannons and flags.  There are also some domestic scenes of the British, quite interesting.

I walked to the city's central tank, with a big modern Shiva statue in the center, and then to the big Indo-Saracenic style law courts nearby.  Sayajirao III built a lot of impressive buildings.  I walked through an old city gate and eventually to an old ruined palace, with boys playing cricket all around it.  Vadodara has something like 1.5 million people, but the old city center seemed compact.  I took an autorickshaw back towards my hotel, stopping at the Kirti Mandir, cenotaphs for the Gaekwads.  From there I walked back to my hotel, past Sayaji Bagh and the domed buildings of Maharaja Sayaji University.

I slept late the next morning, until past 8, and had a fairly lazy day.  I thought about heading further south, but decided to spend another night in this relatively luxurious and friendly hotel.  I did walk over to Sayaji Bagh in the morning and saw the huge museum from the outside and some of the animals in the zoo (nilgai and sambar deer, which I have seen in the wild, and  blackbucks, a small antelope with spiraling horns).  The weather here is getting warm, with highs around 95 and lows in the 60's.

I left Vadodara the next morning on a bus bound for Surat to the south.  After getting through the city, we traveled through the flat coastal plain, with the Gulf of Cambay off to the west, on a six lane divided highway.  There even was landscaping (bougainvillea) at times on the median.  It was a little hairy, though, as India's expressways have openings in the median for u-turns.  Plus, there were a few vehicles, mostly motorcycles, on the the wrong side of the road, near the far edge.  And there were things you just don't expect to see on an expressway, like a camel cart, a religious procession with flags and a small herd of water buffalo guided by a man with a long pole, all moving along the side of the expressway.  We made good time, going about 35 miles an hour, fast for an Indian bus.  We crossed the wide holy river Narmada, which I had seen at Omkareshwar and Maheshwar in January, and reached Surat, with something like five million people in a little more than three hours.

From the bus station in Surat I hired an autorickshaw to take me to the castle on the river Tapi in the center of town.  It isn't much of a castle, built by the Sultan of Gujarat in the 16th century to fend off the Portuguese and captured later that century by the Moghul Emperor Akbar.  Surat is the site of the British East India Company's first foothold in India, dating from 1612, I think.  That was the extent of my sightseeing in Surat, except for the street scenes coming and going, which included some interesting colonial buildings.  I caught a bus heading further south to Vapi.  It was slower going than the morning bus, as we spent less time on the expressway, and it took a little more than three hours to reach Vapi, near the southern end of the state of Gujarat, at about 5:30.  From Vapi I took another bus for seven miles or so to Daman on the coast.

Daman is another former Portuguese colony and like Diu a Union Territory separate from Gujarat.  The Portuguese took it in 1531 and the Sultan of Gujarat formally ceded it to them in 1559.  As with Goa and Diu, the Indian army forced the Portuguese out in 1961.  I found a hotel and opened the door to the balcony to let in the sea air.  The coast was about three blocks away and the fresh and cool sea air felt wonderful.  I had a fish dinner at the hotel, but it wasn't very good.  It was pomfret, with lots of bones.  After dinner I walked down to the sea (or maybe I should say the gulf, as Daman is across the wide mouth of the Gulf of Cambay from Diu) past many brightly  lit up hotels and small shops selling liquor.  Indian tourists come to Daman because liquor is freeing available, unlike Gujarat, which is dry.  In the dark I could just barely make out the sea, but the beach looked, and smelled, dirty.  The sea air felt great, though.

I was up before 7 the next day and went out on my balcony.  The sky was cloudy and the air cool.  I have rarely seen clouds since my arrival in India.  The sky is almost invariably a hazy shade of blue.  I had breakfast in my hotel and then walked a few blocks to the Damanganga River, with a huge Portuguese fort on the other (southern) side.  The tide was out and the river low, exposing muddy banks with fishing boats stuck in the mud. 

There is a smaller Portuguese fort, Fort St. Jerome, on the north bank of the river, with a plaque over its riverfront gate dated 1677.  A statue of a figure (St. Jerome, I guess) and reliefs of two other figures, looking something like Hindu temple guardians, also adorn the gate.  Inside is a large, open, dusty area, a church, a school and a cemetery.  I walked around and along the walls.  I could see how far out the tide was, with the waves breaking maybe a half mile from the gray beach.  The beach and the water were not at all attractive. 

Leaving the fort, I walked along the river to the sea, passing some fishing boats where, oddly, men were loading fish (three to four feet long, with catfish-like whiskers) from a cart on the shore into the ice filled holds of two of the fishing boats.  The sun was breaking through the morning clouds as I walked along the ugly and dirty sea front, where I could gaze at the quintessential Indian ocean scene of a man squatting at the water line to take a crap.  Where the main street coming from inland meets the beach, there were three signs.  One posted the hours that a lifeguard is on duty.  Another advised against swimming because of dangerous currents.  A third prohibited swimming.

I passed by a hotel that offered an all-you-can-eat buffet breakfast for 73 rupees (about a dollar and a half), so I had a second breakfast while reading the Times of India's coverage of the results from five state elections held over the past month or so.  The voting took place in stages, but the results were all announced on the same day.

About 11:30 I crossed the bridge over the Damanganga River (the tide was much higher than earlier in the morning and the river much fuller) and entered the very large fort on the south bank.  It is more or less rectangular, with ten bastions and two gates, one on the north facing the river and another on the south, with a moat beyond.  The fort is, I think, a little less than half a mile long, from east to west, and somewhat less wide.  The north gate had a plaque in Portuguese dated 1593 and inside the fort was a very nice part of town, with government buildings, both old and new, including the old Portuguese governor's building.  There were lots of trees and not much traffic. 

I walked to the Cathedral of Bom Jesus near the southern gate, with a tree-filled plaza in front.  The cathedral is a big barn of a building, completed in 1603, with a beautifully carved and painted pulpit and altarpieces.  I sat in the plaza for a while under the shady trees, then walked out the southern gate (with a plaque in Portuguese dated 1581) and walked along the walls towards the sea.  It was a little hot in the midday sun, but with a very cooling sea breeze.  I walked along the sea and then the river under the walls and re-entered the fort through the north gate.

I walked through the quiet street along the inside of the north wall to the northwest bastion and climbed it for the view out to sea and back over the fort, river and town.  I came down and walked along a grassy patch along the western wall to the ruins of a Dominican convent and looked around what is left of a huge church and adjacent cloisters.  I walked again to the Cathedral.  Another church, on the opposite side of the plaza, was closed but said to be beautifully decorated inside.  I sat in the plaza and the cathedral for a while, then ascended the walls of the fort again just east of the southern gate.  I walked along the eastern wall, with views of the grass filled moat on one side and ruins of former barracks on the other.  I also passed some trees with red blossoms before I came down a ramp, walked through some city streets and then climbed up to the northeastern bastion and walked along the northern wall of the fort, passing over the gate and then by some old cannons atop the wall.  Several were of English make, marked "GR" for George Rex, so they had to have been cast sometime after the first George ascended the throne in 1714.

Reaching the northwestern bastion again, with good views in the late afternoon, I came down and walked again to and through the Dominican convent ruins on the way back to the Cathedral, reaching it just in time for the start of the six o'clock mass.  There were only about fifteen worshipers.  I didn't stay for long, but headed north through and out of the fort and over the river.  I watched the sun disappear into the mist over the sea at about a quarter to 7.   A full moon had already arisen upstream over the river. 

I would have left Daman the next morning, but it was Holi, the Hindu festival of colors, celebrating the beginning of spring.  It is celebrated by people throwing colored powder at each other.  I had read and been told that foreigners are a particular target, so I figured it would not be a good day to travel.  I had also heard that sometimes colored water and even paint is thrown, so I was a little wary.  I walked to breakfast in the morning and didn't see anything being thrown, and saw only a few people with colored powder on their faces or hair or clothes. 

I cowardly spent most of the day in my hotel room reading, but from my balcony I could see people, mostly young men and boys, passing by with with colorful powder on them.  Other boys went door to door banging drums and dancing with batons rather pathetically.  At lunch I saw a group of about ten young men riding on motorcycles and heavily doused with powder.  Most people on the street, though, were untouched.  Later in the afternoon a group of teenage and younger girls with some powder on them came by singing, dancing and throwing water on each other.  Still later, older men, perhaps in their 30's, danced and sang, apparently drunkenly, in the street in front of my hotel.  I watched it all safely from my third story balcony.  By evening, it all seemed to be over.  I have read that Nehru when he was prime minister would stand in his white homespun cotton clothes at the gates of his official residence on Holi to be pelted with colors by his countrymen.

February 28 - March 2, 2012: Champaner and Pavagadh

I left Bhavnagar at 9 on the 28th on a bus bound for Vadodara, formerly (and still often) called Baroda.  We headed north through almost deserted wetlands, but an area otherwise very dry where there was no water.  The water apparently comes from the high tides of the Gulf of Cambay (also known as the Gulf of Khambhat) as there were very white areas and a few salt works.  There were no trees, no bushes, and very little grass.  There was cracked, white, dried ground here and there, and occasional muddy beds of waterways presumably connecting with the Gulf.  It was quite a strange area.  After an hour or so the terrain became grassier, with trees and bushes, and eventually crops, appearing.  Wheat was being reaped and there were a few towns. 

We turned east, leaving the Kathiawar Peninsula and crossed the Sabarmati River, much narrower and with much less water than further upstream at Ahmedabad.  I guess it all gets siphoned off for drinking and irrigation.  We were now north of the Gulf of Cambay and the farmland was much richer, with banana groves, and there were many towns.  We had a lunch stop about noon and reached the main Ahmedabad-Vadodara highway a little after 1.  About half an hour later we arrived in Vadodara and I immediately boarded a bus bound for Champaner about 30 miles to the northeast.  On the way I had good views of the bulky, buttressed Pavagadh Mountain, rising to somewhere between 2500 and 3000 feet, with forts and temples on it. 

We reached Champaner at the foot of Pavagadh Mountain, and about 2000 feet below its summit, about 3.  Champaner is a small village, mostly within the walls of a late 15th century city now abandoned except for the small village.  The bus stand is just outside the walls of the citadel.  I caught the shuttle bus that zigzags up the mountain up about a thousand feet in elevation over less than three miles to the end of the road, where steps and cable cars lead to the top of the mountain.  We passed the remains of forts and palaces on the road up.  The area around the end of the road was very crowded with pilgrims and shops catering to them, plus donkeys and jeeps and other vehicles, and, of course, garbage.  I was hoping there was room at the nearby state run hotel (I didn't think there were any other hotels), and there was.  I got a room for only 400 rupees and was surprised how nice it was, a big room with three single beds.  The hotel had nice gardens and great views up the mountain to the summit and down to the plains.  The people who ran the hotel were very nice and seemed pleased to have a foreigner there.  I thought I might spend two nights there, but ended up spending four.  I think I might have stayed more if the food had been better.

It was late afternoon and I walked up the steps, past shops and langur monkeys and avoiding the donkeys either heavily laden with supplies for further up the mountain or cargo free and charging down the steps.  I went up only about 200 or 300 feet in elevation to an old ruined gate leading to a ruined building with three domes, or rather two domes and the remains of a third.  I wandered around the building, locked with metal grates, and enjoyed the views.  Pavagadh was a stronghold of Hindu Rajputs from about 1300 until its conquest by the Muslim Sultan of Gujarat in 1484.  After a twenty month siege, with their cause hopeless, the Rajputs performed their customary rite of jauhar, the women and children self-immolating while the men charged the enemy to fight unto death.

I came down and sat in the hotel gardens for a while.  Wild peacocks and peahens were there.  It is quite interesting to see a peacock fly with its bulky train of tail feathers.  The Gujarati thali served at the hotel was not all that good and there were not a lot of fellow guests.  There was hot water only in the morning, so I had a cold water bucket bath, bearable now that it is warm. 

The breakfast selection wasn't much either, so the next morning I had tea and toast and took the shuttle bus down to Champaner about 8:30, first down about ten or twelve hairpin turns, passing the remains of a massive gate and walls, plus other ruins.  At the bottom are the remains of the city built by Mahmud Begada, the Sultan of Gujarat, after his conquest of Pavagadh in 1484.  He moved his capital here, centered in a rectangular citadel about half a mile long and 800 feet wide.  The former city walls, portions of which survive, are further out.  Champaner was conquered by the second Mughal Emperor Humayun in 1535, whereupon the Sultan of Gujarat returned to and once again ruled from Ahmedabad.  So Champaner's reign of glory was brief.

The walls of the citadel are mostly intact and I entered through the south gate and first explored what is thought to be the royal mosque just inside the gate.  It is a beautiful building with two slender minarets and a  columned prayer hall.  A village fills about half the old citadel, with nondescript buildings alongside a few old ruins of palace buildings.  Outside the eastern gate is the Jama Masjid, the largest and finest mosque, a beautiful combination of Hindu and Muslim styles, with domes, two minarets and a beautifully carved entrance pavilion leading to the courtyard before the 200 columned prayer hall.  I wandered around there for a while and then through the gardens outside.  I spotted three red-headed woodpeckers in a tree.  There were many egrets on the grass. 

From the Jama Masjid I walked northwest on a narrow path, with views of the citadel's northern walls to the south.  I spotted another woodpecker along the way.  After about 2000 feet I reached another mosque, the Kevda Masjid, with a columned pavilion in front of it.  Green parrots with orange on their heads and yellow on their tail feathers fluttered and squawked through the pavilion.  I climbed one of the mosque's two minarets for great views of the mosque, the Jama Masjid and other mosques further out, the citadel, and the forested countryside.  There were also great views of towering Pavagadh Mountain and its rocky summit.  You could also pick out the fortifications on the way up.  I climbed the other minaret and had to step gingerly around a nesting pigeon chick on one of the narrow steps.  Down at the base of the mosque, women were filling pots with water from the hose watering the grass and then taking them to their nearby houses.  They seemed amused at my taking photos of them. 

From the Kevda Masjid I walked further north along an even narrower path through thorny trees to the Nagina Masjid, with no minarets but very good carvings, including on a pavilion in front of the mosque.  Then I walked back the way I had come to the Jama Masjid and from there walked along another narrow path to another mosque, the Lili Gumbaj ki Masjid, with no columns but with a fluted dome.  I climbed the stairs up to the second story and sat for a while.  There are good views of Jama Masjid and Kevda Masjid, plus Pavagadh Mountain.  I was getting humgry, as all I had eaten since my toast and tea breakfast were peanuts I had brought with me.  I walked back past the Jama Masjid and through the citadel to the bus stop and took the bus up to my hotel, arriving back about 3:30. 

I ate some potato and pea filled samosas and drank a lassi at the hotel restaurant, and about 4:30 walked down the road (three or four hairpin turns) for about 15 minutes until I reached the ruins of a former Rajput palace with seven restored arches and great views down toward Champaner.  I could easily pick up the mosques I had visited earlier in the day.  The sun went behind Pavagadh about 5, but the citadel and mosques below were still in the sunshine.  I sat for a long while on the walls of the palace and enjoyed the views. 

Sometime after 6 I walked down the road just a bit further to the massive gate and steep walls.  In the gathering dusk I explored the area.  The entryway curves around a massive circular bastion on one side and high walls on the other to the narrow gate.  Inside are rooms, through several of which fluttered either bats or swiftlets, or perhaps both.  I couldn't see them in the dark, but there was a strong smell of ammonia, characteristic of bat guano.  (I like the phrase "bat guano."  It reminds me the major in Dr. Strangelove.  "All right, but if you're lying, you're going to have to answer to the Coca Cola people.")  From the gate, stairs led up past some other ruins to the bus stop near my hotel.  Some very poor people and their donkeys were preparing dinner near their hovels alongside these stairs, just below the bus stop and the start of the stairs to the top of the mountain.

Soon after 8 the next morning I walked down the steps to the gate I had visited the evening before and looked all around.  There were great views from the walls.  This fort was the middle line of fortifications on Pavagadh, with another line below and another fortress up on the top.  I did spot a bat hanging from the ceiling of one of the rooms near the gate, and heard (and smelled) many more.  I followed the wall sloping west toward a ravine and climbed down the steep stairs to the bastion above the deep ravine.  There was a trickle of water in the stream bed leading to the ravine.  The drop into the ravine must create an impressive waterfall in the monsoon.  I spotted more fortifications along the ridge on the other side of the ravine, and found a path through grass and thorny trees that crossed the stream bed above the ravine and went along the ridge to these fortifications.  There were great views all along.  I had brought some peanuts with me, but no water, as I didn't think it would take as long as it did to explore the area.  Thirsty, I made my way back the way I had come to the gate and then up the stairs to my hotel, arriving after 2.  I drank two liters of water and then had some samosas and lassi.

About 3:30 I took the cable car up the mountain.  It costs only 98 rupees (about $2) and you get a great view from the swinging little compartment.  It's kind of an exciting ride, made even more exciting if you think about the Indian disinclination to put a high priority on maintenance.  You rise about 1000 feet to the relatively flat plateau just below the rocky summit.  The views on the way up are fantastic, of Champaner below and of a plateau on a ridge with the ruins of forts and palaces to the east, about 300 feet above the hotel and bus stop area.  Once off the cable car, I walked past the restaurants and shops (many selling coconuts, as offerings to the gods) all along the remaining steps.  There were plenty of pilgrims still ascending and descending.  I walked up the gentle rise to the foot of the rocky summit and then took the steep steps up the final 200 to 300 feet to the Kali temple at the top.  The temple itself isn't much, but the views are fantastic.  I spotted a seven-domed building at the edge of the plateau to the northwest.  There are dirty lakes on the plateau on either side of the rocky summit, and in fact there is lots of garbage everywhere.  The views down to Champaner were good, but to the west, towards Vadodara, the haze and afternoon sun obscured the view.

