Junagadh - The old Fort City

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Hello friends.. Finishing our office work on tuesday evening bit early, we 4 friends gathered at borivali station in mumbai to catch 9005 saurashtra mail at around 9:15 pm. Train tickets were not confirmed yet, so i was continously checking PNR status on my HTC GPRS. The train arrived on platform, we got in and possessed our sits and said to ourself-finally we are on our way to Junagadh..

As usual as it happens in train journey, tea sellers got us up in morning. We were passing through viramgam, lakhtar area. I was surprised to see huge fields of Cotton on both sides of railway track and that to for 3-4 hours..Most of the stations on this route looked newly built though small is size. Although as per my knowledge this train route is atleast as old as 50 years. It was used during partion when indians traveled from Karachi to Okha port by sea route and took train towards Ahmedabad. We alight at Rajkot, took next tickets till Junagadh for 11 am local, just to know that local trains have boggie attached from our overnight train. Had we knew that the train has split route we could have traveled from Mumbai to Junagadh without alighting at Rajkot.

Junagad is a city which has most of its government maintained places closed on wedneday. And we were group of travellers who landed in there on wednesday afternoon. So in evening decided to visit places which were open on wednesday starting with Uperkot fort. This fort was won by mehmood begada. Begada means Be-gada. Be means 2 and gada means forts. One who owns 2 forts. Mehmood bedaga won Uperkot at Junagad and Pavagad near Vadodara. From the fort you can see the palace where family of actress parveen babi lived. You can have a telescopic view of Girnar from Fort. It also hosts 2-3 deep water-wells which has unique architecture where you can climb down through straight 100 steps till you reach water level deep in ground.The Fort also have budhist caves which do down 2 flours down the ground. The local guide has interesting and funny stories about the fort history, where most of the events were linked to curse (shraap in hindi) given by some one in past. Junagad is called so because mehmood begada formed a new city outside fort making the fort as relatively old, so Junagad.

From Fort we went to see Welington Dam which is source of water for the City. It was constructed during British era. A cool place to spend some time in evening. Swami narayan temple, which is constructed recently around a year or back, was our next destination. Next day morning we decided to start climbing at round 4 am.

As i dint want to spoil my trip with the memories of knee pains, i skiped climbing of Grinar. The trek had ample presence of Monkys and Peacock on its way. Junagad Zoo was a good place for me instead. The tigers, lions and leapords were as live as in natural habitate. It was nice to see this. Our general view before visiting this zoo was that zoo animals are malnourished and unclean. All other was as simple as other zoos except Pista trees which i saw for first time. It had fruits like bunch of half-moon hanging on huge tree, where each fruit opened like a laptop when ripe. It had around 10-12 pieces of nuts which looked like black grapes. It had raw white colored pista in it. You can get raw pistas outside zoo and other market locations in Junagad.

Among other places of interests are some writings carved on huge stone by Emperor Ashoka. There is a temple of great devotee Narsinh mehta. Mahabat maqbara comes to as as a hidden jewel. Museum, Bhavnath temple,damodar kund is atleast worth a quick glance.

Our next destination was to GIR National Park which i will update in my next entry.

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Comments

[samrat dhamale]

Story of GIR and Diu.
Story of GIR and Diu. http://www.travelblog.org/Asia/India/Daman-and-Diu/Diu/blog-461481.html

[Raghavarao Duggirala]

Tour to Junagadh Fort
The desription of the Fort and the narration is very good.

[Hanan Jameel]

Visting zoo on Climbing :)
if i were you, i would rather climb than visiting a zoo, it is such a nice experience and it is challenging ... ! by the way i like the way you described how wonderful the zoo was ..! you have got a strong relationship with a nature ( let us say .. you are a friend's nature)