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.
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.
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