I decided to walk down the steps rather than take the cable car down (you get a round trip ticket for your 98 rupees).  The path is fairly level at first, on the plateau past the eastern lake, shops, and the ruins of temples, one dating from about a thousand years ago.  Boys were playing cricket in the dust near the old temple ruins.  Here and there I stopped to peak over the remaining walls that line the edge of the plateau.  The steps down the rock face of the mountain below the plateau weren't too steep and I enjoyed the walk down.  It was late afternoon now and there were few pilgrims.  There were shops, with plastic or canvas walls and roofs, almost all the way down, and the ruins of gates and walls here and there.  I reached the ridge leading to the plateau I had spotted from above and walked out on it just a bit.  Swiftlets abounded in the deep ravine between it and the much higher plateau just below the summit, from where I had come.  It was near dark, so I didn't go all the way out on the plateau.  I made it back to my hotel before 7, just before dark.

I took the cable car back up the next morning about 8:30.  There were lots of pilgrims, some bathing in the dirty lake on the western side of the summit.  At the edges of the lake floated a layer of garbage on slimy green water.  I walked around a bit, but not up to the summit.  One of the temples near the start of the steps down the rock face was being reconstructed.  From there I walked out to the plateau beyond the temples toward the building with seven domes that I had seen from the summit the afternoon before.  This extension of the plateau at the top is somewhat hidden by a slight rise between it and the steps.  It was a fantastic area, a grassy, rolling and rocky area with this domed hall on the edge.  I walked to it, with great views down the sheer drop below it.  The building is in an L shape, or rather an inverted L shape, with five domed halls facing the plateau and another two behind the domed hall on the left (as you face the building from the plateau).  I explored it and enjoyed the great views down the sheer drop.

I walked north along the plateau to a wall at the edge, with three deep stone-lined tanks with water near the wall.  From the wall there were more great views to the north, including a fortification a few hundred feet below and Champaner at the foot of the mountain.  I walked back toward the seven domed building.  Two white donkeys were standing on the rocky slope in front of it.  I sat on a little ledge on the back side and ate some peanuts while enjoying the spectacular view.  I walked along the edge of the plateau east of the domed building, with a sheer drop below me, and found a path through boulders that wound up towards the lake on the western side of the summit.  There were great views along the way back to the seven domed building and the sheer drop below it.  Unfortunately, approaching the lake, I had to come through a human excrement spotted area that apparently serves as the mountaintop's latrine.

I wound my way around the little lake and down the steps past the pilgrims and shops to a restaurant near the top of the cable car line, where about 1 o'clock I had a good lunch, a masala dosa (a thin, crispy rice pancake filled with spicy potatoes) and a mango lassi.  The restaurant had great views.  It was warm, and I was getting a sunburn, so I rested a while in the shade of a derelict temple and about 3 began the walk down the mountain, again foregoing the cable car down.  The steps by that time of afternoon were mostly in the shade of the mountain.  There weren't a lot of pilgrims by then.  I reached the ridge leading to the plateau that I had partially explored the afternoon before, and this time went out to the end of it.  There were great views down the ravine as I neared the ruins of a palace.  I climbed through the ruins up to a hill above them, and then to a whitewashed little temple near the end of the plateau.  A few pilgrims came and went, outnumbered by the langur monkeys hoping to exploit their offerings.  I sat for a while at the edge, just below the temple, enjoying the views of the plains below, before making my way back to my hotel about 6:30.

Feb. 25-27, 2012: Palitana, Bhavnagar and Alang

After a final breakfast at O Coqueiro, I left Diu on a 10 o'clock bus that crossed the bridge over to the mainland and headed northeast paralleling, but not within sight of, the coast.  The first town we passed through, Una, looked dirty and unappealing, quite a change from Diu.  The road was fairly bumpy, especially at first, as we passed lots of scrub vegetation and some crops, including cotton.  I saw some camel-pulled carts.  It was only about 80 miles from Diu to Talaja, where I got off the bus, but we didn't get there until 3.  A hill outside town was covered with temples.  I waited about an hour and a half there and then caught a bus to the west, inland, to Palitana, arriving after a trip of a little more than an hour through brown hills and green fields.  I checked into a not very nice hotel near the bus station and had some difficulty finding a restaurant.  Finally, I found one with a Gujarati thali.  There was no hot water at the hotel, so I did without a bucket bath.  The hotel did have mosquitoes, though, which bothered me until about 1 in the morning, when I finally got the ceiling fan to work.

I got up about 6 the next morning and took an autorickshaw in the dark to the west end of town, where there is a big Jain temple complex, to begin the hike up Shatrunjaya, a hill rising to about 1900 feet (from a base of maybe 300 feet elevation) with Jain temples on the top.  There are 3300 stairs to the gate of the compound at the top, with another 300 or so stairs after that.  As at Girnar, every hundredth step is numbered.  The stairs are wide (maybe 15-20 feet) and low, so it's not a bad hike.  Lots of pilgrims were ascending, many (especially men) robed all in white.  Quite a few were being carried in dholis, some of the dholis just a square platform to sit on hanging from two poles, while others consisted of plastic beach chairs atop poles and carried by four people.  Some women were carried by four women dholiwallas (which is what the people who do the heavy lifting are called). 

The steps wound up through scrub, with bird feeders on many of the trees, and so lots of chirping little birds.  I started the climb about 7 and saw the just arisen sun about fifteen minutes later.  Unlike Girnar, there were no food stalls on the way, although there were a few places where you could get water, but not bottled water.  Many people were coming up barefoot.  Just before reaching the top, I wandered off the steps into the scrub and ate some cookies and peanuts I had brought with me, with a great view down while I ate.  I reached the temples on the top before 9, but rather than go in through the main entrance I went up to a higher entrance for the view.  There are something like 800 temples, big and small, on the two ridges on the top and the area between the ridges.  I went first to the slightly higher, northern ridge and went to a grave of a Muslim pir (a teacher, I think; anyway, some sort of holy man) who saved the temples from destruction by his fellow Muslims, though they had been destroyed many times by Muslims before then. 

I spent more than four hours up there exploring.  The temples, the earliest from the 16th century, are in nine walled compounds, looking a little like forts.  It 's a very impressive setting and the temples themselves are interesting, as were the many pilgrims.  Quite a few wore cloths over their mouths to prevent accidental ingestion of insects.  There was lots of cleaning of temples being down.  The views of the temples and countryside below were great, but hazy in the distance.  I couldn't see the nearby Gulf of Cambay (or Khambhat). 

The main temple is at the western end of the south ridge and it was full of people.  There were long lines to enter the main hall, with long waits, so I passed that up.  I did spend a lot of time in that compound just wandering around and watching all the activity.  Lots of plates of red flower petals and lots of little metal cups of sandalwood dust mixed with water were being carried around. This temple is dedicated to Adinath, the first of the twenty-four tirthankars ("ford crossers," who lead you from one world into another) worshiped by Jains.  The statues of the tirthannkars are always a little eerie, all in the same pose (sitting cross-legged) and expression and usually of highly polished white marble, but with very black eyes and eyebrows and very red lips.  In the temples there are rows and rows of them and every once in a while there will be a black or a brown one.

After spending a lot of time in the main temple, I explored some others and climbed two to the top for some more great views.  It was a lot more peaceful once you got away from the main temple, but there were still quite a few people elsewhere.  All were very friendly, except maybe some of the dholiwallahs.  Big groups of dholiwallahs were lounging, with some sleeping near the main gate, waiting for customers for the trip down.

I started down sometime after 1 o'clock and reached the bottom after about an hour and a half.  It was considerably hotter in the afternoon, but there were still lots of people coming up.  I again strayed off the steps and sat to eat a lunch of cookies and peanuts.  During the last stretch down the steps I walked with a guy, all in white, from Bombay.  He said there would be a procession the next day, with a meal beforehand in tents we could see below. He said 30,000 people were expected, and that normally about 5,000 ascended daily.  He thought there might be 10,000 to 12,000 today, as people were arriving for the next day's festivities.

At the bottom I watched the activity at the big temple at the start of the steps.  There were lots and lots of flowers, and I watched a guy grind sandalwood dust off a piece of sandalwood.  The museum containing sculpture from previous sacked temples was closed, so I took an autorickshaw back to my hotel, picked up my backpack, and caught a bus west to Bhavnagar, an hour and a half away.  I got there shortly after 5 and checked into a relatively expensive (650 or so rupees) hotel, especially for what you got, but it was much better than the night before.  It also had a good restaurant and I had chicken tandoori for dinner, took a hot water bucket bath, and was in bed before 10.

At 9 the next morning I caught a bus south to Alang, a little less than two hours away.  Alang is the town where Indian workers dismantle huge, no longer wanted ocean-going vessels.  It is on the Gulf of Cambay, which is said to have the world's second highest tides (after the Bay of Fundy, I guess).  The ships run up on the shore at  high tide, where they aren't bothered by the sea until the next high tide in two weeks, and are dismantled by a work force said to be 20,000 to 30,000 strong.  Along the road on the last five miles or so to Alang were scores of yards containing not only maritime equipment (lifeboats, life jackets, pipes, rope and the like), but lots of everyday stuff from the ships, such as bedsteads, chairs, tables, refrigerators, freezers, washers, driers, even plates. 

At the check post, I was told to get off the bus and in the little office was told politely and even a little apologetically, but very firmly, that I was not allowed past the check post.  A jail sentence of six months was twice mentioned.  Tourists used to be able to approach the ships and watch the dismantling, but a few years ago Greenpeace produced a documentary which they had secretly filmed showing the environmental and worker safety hazards of the place, and it's been closed to tourists ever since.  From the check post I could see a long line of big ships maybe less than a mile away behind some buildings. 

I decided to walk back along the road for a while passing the yards full of items from the ships and that was interesting, though it was starting to warm up at midday.  Eventually, I caught an autorickshaw to the main highway and immediately jumped on a bus back to Bhavnagar.  I had lunch at the hotel and read the newspaper until about 3 and then took an autorickshaw to a rather poor museum, but with an excellent photo gallery about Gandhi on the second floor.  Gandhi went to university for a while in Bhavnagar, before he left for London to study law.  There were hundreds of photos, many I'd seen before but many I hadn't.  All captions were in Gujarati, as were dates, but I've become accustomed to Gujarati numerals since the platforms at bus stations are marked with them.  It turns out that Arabic numerals really came to Europe from India, via Arabia.  2 and 3 are similar, 1 looks like a 9, 5 looks a little like a 4 or a squarish y, 7 like a 6 on its back, 0 is a 0, and so forth.

From the museum I took an autorickshaw to a temple on a small hill where, contrary to what one of my guidebooks said, I could not see the Gulf of Cambay.  Another autorickshaw took me to a marble cenotaph of a late 19th century rani (queen) on the town's small lake, the Ganga Jalai Tank.  From there I walked into the crowded, narrow lanes of the old city, which was quite interesting in the late afternoon.  I found the former palace, very rundown, with an unappealing hotel in part of it.  I found several interesting old houses, including a brightly painted Jain one.  The nearby shopkeepers told me, if I understood correctly, the Jain family no longer lives there.  There were all sorts of brightly painted figures and designs on it.  Jains are noted as prosperous businessmen.  People were very friendly.  Not many tourists make it to Bhavnagar. 

As it was getting dark I headed back to the Ganga Julia Tank and noticed a huge cloud of little black birds south of the lake.  There must have been thousands of them.  The cloud of birds formed and reformed as they wheeled around the southern sky over trees in the distance. Occasionally the cloud would break into two and then reform.  It was a fantastic sight, right in the middle of the city, and I stood on the eastern shore of the rectangular tank and watched them until they finally disappeared, perhaps settling into trees for the night. 

Right along the tank other birds, mostly black ibises but some white ibises and some other birds, were settling into the trees for the night.  Groups of five or so black ibises were flying in from the west and settling noisily into the trees.  The tank itself was full of ducks.  Lots of people were out but no one seemed to be watching the show but me and one other guy.  As it was getting nearer to dark, I noticed the black ibises flying in were being replaced by big fruit bats (flying foxes) flying out, first just a few, then scores of them, then hundreds.  They were fascinating to watch as they flew only 20 to 40 feet above me and headed west toward the reddish horizon.  Some circled back and then headed west again.  The still red western horizon beyond the tank was speckled with bats.  Soon few could be seen, but a quarter moon was out, along with Jupiter and Venus.  That was a spectacular ending to the day.  I have three guidebooks to India with me, Lonely Planet, Rough Guide and Footprint, and none of them mentioned the birds at sunset in Bhavnagar.

February 18-24, 2012: Veraval, Somnath and Diu

After two very early morning safaris in the Sasan Gir Lion Sanctuary and National Park, I was happy to sleep in until past 7 on the morning of the 18th and then spend most of the morning sitting in the sun, or when the morning warmed up, the shade, outside my room.  There are buses to my next stop, Veraval on the coast, but I decided to take the narrow gauge train, scheduled to leave at noon.  I walked down to the station about 11:30 and bought my ticket for all of seven rupees (fourteen cents).  There were quite a few people waiting at the little station, many of them colorfully dressed tribal people.  A train soon arrived going in the opposite direction from where I was headed.  It remained at the station until my train arrived about 12:30 and before my train's arrival I enjoyed watching the people as they got on and off the train waiting for it to get going again.

My train was not very full and I enjoyed the trip of less than an hour and a half as we headed southwest to Veraval.  I found a hotel, had a good lunch and then took a shared autorickshaw about three or four miles outside of town to the famous temple at Somnath, right on the sea.  This temple was once one of India's richest and that is what  attracted the attention of Mahmud of Ghazni (in what is now Afghanistan).  He used to make an almost annual plundering and pillaging trip to India in the 11th century and in 1026 or so arrived at Somnath.  Supposedly, a Hindu army of 70,000 soldiers died trying unsuccessfully to protect Somnath, but Mahmud plundered it and destroyed it.  It was rebuilt again by Hindus and then destroyed again by Muslims several times over the centuries, the last destruction by the intolerant Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb in 1706.  It wasn't rebuilt again for almost two and a half centuries, until 1950.

The temple is in the style of old temples, but is rather ugly.  I couldn't tell if it is made of stone or cement.  It is painted a light yellow (in fact, painters were painting part of it), but much of the paint is peeling.  There is some sculpture inside and out.  There is also some gold leaf inside, with a notice asking for donations so the temple can be restored to what it once was, encrusted with gold and jewels.  A black lingam (one of the twelve jyotirlingams) reposes in the sanctuary.  Outside the compound, which you can't enter with bag or camera, is a statue of Vallubhai Patel, India's Home Minister from independence in 1947 until his death in 1950, a Gujarati and a rival to Nehru.  On the pedestal he is acclaimed as something like "consolidater of India" and rebuilder of the temple.  He was always more of a Hindu nationalist than the secular Nehru.

Arriving about 4, it took me no more than half an hour, less in fact, to look around the temple and the dioramas off to one side illustrating episodes concerning Shiva, to whom the temple is dedicated (hence, the lingam).   The seashore below the temple is not particularly nice, but I enjoyed sitting on a bench above the sea just outside the temple watching people and enjoying the sea breeze.  At 6 a drummer and a guy playing those Indian horns used to charm cobras played for a while from a balcony over the gateway to the temple.  The sun disappeared into the mist over the horizon about 6:40 and just before 7 the evening aarti began in the sanctuary of the temple.  There was quite a large crowd in the main hall adjacent to the sanctuary as drums were beaten, bells rung, a horn played and a conch occasionally blown while a Brahmin priest in the sanctuary waved a fiery candelabra.  I got glimpses of him through the clapping crowd.  The ceremony lasted about twenty minutes with the music growing increasingly faster and even frantic.  It was a little mesmerizing.  Near the end the crowd was clapping above their heads and then raising their hands palms forward as it all ended.   It reminded me a bit of a Sufi whirling dervish performance I saw in Cairo years ago.  While I was filing out with the crowd, a man said to me, "Good to see a white man here."  I was back in Veraval by about 8.

I left Veraval the next morning at about 9:30 on an uncrowded bus bound for Diu to the southeast.  Diu, a former Portuguese colony, is an island just off the southernmost tip of the Kathiawar Peninsula.  It was warm enough that morning for me to wear only a tee shirt as we bumped along on a bad road, with lots of detours and on-going repairs.  Cotton and other crops were growing alongside the road.  We reached Diu shortly before 1, passing first through a small mainland peninsular enclave that is politically part of Diu and then crossing a bridge onto the island of Diu.  Diu politically is not a part of Gujarat, but part of a separate Union Territory of Daman and Diu.  (Daman is another former Portuguese enclave.)  The Portuguese conquered it in 1535 from the Sultan of Oman, who apparently had controlled it for a couple of centuries, and held it until 1961, when India forcibly removed them from their colonies in India (Goa, Daman and Diu).

Diu Island is something like seven miles long and two miles wide, with the small town of Diu at the eastern end.  The bus stop is just outside the old city walls, which I passed through under a gate with two Portuguese lettered plaques dated 1570 and 1584.  I walked through town to a nice little hotel run by a family from Goa and got a room.  The town is quite nice, especially for India, with relatively clean streets and many houses painted in bright pastel colors.  The family running the hotel speaks Portuguese and I  enjoyed speaking a little Portuguese with them. I have noticed they say "bom dia" with a hard "d' rather than a "dj" sound spoken by Brazilians.

I walked to a nearby garden restaurant called O Coqueiro (Portuguese for "The Coconut") and had a wonderful lunch of swordfish and french fries, along with a banana lassi.  Afterwards I walked around town in the bright sunshine, passing three big whitewashed churches or former churches.  St. Thomas is now the town museum, though there isn't much in it other than old wooden statues of saints, albeit hundreds of years old.  St. Francis of Assisi is now part of a hospital.  Only St. Paul is still a church, originally built about 1600 by Jesuits and then rebuilt about 200 years ago with a neo-classical facade.  They are all blindingly white in the sunshine.  St. Paul (and it does say "St. Paul" on the sign outside rather than "Sao Paulo") has a very nice interior of blue and white with very large carved wooden retables in the sanctuary and an equally elaborately carved wooden pulpit.

I walked to the fort at the farthest eastern end of the island and town.  It is a massive structure, with massive walls.  Originally built by the Portuguese in 1535, improved in 1546 when the Sultan of Gujarat tried to capture it and further improved over the centuries, it is bordered by the sea on three sides.  On the land side, to the west, are two massive walls each maybe a thousand feet long and two very deep moats, one moat before each wall.  The moats have been cut right into the rock and must be twenty to thirty feet deep and maybe forty to fifty feet wide.  They are connected with the sea and presumably fill when there is a high tide.  The tide was low and they were mostly dry that afternoon.  I walked along the outer moat to the cliffs above the sea, with great views of the imposing moat and outer wall.  I've never seen such an impressive moat.

I entered the fort over two stone bridges crossing moats and through a couple of gates.  Part of the fort is still the town jail, but most of it you can explore.  There are several bastions topped by old iron cannons, many with Portuguese inscriptions (one had a Spanish inscription and the date 1624, during the eighty years Spain and Portugal were united under a single king).  Cannons can be found on the walls, too.  Several buildings, most in ruins, are inside the fort, including several churches, one with Santiago on his horse carved just above the door.  In one ruined building are six World War I era howitzers.  One is dated 1916 and labelled "4.5 Inch Howitzer Mark I."  Another is dated 1918 and labelled "4.5 Inch Howitzer Mark II."  A third has Russian labeling.  They all look the same and I am guessing they are  British made, at least one for the Russians during World War I, and somehow they all were acquired by the Portuguese military.

There are great views out to sea and around the fort.  Just offshore is a very small island turned completely into a small fort, which you are not allowed to visit.  The interior of the main fort is quite large, but was teeming with Indian tourists on that Sunday afternoon, and some of them were a real pain, grabbing me and insisting on photographs.  I usually accommodate those who ask politely (though that can get a little tiresome), but those, mostly young men, who just grab you and insist on a photo I often refuse, though they keep grabbing you and insisting.  I have to say that while I have met many nice people in India, Indians in general are not my favorite people, compared to, say, southeast Asians or Africans or Latin Americans.  Not as bad as Chinese, but that's about the best you can say.  My reaction is pretty much typical of other western tourists here.  I've been told that southern Indians are kinder and gentler, so I'm looking forward to reaching the south eventually.  Of the 120-130 countries I've visited, I've only had a negative reaction to Chinese and Indians (with many individual exceptions), which doesn't sound so bad, until you realize that together they represent about 40% of the world's population.

I didn't have enough time to explore the whole fort before it closed at 6.  I sat outside on the fort jetty for a while, looking out at the blue sea and getting my photograph taken, though eventually I refused to get up to be photographed.  After sunset I walked along the seafront facing the mainland to the north to the center of town.  There were lots of Indian tourists in town for the weekend.  Lots of Gujaratis come to Diu to party as it has alcohol while Gujarat is dry, but I haven't seen any drunkenness.  I went back to O Coqueiro for dinner and had a delicious fish and coconut curry on rice, plus another banana lassi.

The next morning I was out before 8 (sunrise is about 7:30, I think) and was quite comfortable in only a tee shirt.  I walked along the southern seafront, passing a small beach, then exiting through one of the three gates in the city wall and walking to and along another, longer beach further west.  The beaches, of brownish sand, were relatively clean, and very clean for Indian beaches.  I turned around and came back to the city wall and walked north along the outside to the central Zampa Gate, painted red with carvings of lions, angels and a priest on it, and reentered the city.  I walked through the narrow lanes of this tightly packed part of town, filled with old buildings.  Again, the streets were relatively clean, although there was some garbage and a few cows.  Bent over women with little brooms were sweeping here and there (India does not seem to have discovered the long handled broom) and the streets were not noisy and clogged with traffic.  It was pleasant to walk along them, something very unusual in India.  There were, however, some motorcycles coming through and invariably honking.  I was talking to a German woman who has been coming to India for about 15 years and she said the worst development in her opinion has been the profusion of motorcycles.

Many of the buildings are painted in bright pastels and some are quite elaborately carved and painted. A couple had lions and soldiers and other figures carved on them, along with fruit and vines and other designs, and were painted in perhaps seven colors:  blue, green, yellow, reddish orange, white, black and brown.  As I was looking at one old unpainted house of three stories, a man invited me in and showed me around.  He told me it was 230 years old.  The front room contained old furniture, an old photograph of his mother and father and a bust of a king of Portugal.  He told me he doesn't speak any Portuguese and showed me the contents of the big wooden cabinets along one walls.  Inside were various old knickknacks, along with old coins and stamps. Most of the stamps seemed to be from Portugal and Mozambique.  He had some very old, pre-colonial Indian coins, as well as coins from Britain, France and the United States.  One of the silver US coins was dated 1795 and must be quite valuable if it is genuine.  Upstairs were rooms with more old furniture and on the floor a row of framed photographs of Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, his father Motilal Nehru and a few others.  Judging from Nehru's relatively youthful appearance, they may date from the 1930's.

I walked to O Coqueiro and had a leisurely breakfast from about 10 to 11 and then spent a few hours, during the hot part of the day, at an internet cafe.  I had a late lunch at a restaurant on the seafront, eating a Kashmiri naan, which is bread filled and topped with fruit, nuts and cheese, and it was very good.  At a nearby ice cream shop that makes its own ice cream, I had three scoops, rum raisin, date almond and saffron pistachio, all very good.  From there I walked along the seaside to the fort and spent the end of the afternoon there.  It was far less crowded than on the previous Sunday afternoon, but there were still quite a few people there.  I wandered around and eventually climbed the highest bastion, in the center of the inner wall.  Atop it are cannons and a lighthouse originally built in 1897 but reconstructed several times since then.  You can climb the inside spiral staircase to near the top and I did so, enjoying the great views all around.  The lighthouse is about 50 feet high and the top of the bastion is about 100 feet above sea level.  I got an excellent view of the double line of walls, each with three bastions, and moats to the west and the town beyond, including the three big white churches.  There is a wide expanse of open ground between the outer moat and the town.

