I headed north from Badami to Bijapur on the morning of the 18th, but not before taking an early morning walk through the narrow streets of Badami's whitewashed old town. I strolled around for more than an hour, passing women washing clothes and pots in front of their houses, children getting ready for school, monkeys fighting on rooftops. Cows, dogs and pigs were also to be seen. There are a lot of pigs in Badami, which was a bit of a surprise. Not too much bacon on the menus. I came across a sow feeding her obviously voracious three piglets. A fourth one nosed his or her way in and drank just as vigorously as the others until the mother decided that they, or perhaps she, had had enough. I walked by the cave temples under the south fort and along the lake, where only one woman was washing clothes on the ghats. The air was cool in the early morning and there were great views of the north cliffs and their temples.
After breakfast, I left on a bus about 10:30 heading northwest on a narrow country road to the very small town of Kerur, only about 12 or 15 miles away. In Kerur I almost immediately got on a passing bus headed to Bijapur, about 60 miles north. The uncrowded bus passed many seemingly parched corn fields while driving through grain piled on the road here and there. I saw a lot of bullock carts. Further north yellow grass grew on the rolling landscape as we approached and crossed the long bridge over the reservoir created by the damming of the Krishna River. Approaching Bijapur there was again a lot more agriculture. The trip was all at about 2000 feet elevation.
We passed through remnants of Bijapur's walls, made of a dark brown stone compared with the lighter, yellow-red sandstone of Badami, and arrived in the city center about 1:30. Badami's city walls are mostly intact and are about six miles in circumference, with most of Bijapur's 200,000 or so people within the old city walls. Bijapur was one of the Muslim Deccan sultanates that fought against and finally vanquished the Hindu Vijayanagar Empire to the south. With the defeat of Vijayanagar in 1565, Bijapur used the proceeds of the sacking of the capital to build many fine monuments. It also returned to fighting the other sultanates that arose after the fall of the Bahmanis, and later Shrivaji's Hindu Maratha state to the north, but it had a century or so of magnificence until it was conquered by the Mughul Emperor Aurangzeb's armies in 1686. The city was originally part of the later Chalukya Kingdom. Muslims of the Delhi Sultanate first arrived in the Deccan in the early 14th century, and Bijapur was part of the Bahmani Kingdom established in 1347. It Turkish governors, the Adil Shahis, broke away from the Bahmanis in 1489. All the sights in town seem to be from the Bijapur Sultanate era.
I had caught a slight cold in Badami, so spent the afternoon resting in my hotel room, with a brief foray to get cold medication. I had a delicious south Indian thali in the hotel restaurant for dinner.
The next morning I slept until almost 8, had breakfast, and about 9:30 or 10 walked to the Jama Masjid, the great mosque built by the Sultan Ali Adil Shah with the spoils of the sacking of Vijayanagar. It is large and domed, with a high colonnaded prayer hall, but simply decorated except for the very elaborate mihrab (the niche in the center of the wall facing Mecca), which was covered with designs and Arabic calligraphy in gold leaf. Aurangzeb, after his conquest of the city, added a grand entrance to the south. I wandered around inside. It was very quiet, almost deserted. It has capacity for 2250 worshipers. Four men were using very long poles with brooms attached to sweep the inside of the colonnaded hall's many domes high above the floor. One guy was on top of a rolling piece of movable scaffolding. I noticed the inside of the main dome, much higher than the side domes, was noticeably dirtier. I guess they don't have poles long enough for that one.
I walked out the eastern entrance to some domed tombs in an old neighborhood (surprisingly, with lots of pigs, next to a mosque) and then walked west towards the city center. I passed an elaborate three story doorway, with minarets and balconies, that led to a small mosque. Further west I could see the walls of the citadel, the royal enclosure at the center of the city. The walls are mostly intact, but the palace buildings are in ruins. Before entering the citadel I stopped in at a large building that served as an open fronted hall of justice, built in the mid 17th century. It is an ugly building with teak columns painted yellowish white that rise maybe 30 feet. Two hairs of the Mohammed's beard are supposed to have been housed here once. No information on what happened to them.
I walked along the citadel's walls and then went inside and explored the ruins. Huge arches remain from Ali Adil Shah's Heavenly Palace. Later it was made into a durbar hall, open to the north, so the public could see the Sultan seated upon a platform. I stopped for a snack at a roadside eatery next to the ruins and ordered what are called "finger chips" here -- french fries. I watched the guy cut up a potato, first cleaning the stone he used for a cutting board with a dirty wet rag. (Indian cleaning, of a table in a restaurant, or a floor in a restaurant or hotel, always seems to involved wiping a dirty wet rag over what is to be cleaned.) The finger chips were very red when cooked up, but not too hot. Nearby were the ruins of a five story palace building and, in front of it, an ornate little pavilion in a now empty tank, made to be filled with water.
I walked out of the citadel and headed further west, past the bus station, and reached the Jod Gumbaj, four domed tombs, the two largest for a general and his spiritual adviser. One had a mirrored interior. There were a few pilgrims there and, again surprisingly, quite a few pigs. I walked around and a very old lady beckoned me over. The somewhat younger woman next to her gestured to me that the old woman wanted her photo taken, so I took several. She removed her old fashioned round glasses first. I showed her the photographs and she sort of cackled. I guess she got quite a kick out of seeing her photograph.
I then walked to the west gate in the city walls (the gate is mostly gone, with just a gap in the walls with the city's main east-west street passing through) and climbed the bastion topped with a huge cannon. The cannon is called the Malik-e-Maidan, the "Lord of the Plains." It is said to have been cast in Ahmednagar (one of the other sultanates, to the north) in 1551 and to have come to Bijapur as spoils of war. It weighs 55 tons and is almost fifteen feet long with a five foot diameter. Supposedly, it was pulled to Bijapur from Ahmednagar by 400 bullocks, ten elephants and hundreds of men. On its sides, near it open end, is relief of a lion's head with an elephant in its jaws.
From there I walked east a short distance to a nearby watchtower, inside the city walls, that rises to 80 feet. There were a couple of very long cannons on top and great views in all directions. To the east I could see the Gol Gumbaz, the giant domed tomb of Mohammed Adil Shah and to the west I could see the domes and minarets of the Ibrahim Rauzi, the tomb and accompanying mosque of Ibrahim Adil Shah. From there I walked to and then through the bazaars in the city center, filled with people just before sunset. I took a photo of a cart on the side of the street filled with colorful sweets and a guy with a similar cart called me over to take a photo of his cart, and of him. He then bought me tea. I reached the Bara Kaman, intended to be the mausoleum of another Adil Shah sultan. He died before it was finished and it was never completed. It would have been huge. It has a very large one story high base covered by high, often unfinished arches. Supposedly, it was to be twelve stories high. There is a tomb at the center of the platform. The guards shooed us out at 6 and I took an auto rickshaw back to my hotel.
The next morning after breakfast I walked to the Gol Gumbaz, Bijapur's signature attraction, about 8:30. This is the 1659 mausoleum of Mohammed Adil Shah, his two wives, a son and a daughter, and his favorite courtesan, the dancer Rambha. There tombs are lined up under the dome of the cavernous building. The Gol Gumbaz is huge, topped by the world's second largest dome, with a diameter only fifteen feet less than St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, of which it is roughly contemporary. I have to say that St. Peter's is a lot more beautiful. The dome is about 375 feet in diameter, and rests on a square base seven stories high, supported by eight arches built into the walls of the base. I walked around the outside of it in the early morning and could almost constantly hear Indians screaming inside to hear the echo. I had hoped to get there early enough to miss most of that.
I went inside the huge interior, very simply decorated. There is a metal canopy over the sultan's tomb, with the others on either side of him. Up above, reached by seven stories of stairs in each corner, is a ten foot wide gallery, called the Whispering Gallery. It is said that a sound made up there will echo ten to twelve times through the building, lasting for 26 seconds. Of course, there was no whispering going on up there, just constant screaming. I walked around below and then ascended the stairs. On the seventh level, you come out onto the exterior of the base of the dome, with great views all around. A small set of steps leads into the dome and the Whispering Gallery inside. I walked around the outside first, enjoying the views and hoping for a break in the screaming when groups left. I had great views of the city walls and bastions to the north and east (the Gol Gumbaz is just inside the walls near the eastern end of the city) and the Jama Masjid to the south. I could even make out the buildings of the citadel. There are four minarets towering above the walkway, one at each corner, and a mosque just below and to the west of the Gol Gumbaz. Hawks or falcons or kestrels or some other birds of prey were circling in the morning sun over the mosque.
