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Published: March 15th 2009
Fresh out of the Aravali Hospital, Jenny and I decided to head South to the little visited state of Gujarat. If you've never heard of this place (Guja-what?) then here's a crash course on everything there is to know about it:
-Its Gandhi's birthplace
-booze is illegal
-the last name Patel comes from here
-its the state below Rajasthan
-everybody's got an uncle in Toronto
Our first stop was Ahmedabad, which is the economic centre of Gujarat. We had heard some dreadful comments from other travellers who had been there but our time there turned out to be quite fun.
There are no amazing sights in Ahmedabad but for such a huge metropolis people are very friendly, laid back, and very much unaccustomed to seeing foreign tourists which is an appealing feature after having spent a lot of time in Rajasthan.
We got to savor our first Gujarati thali, in Ahmedabad, which is a meal that consists of an insane amount of dishes. We had something in the vacinity of 25 dishes served to us in one sitting. This is sumo-wrestler diet territory. Which is exactly what I needed after losing weight during my hospital stay. It
was quite a contrast to my hospital diet of drip and cold rice though I'm not sure if the Doctor meant 25 dishes of every taste possible when he recommended me to be eating a "blend diet" for two weeks.
While we are on the subject of food, in Ahmedabad, we found a delightful restaurant that had a peculiar twist to it. Sometimes there are businesses that combine different types of services and products that can be a bit puzzling. For example, next to where we live in Montreal, there is a hair dresser/computer store. Weird, I don't get it, but mostly harmless. But this restaurant in Ahmedabad had a combination that truly baffles marketing logic. This one was a restaurant/cemetary! This place specialized in crispy South-Indian Dosas and housing dead people! To make the matter even more confusing the place was called...Lucky restaurant. Do I hear franchise opportunities?
The other undisputed highlight of our time spent in Ahmedabad was the audio tour. Audio tours sound really boring but the 2 we've done in India were fantastic!
After 4 nights in Amdabad we headed west to Jamnagar which is a chaotic city of 500,000 people. You might
Freaky stuff...
awaits you on every corner in India.think that 500,000 people isn't so much but the thing about Indian cities is that everyone is outside all the time. 500,000 people means that you see, feel, smell and get to be greeted by 500,000 people. Also cities of that size, a friend of ours made me realized, seem to have very little town planning compared to the huge indian cities of millions of inahabitants, which sometimes can make them feel even more crowded and chaotic.
We spent 3 days here exploring the various temples and mosques that are liberally sprinkled all over the city. The people here were incredibly friendly. On one day alone we had 4 different people buy us Chai.
It's also in Jamnager that I had my first, and last, chicken lollipop. This was the dish recommended to me from a mosques Imam when I asked him about local specialities. I can't say that I expected him to say chicken lollipop when I asked him that question. