Endangered lions and 10,000 steps

---

We decided to take a slight detour from the standard travelers tour of India and head down to southwest Gujarat for a few days. We technically I really wanted to do it and Trish put up with me and all the hassles getting here entailed... Due to the obvious train difficulties we experienced we ended up spending the day at the Amedabad train station and it's vicinity and missed what would have been a chill/relax day in Junagadh.

Getting here at 4:30am after a noisy train ride, our first priority was a little more sleep, followed by showers. After that we wasted no time headed over to one of the towns two attractions (for me at least...), the Junagadh Zoo. As many of you may know, I'm a science dork and love zoos. I love any zoo, my first zoo in Asia would be cool, but not only that, this zoo is one of the only ones in the world with Asiatic lions. Since reading David Quammen's Monster of God a few years ago I've been really interested in these extremely endangered, inbred animals. Just south of here, in the Sasan Gir Animal Sanctuary, is the worlds only remaining population of Asiatic lions. Technically the only differences between them and African lions are a slightly smaller build, small mane, and a skin fold along the stomach, but I still think it's cool. So anyway, we spent a couple hours at the zoo, staring at lions and walking around the new, bigger, enclosures with lions, tigers and sloth bears (oh my!!) and saw some wild sambar running through the park since it’s open to the forest. We actually got to see an attempted mating but I don't think the male was up for it. Trish found it all quite fascinating and wondered why I wasn't taking pictures.

Today we attempted to get up at 6:30 (ha!) and were actually up and ready to go by 7:30. We were trying to make our way out east to the base of Girnar, a local hill with a bunch of religious (mostly Hindu and a few Jain) temples along the hike up and a few at the top as well. A little over 100 years ago a series of stone steps were put in from the bottom all the way to the top, and this just added to our interest in the area. We set out with stout hearts; ready to climb what we were told was 10,000 steps to the top of the hill. Doesn't sound too hard right? Well by the first 1000 we were already feeling it. We made it to 2500 and both ceded the fact that we were both out of shape, but that we'd get to at least 5000, though that was probably about all we had. Not wanted to look weak, I started formulating clever ways I could type this blog and make it look like we'd succeeded, saying we 'took 10,000 steps' or 'made 10,000' but it turned out my scheming wasn't necessary. As we got to about 4300 we took a quick break and came to the conclusion that the hill was narrowing rapidly and that maybe it actually ended at 5000 and the other 5000 were heading back. It turns out we were right! We got to the top and looked around and a guy walked up to us and made a strongman pose and we both kind of laughed. We walked a little further to an overlook, sat down and rested for a while, slightly happier than we might otherwise have been. The trip back down was a quick one, less that half the time it took us up, and pretty soon we were on a rickshaw back towards town. All that remained were a few quick errands and we were left with the rest of the day to lie around and relax.

Now after dinner at the same outstanding place we ate last night it's time for a little ice cream and bed. Another early train to catch in the morning, Mumbai here we come!

---

Photos

lions
pre-mating

langur hanuman monkey
on the trail up girnar

trish at the summit
overlooking the other hills

looking down past the temple
back towards junagadh

Comments

[Kevin Su]

Was this a zoo like Jurassic Park where they drive you out in the wild in a jeep and then get attacked by wildlife? Cause that would just be super cool.