The screaming never let up and eventually I went inside. The gallery has only about a three foot wall at its edge, making the view down a little daunting. It's a long way down. The screaming and screeching and whistling was annoying, but the echoes were amazing. I would hear something coming from one direction, look in that direction, and no one was there. I ducked out a couple of times when big groups of kids came into the gallery. They are particularly noisy.
About 10:30 or 11 I came down and went into the museum in what was the gatehouse to the Gol Gumbaz. It is a very good museum, with sculpture, Chinese porcelain, carpets, paintings, weapons, Korans and other stuff, all with very good explanatory texts. I got back to my hotel restaurant about 1:30 for lunch.
About 3 I took an auto rickshaw to the Ibrahim Rauzi, maybe half a mile outside the western walls of the city. It is the tomb of Ibrahim Adil Shah, who ruled from 1580 to 1626, his wife, and several others. The walled enclosure, with a gateway decorated with minarets, contains the tomb on the east side facing a mosque to the west across a pool once filled with water. There are domes and minarets on both, and this tomb complex is much more beautiful than the huge Gol Gumbaz. The mosque is almost without decoration inside but has intricate designs on its exterior, facing the tomb. The tomb has a columned veranda and its decorations are almost all on the exterior walls of the inner chamber containing the graves (although the actual graves are in fact deep below in the crypt). These walls are covered with designs and Arabic calligraphy. Originally, there were eight jali windows made of Arabic calligraphy. Two of them are still substantially intact, and one about half intact, while the other five are destroyed.
I spent the rest of the afternoon there, trying to avoid the school groups which came and went. Green parrots fluttered about, landing on the mosque and tomb. It was peaceful there towards 6, with few people. I left when it closed and before taking an auto rickshaw back to my hotel spent a little time at the entrance talking to a busload of white robed, skull capped madrassa students on tour from northern Kerala who arrived just as the Ibrahim Rauzi was closing. I got a much needed haircut when I got back. As usual here in India, the barber cut it very short. I may not need another haircut until 2014.
The next morning after breakfast and reading the newspaper I left on a bus heading west to Kolhapur about 10:30. The 110 mile trip took more than five and a half hours, at about 2000 feet elevation the whole way across the Deccan plains. At first we traveled through the rolling countryside on a very narrow road, past fields of corn and of something with a similar stalk but a fluffy head at the top of the stalk. There were also vineyards, which wasn't that much of a surprise as I had seen lots of grapes on sale in Bijapur. Later, there was lots of sugar cane, and lots of trucks and bullock carts transporting it to sugar mills. It did seem a little strange to see in one view sugar cane, coconut palms, banana trees . . . and grape vines. Many of vines had big bunches of ripening light green grapes.
We eventually reached and crossed the Karnataka-Maharashtra state line. I noticed the alphabet used on signs changed. The road was much more congested in Maharashtra and we reached Kolhapur, a city of about half a million people, after 4. I asked at several hotels near the bus station before I found one with a reasonably priced room, though it wasn't a great room. Still, it had a television, as do almost all hotel rooms in India. Later that evening I checked through the more than 100 channels and eventually found one that carried the inaugural ceremony in Washington. The commentary was all in Hindi and there were lots of commercials. I watched it for more than an hour. They did show Obama's speech in its entirety, starting at just before 10:30 at night here, but with a slightly delayed translation in Hindi, which made it a little difficult to follow. They ended coverage soon after his speech.
I spent the next day exploring Kolhapur. Mid morning I took an auto rickshaw to the New Palace, built in 1884 for the Maharajah of Kolhapur by an English officer named Charles Mant, with the worrisome nickname of "Mad" Mant. I believe he also designed the palace of the Gaekwad of Baroda in southern Gujarat, further north. It is quite a building, an Indo-Saracenic combination of Jain and Hindu styles with a Victorian clock tower on top. The ground floor is now a museum while the descendants of the Maharajah are said to still live on the higher floors. It was quite a museum, too, with interesting old furniture and photos, a massive weapons gallery, and lots of stuffed animals. The museum is named after the corpulent maharajah, born in 1874, who reigned from 1894 till his death in 1922. There are many photos of him and his successor, a much thinner man, his nephew I was told, who reigned from 1922 till his death in, I believe, 1970.. I think they may have been descendants of Shivaji, but I'm not sure.
They both were avid hunters and the museum has a remarkable collection of animal trophies, including lots of stuffed heads and whole animals. In one room there is a diorama with ten tigers, four of them cubs. Four other tiger heads are on the wall above the diorama and the room contains all sorts of other stuffed animals including sloth bears and other bears, deer, a lion, a rhinoceros and several others. And in other rooms of the palace there are mounted animal heads and bear and tiger skin rugs, in addition to rugs of the skins of other animals. There is stuff made of animal parts, such as ashtrays and lamps mounted on the feet of elephants, tigers, water buffalo, ostriches, and some hoofed animal with stripes on its legs. A pan box (for betel nut) is mounted on the skull of a tiger. The teeth of wild boar are made into handles on drinking glasses. There is even a line of attached leopard vertebrae with a silver tip said to be a walking stick.
The palace also contains a beautiful durbar hall two or three stories high, with a mosaic floor and a throne at one end. No chandeliers, though. I wandered around outside and inside the palace for a couple of hours and then had a very good thali lunch for less than a dollar and a half at a little outdoor cafe on the palace grounds.
After lunch I took an auto rickshaw to the Mahalaxmi Temple in the center of town. I've read these temples, to Amba Bai or the Mother Goddess, are rare in India. Before entering I walked to the nearby Rajwada, the old palace. Part of it is now a school and I looked around, both inside and out, despite school being in session. Nobody seemed to mind and in fact the people I talked to were quite friendly. One woman had me take her photo and then I took another photo of her next to a drawing of Abraham Lincoln, next to a long text in the Devanagari script, on a corridor wall. She then summoned several other women to have their photos taken. They all seemed amused when showed their photos. I walked through the big square at the center of the old palace, now thronged with parked motorcycles and food stalls, with corridors left for traffic, to the temple in the old palace, where most people were just lounging around while a few were making offerings to the deity. Just to the side of the deity was a colorful statue of the corpulent maharajah next to several stuffed tigers and a stuffed leopard, all in very poor condition.
I then made my way into the Mahalaxmi temple, leaving my shoes and day pack outside. Its foundations are said to be 10th century, but the towers, painted white, are from the 18th century. It wasn't very crowded, so I followed the queue to see the deity. It was hot and humid in the sanctuary, tended by several shirtless Brahmin priests. Outside the temple compound a woman seated on the pavement was apparently telling fortunes by rolling cowrie shells, as two other women looked on intently.
Soon after 4 I walked to the training center for Kolhapur's famous wrestlers. They train every day from 6 to 9 in the morning and 4 to 6 in the afternoon. There were more than 30 of them exercising on a concrete floor next to a dirt wrestling pit. They wear only a sort of loin cloth and some were as young as about 10. Many were doing a sort of yogic push-up. Others were doing squats. Some of the older guys were extremely muscular. There were others beside me watching, though I was the only foreigner. I watched for about 20 minutes and then went to the big square again to sit and watch the crowds. I came back after 5 and two skinny little boys were wrestling in the dirt pit. Later one of the bigger guys and a very strong looking little kid wrestled, the older guy obviously training the younger one. The young guy got thrown several times very hard, but always came up with a smile on his face, and there was a lot of joking between the two and from onlookers. They get very dirty wrestling in that pit, in part because they oil their skin, which makes it easier for the dirt to cling to it. Outside the pit, in the adjacent courtyard, others took turns pulling a heavy bag, filled perhaps with sand or dirt, by a rope attached to a pulley on a tree branch, while others climbed up another rope. Towards 6, many were washing off in the courtyard, using buckets of water drawn from a tank. I left before 6, walked around the temple and square a bit more, and then took an auto rickshaw back to my hotel.
I spent most of the next morning in my room, as I was tired. I had woken up with a very bad sinus infection the morning before and either it or the medication I was taking, or both, had tired me out. I did go out for breakfast, and about 11:30 took a bus heading to the little town of Panhala, about 12 miles northwest in the Western Ghats. It took us more than an hour to get there as we rose to over 3000 feet in elevation. I could see some of the ramparts of the Panhala fort as we approached the town. From the bus stop I walked up to the fort. The walls reportedly run for more than four miles, with several gates. One ruined gate appeared to be at the entrance to the town and there were several old buildings, including a stepped tank and a temple, in the town. I walked to two gate complexes and remnants of a wall, with views out over the lower areas stretching to the southwest, and explored the area. One gate complex had three different gates, with two ninety degree turns between the first two and a guard house between the second and third. Shivaji is supposed to have spent a lot of time at this fort. There were Indian tourists there, though not massive amounts. I walked to another area with now ruined ramparts and views toward the northeast before coming back to the town to look around and catch a bus back to Kolhapur about 4.