Leaving the fort at 6 when it closed, I sat on the fort jetty until about sundown and then walked back to town, with a stop to see the end of mass at St. Paul.  The mass was in English, not Portuguese, with about 25 in the congregation, including three nuns in white.  Lights lit up the blue and white ceiling and walls and in the apse behind the altar were strings of little blue lights.  I had dinner again at O Coqueiro, this time caldo de camarao, a soupy shrimp and vegetable Portuguese dish served over white rice, and a papaya lassi.

I was out and about about 8 the next morning, walking to St. Thomas (the museum) and St. Paul to see their east facing facades in the morning light.  I had breakfast at O Coqueiro and then walked through the narrow lanes of the western part of the city, near the city wall.  I made a more extensive walk than I had made the previous day and saw more old buildings, some brightly painted.  One building, perhaps containing two separate homes, was very brightly painted on one half, with painted figures and designs on the facade, while the other half was a unpainted and in need of restoration, with weeds growing on portions of the building.  It got fairly hot after about 11.  The newspapers I've read here report highs in the low and mid 90's in nearby cities, with lows about 60.  Perhaps Diu, being on the sea, has temperatures a bit more moderate.  There is usually a very nice sea breeze.

I ate lunch at O Coqueiro about noon and then spent the hot part of the afternoon at an internet cafe.  About 4 I walked again to the fort and explored the westernmost wall (the outer wall) and the moat between it and the inner wall.  There was a little path in part of the scrub filled moat, which was completely dry.  The outer moat has a solid rock bottom, no vegetation, and a bit of water in it.  There were great views from the bastions and ramparts of the outer wall, with a few cannon here and there.  It really is an impressive fort.  As usual, I ate dinner at O Coqueiro, fried calamari.  I can certainly see why people, myself included, tend to spend more time in Diu than they plan.

I slept till almost 8 the next morning and then walked to the fort about 8:30.  I wanted to see it in the early morning light.  I was also hoping it would be fairly deserted at that hour, but it was not.  I walked around a bit and then climbed up the lighthouse atop the highest bastion to enjoy the great views. With the sun to the east, the views to the west towards the town and its churches were good, as was the view down to the western walls and moats.  I stayed up on the lighthouse until it closed for the morning at 10.

I headed to O Coqueiro for breakfast and read newspapers and magazines there until noon. I spent the afternoon at an internet cafe until the connection failed and then again walked around the narrow lanes of the old town.  I had a late long lunch at O Coqueiro and then walked around town a bit before dinner at, yes, O Coqueiro.

The next morning I arrived at the fort about 8:30 and for almost an hour had it pretty much to myself, along with the parrots, pigeons, crows, squirrels and the guy who lets you into the lighthouse.  I walked around just a bit before climbing the lighthouse for the great views.  The sun shone on the green backs, wings and tails of the parrots flying below me.  Five fishing boats, one after the other, made their way from the strait between Diu and the mainland, passed between the two forts, and headed south into the Arabian Sea.  Not too far out the stopped and, I assume, began to fish.  Buses of tourists started to arrive sometime after 9 and I left the fort about 10, walking  along the cliffs overlooking the sea just west of the fort and along the southern shore (the usual approach to the fort is along the northern shore of the island), before circling back into town.

After a late breakfast at O Coqueiro, I rented a scooter for all of about $4, plus $3 of gas, and headed out of the town through the northernmost gate and along the Arabian Sea until I reached a little seaside temple called Gangeshwar only about two miles from town.  It contains five flower-covered Shiva lingams in a shallow cave right by the sea, with the small waves at high tide washing into the cement floor of the cave and wetting the lingams.  I watched the pilgrims scooping up handfuls of the seawater to pour on the lingams and then take photos of each other in front of them.

Inland from the temple about 700 feet are two Parsi towers of silence.  Parsis are Zoroastrians who ancestors fled Persia (Parsi means Persian) for India at the time of the Arab conquest in the 7th century.  They dispose of their dead by leaving their bodies in towers to be eaten by vultures.  I'm guessing these towers are no longer in use as I was able to enter the walled compound and go up into the towers.  The biggest one, on a slight hill, is circular and made of stone with an opening about halfway up reached by a ramp.  Inside is a stone floor with a circular pit in the center and grooves in the stone floor, perhaps to drain blood into the pit.  The tower is open to the sky.  There were no signs of any use.  The other tower is smaller, down the side of the hill, and filled with rubble.

I continued west through the little towns of Fudam and Malala to a seashell museum with several thousand shells collected by a sea captain from all over the world over several decades.  They were interesting, as was he.  I continued west along the sea and passed through the beach resort of Nagoa, with a fairly nice beach, hotels and lots of tourists, most if not all Indians.  Not much further (the island is only seven miles long) I reached the town of Vanakbara at Diu's western end, with lots of fishing boats, including some under construction.  I headed back to Diu city, with a stop to see a memorial to a ship and its crew that went down after being torpedoed by the Pakistanis during the 1971.   I got back a little before 5 and got something to eat at O Coqueiro, took a little walk (stopping in again at St. Paul to see the end of mass), and came back to O Coqueiro for dinner.  There are some interesting fellow tourists here in Diu, some who have been here for a month or more.

I spent the next day in Diu, not doing much.  I didn't even make it to the fort.  I read, walked around town just a bit, spent time at an internet cafe, and relaxed.  I stopped in at the ice cream parlor, had four scoops of ice cream, and talked to the owner.  It was started in 1933 by his great grandfather, and he pointed out to me on the wall photos of his great grandfather, grandfather and father, the first two with impressive mustaches.  He told me they make their ice cream in the nearby village of Fudam.  He had a Portuguese flag in the parlor and spoke some Portuguese, but said he wasn't of Portuguese descent.  At the bus station I talked to an interesting Indian man who has been living in Zimbabwe since the 70's and was back in Diu for his father's final illness and funeral.  I had my final dinner at O Coqueiro and then went back to the ice cream parlor for my final two scoops of ice cream.