After breakfast, I left on a bus about 10:30 heading northwest on a narrow country road to the very small town of Kerur, only about 12 or 15 miles away. In Kerur I almost immediately got on a passing bus headed to Bijapur, about 60 miles north. The uncrowded bus passed many seemingly parched corn fields while driving through grain piled on the road here and there. I saw a lot of bullock carts. Further north yellow grass grew on the rolling landscape as we approached and crossed the long bridge over the reservoir created by the damming of the Krishna River. Approaching Bijapur there was again a lot more agriculture. The trip was all at about 2000 feet elevation.
We passed through remnants of Bijapur's walls, made of a dark brown stone compared with the lighter, yellow-red sandstone of Badami, and arrived in the city center about 1:30. Badami's city walls are mostly intact and are about six miles in circumference, with most of Bijapur's 200,000 or so people within the old city walls. Bijapur was one of the Muslim Deccan sultanates that fought against and finally vanquished the Hindu Vijayanagar Empire to the south. With the defeat of Vijayanagar in 1565, Bijapur used the proceeds of the sacking of the capital to build many fine monuments. It also returned to fighting the other sultanates that arose after the fall of the Bahmanis, and later Shrivaji's Hindu Maratha state to the north, but it had a century or so of magnificence until it was conquered by the Mughul Emperor Aurangzeb's armies in 1686. The city was originally part of the later Chalukya Kingdom. Muslims of the Delhi Sultanate first arrived in the Deccan in the early 14th century, and Bijapur was part of the Bahmani Kingdom established in 1347. It Turkish governors, the Adil Shahis, broke away from the Bahmanis in 1489. All the sights in town seem to be from the Bijapur Sultanate era.
I had caught a slight cold in Badami, so spent the afternoon resting in my hotel room, with a brief foray to get cold medication. I had a delicious south Indian thali in the hotel restaurant for dinner.
The next morning I slept until almost 8, had breakfast, and about 9:30 or 10 walked to the Jama Masjid, the great mosque built by the Sultan Ali Adil Shah with the spoils of the sacking of Vijayanagar. It is large and domed, with a high colonnaded prayer hall, but simply decorated except for the very elaborate mihrab (the niche in the center of the wall facing Mecca), which was covered with designs and Arabic calligraphy in gold leaf. Aurangzeb, after his conquest of the city, added a grand entrance to the south. I wandered around inside. It was very quiet, almost deserted. It has capacity for 2250 worshipers. Four men were using very long poles with brooms attached to sweep the inside of the colonnaded hall's many domes high above the floor. One guy was on top of a rolling piece of movable scaffolding. I noticed the inside of the main dome, much higher than the side domes, was noticeably dirtier. I guess they don't have poles long enough for that one.
I walked out the eastern entrance to some domed tombs in an old neighborhood (surprisingly, with lots of pigs, next to a mosque) and then walked west towards the city center. I passed an elaborate three story doorway, with minarets and balconies, that led to a small mosque. Further west I could see the walls of the citadel, the royal enclosure at the center of the city. The walls are mostly intact, but the palace buildings are in ruins. Before entering the citadel I stopped in at a large building that served as an open fronted hall of justice, built in the mid 17th century. It is an ugly building with teak columns painted yellowish white that rise maybe 30 feet. Two hairs of the Mohammed's beard are supposed to have been housed here once. No information on what happened to them.
I walked along the citadel's walls and then went inside and explored the ruins. Huge arches remain from Ali Adil Shah's Heavenly Palace. Later it was made into a durbar hall, open to the north, so the public could see the Sultan seated upon a platform. I stopped for a snack at a roadside eatery next to the ruins and ordered what are called "finger chips" here -- french fries. I watched the guy cut up a potato, first cleaning the stone he used for a cutting board with a dirty wet rag. (Indian cleaning, of a table in a restaurant, or a floor in a restaurant or hotel, always seems to involved wiping a dirty wet rag over what is to be cleaned.) The finger chips were very red when cooked up, but not too hot. Nearby were the ruins of a five story palace building and, in front of it, an ornate little pavilion in a now empty tank, made to be filled with water.
I walked out of the citadel and headed further west, past the bus station, and reached the Jod Gumbaj, four domed tombs, the two largest for a general and his spiritual adviser. One had a mirrored interior. There were a few pilgrims there and, again surprisingly, quite a few pigs. I walked around and a very old lady beckoned me over. The somewhat younger woman next to her gestured to me that the old woman wanted her photo taken, so I took several. She removed her old fashioned round glasses first. I showed her the photographs and she sort of cackled. I guess she got quite a kick out of seeing her photograph.
I then walked to the west gate in the city walls (the gate is mostly gone, with just a gap in the walls with the city's main east-west street passing through) and climbed the bastion topped with a huge cannon. The cannon is called the Malik-e-Maidan, the "Lord of the Plains." It is said to have been cast in Ahmednagar (one of the other sultanates, to the north) in 1551 and to have come to Bijapur as spoils of war. It weighs 55 tons and is almost fifteen feet long with a five foot diameter. Supposedly, it was pulled to Bijapur from Ahmednagar by 400 bullocks, ten elephants and hundreds of men. On its sides, near it open end, is relief of a lion's head with an elephant in its jaws.
From there I walked east a short distance to a nearby watchtower, inside the city walls, that rises to 80 feet. There were a couple of very long cannons on top and great views in all directions. To the east I could see the Gol Gumbaz, the giant domed tomb of Mohammed Adil Shah and to the west I could see the domes and minarets of the Ibrahim Rauzi, the tomb and accompanying mosque of Ibrahim Adil Shah. From there I walked to and then through the bazaars in the city center, filled with people just before sunset. I took a photo of a cart on the side of the street filled with colorful sweets and a guy with a similar cart called me over to take a photo of his cart, and of him. He then bought me tea. I reached the Bara Kaman, intended to be the mausoleum of another Adil Shah sultan. He died before it was finished and it was never completed. It would have been huge. It has a very large one story high base covered by high, often unfinished arches. Supposedly, it was to be twelve stories high. There is a tomb at the center of the platform. The guards shooed us out at 6 and I took an auto rickshaw back to my hotel.
The next morning after breakfast I walked to the Gol Gumbaz, Bijapur's signature attraction, about 8:30. This is the 1659 mausoleum of Mohammed Adil Shah, his two wives, a son and a daughter, and his favorite courtesan, the dancer Rambha. There tombs are lined up under the dome of the cavernous building. The Gol Gumbaz is huge, topped by the world's second largest dome, with a diameter only fifteen feet less than St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, of which it is roughly contemporary. I have to say that St. Peter's is a lot more beautiful. The dome is about 375 feet in diameter, and rests on a square base seven stories high, supported by eight arches built into the walls of the base. I walked around the outside of it in the early morning and could almost constantly hear Indians screaming inside to hear the echo. I had hoped to get there early enough to miss most of that.
I went inside the huge interior, very simply decorated. There is a metal canopy over the sultan's tomb, with the others on either side of him. Up above, reached by seven stories of stairs in each corner, is a ten foot wide gallery, called the Whispering Gallery. It is said that a sound made up there will echo ten to twelve times through the building, lasting for 26 seconds. Of course, there was no whispering going on up there, just constant screaming. I walked around below and then ascended the stairs. On the seventh level, you come out onto the exterior of the base of the dome, with great views all around. A small set of steps leads into the dome and the Whispering Gallery inside. I walked around the outside first, enjoying the views and hoping for a break in the screaming when groups left. I had great views of the city walls and bastions to the north and east (the Gol Gumbaz is just inside the walls near the eastern end of the city) and the Jama Masjid to the south. I could even make out the buildings of the citadel. There are four minarets towering above the walkway, one at each corner, and a mosque just below and to the west of the Gol Gumbaz. Hawks or falcons or kestrels or some other birds of prey were circling in the morning sun over the mosque.
The screaming never let up and eventually I went inside. The gallery has only about a three foot wall at its edge, making the view down a little daunting. It's a long way down. The screaming and screeching and whistling was annoying, but the echoes were amazing. I would hear something coming from one direction, look in that direction, and no one was there. I ducked out a couple of times when big groups of kids came into the gallery. They are particularly noisy.
About 10:30 or 11 I came down and went into the museum in what was the gatehouse to the Gol Gumbaz. It is a very good museum, with sculpture, Chinese porcelain, carpets, paintings, weapons, Korans and other stuff, all with very good explanatory texts. I got back to my hotel restaurant about 1:30 for lunch.
About 3 I took an auto rickshaw to the Ibrahim Rauzi, maybe half a mile outside the western walls of the city. It is the tomb of Ibrahim Adil Shah, who ruled from 1580 to 1626, his wife, and several others. The walled enclosure, with a gateway decorated with minarets, contains the tomb on the east side facing a mosque to the west across a pool once filled with water. There are domes and minarets on both, and this tomb complex is much more beautiful than the huge Gol Gumbaz. The mosque is almost without decoration inside but has intricate designs on its exterior, facing the tomb. The tomb has a columned veranda and its decorations are almost all on the exterior walls of the inner chamber containing the graves (although the actual graves are in fact deep below in the crypt). These walls are covered with designs and Arabic calligraphy. Originally, there were eight jali windows made of Arabic calligraphy. Two of them are still substantially intact, and one about half intact, while the other five are destroyed.
I spent the rest of the afternoon there, trying to avoid the school groups which came and went. Green parrots fluttered about, landing on the mosque and tomb. It was peaceful there towards 6, with few people. I left when it closed and before taking an auto rickshaw back to my hotel spent a little time at the entrance talking to a busload of white robed, skull capped madrassa students on tour from northern Kerala who arrived just as the Ibrahim Rauzi was closing. I got a much needed haircut when I got back. As usual here in India, the barber cut it very short. I may not need another haircut until 2014.
The next morning after breakfast and reading the newspaper I left on a bus heading west to Kolhapur about 10:30. The 110 mile trip took more than five and a half hours, at about 2000 feet elevation the whole way across the Deccan plains. At first we traveled through the rolling countryside on a very narrow road, past fields of corn and of something with a similar stalk but a fluffy head at the top of the stalk. There were also vineyards, which wasn't that much of a surprise as I had seen lots of grapes on sale in Bijapur. Later, there was lots of sugar cane, and lots of trucks and bullock carts transporting it to sugar mills. It did seem a little strange to see in one view sugar cane, coconut palms, banana trees . . . and grape vines. Many of vines had big bunches of ripening light green grapes.
We eventually reached and crossed the Karnataka-Maharashtra state line. I noticed the alphabet used on signs changed. The road was much more congested in Maharashtra and we reached Kolhapur, a city of about half a million people, after 4. I asked at several hotels near the bus station before I found one with a reasonably priced room, though it wasn't a great room. Still, it had a television, as do almost all hotel rooms in India. Later that evening I checked through the more than 100 channels and eventually found one that carried the inaugural ceremony in Washington. The commentary was all in Hindi and there were lots of commercials. I watched it for more than an hour. They did show Obama's speech in its entirety, starting at just before 10:30 at night here, but with a slightly delayed translation in Hindi, which made it a little difficult to follow. They ended coverage soon after his speech.
I spent the next day exploring Kolhapur. Mid morning I took an auto rickshaw to the New Palace, built in 1884 for the Maharajah of Kolhapur by an English officer named Charles Mant, with the worrisome nickname of "Mad" Mant. I believe he also designed the palace of the Gaekwad of Baroda in southern Gujarat, further north. It is quite a building, an Indo-Saracenic combination of Jain and Hindu styles with a Victorian clock tower on top. The ground floor is now a museum while the descendants of the Maharajah are said to still live on the higher floors. It was quite a museum, too, with interesting old furniture and photos, a massive weapons gallery, and lots of stuffed animals. The museum is named after the corpulent maharajah, born in 1874, who reigned from 1894 till his death in 1922. There are many photos of him and his successor, a much thinner man, his nephew I was told, who reigned from 1922 till his death in, I believe, 1970.. I think they may have been descendants of Shivaji, but I'm not sure.
They both were avid hunters and the museum has a remarkable collection of animal trophies, including lots of stuffed heads and whole animals. In one room there is a diorama with ten tigers, four of them cubs. Four other tiger heads are on the wall above the diorama and the room contains all sorts of other stuffed animals including sloth bears and other bears, deer, a lion, a rhinoceros and several others. And in other rooms of the palace there are mounted animal heads and bear and tiger skin rugs, in addition to rugs of the skins of other animals. There is stuff made of animal parts, such as ashtrays and lamps mounted on the feet of elephants, tigers, water buffalo, ostriches, and some hoofed animal with stripes on its legs. A pan box (for betel nut) is mounted on the skull of a tiger. The teeth of wild boar are made into handles on drinking glasses. There is even a line of attached leopard vertebrae with a silver tip said to be a walking stick.
The palace also contains a beautiful durbar hall two or three stories high, with a mosaic floor and a throne at one end. No chandeliers, though. I wandered around outside and inside the palace for a couple of hours and then had a very good thali lunch for less than a dollar and a half at a little outdoor cafe on the palace grounds.
After lunch I took an auto rickshaw to the Mahalaxmi Temple in the center of town. I've read these temples, to Amba Bai or the Mother Goddess, are rare in India. Before entering I walked to the nearby Rajwada, the old palace. Part of it is now a school and I looked around, both inside and out, despite school being in session. Nobody seemed to mind and in fact the people I talked to were quite friendly. One woman had me take her photo and then I took another photo of her next to a drawing of Abraham Lincoln, next to a long text in the Devanagari script, on a corridor wall. She then summoned several other women to have their photos taken. They all seemed amused when showed their photos. I walked through the big square at the center of the old palace, now thronged with parked motorcycles and food stalls, with corridors left for traffic, to the temple in the old palace, where most people were just lounging around while a few were making offerings to the deity. Just to the side of the deity was a colorful statue of the corpulent maharajah next to several stuffed tigers and a stuffed leopard, all in very poor condition.
I then made my way into the Mahalaxmi temple, leaving my shoes and day pack outside. Its foundations are said to be 10th century, but the towers, painted white, are from the 18th century. It wasn't very crowded, so I followed the queue to see the deity. It was hot and humid in the sanctuary, tended by several shirtless Brahmin priests. Outside the temple compound a woman seated on the pavement was apparently telling fortunes by rolling cowrie shells, as two other women looked on intently.
Soon after 4 I walked to the training center for Kolhapur's famous wrestlers. They train every day from 6 to 9 in the morning and 4 to 6 in the afternoon. There were more than 30 of them exercising on a concrete floor next to a dirt wrestling pit. They wear only a sort of loin cloth and some were as young as about 10. Many were doing a sort of yogic push-up. Others were doing squats. Some of the older guys were extremely muscular. There were others beside me watching, though I was the only foreigner. I watched for about 20 minutes and then went to the big square again to sit and watch the crowds. I came back after 5 and two skinny little boys were wrestling in the dirt pit. Later one of the bigger guys and a very strong looking little kid wrestled, the older guy obviously training the younger one. The young guy got thrown several times very hard, but always came up with a smile on his face, and there was a lot of joking between the two and from onlookers. They get very dirty wrestling in that pit, in part because they oil their skin, which makes it easier for the dirt to cling to it. Outside the pit, in the adjacent courtyard, others took turns pulling a heavy bag, filled perhaps with sand or dirt, by a rope attached to a pulley on a tree branch, while others climbed up another rope. Towards 6, many were washing off in the courtyard, using buckets of water drawn from a tank. I left before 6, walked around the temple and square a bit more, and then took an auto rickshaw back to my hotel.
I spent most of the next morning in my room, as I was tired. I had woken up with a very bad sinus infection the morning before and either it or the medication I was taking, or both, had tired me out. I did go out for breakfast, and about 11:30 took a bus heading to the little town of Panhala, about 12 miles northwest in the Western Ghats. It took us more than an hour to get there as we rose to over 3000 feet in elevation. I could see some of the ramparts of the Panhala fort as we approached the town. From the bus stop I walked up to the fort. The walls reportedly run for more than four miles, with several gates. One ruined gate appeared to be at the entrance to the town and there were several old buildings, including a stepped tank and a temple, in the town. I walked to two gate complexes and remnants of a wall, with views out over the lower areas stretching to the southwest, and explored the area. One gate complex had three different gates, with two ninety degree turns between the first two and a guard house between the second and third. Shivaji is supposed to have spent a lot of time at this fort. There were Indian tourists there, though not massive amounts. I walked to another area with now ruined ramparts and views toward the northeast before coming back to the town to look around and catch a bus back to Kolhapur about 4.
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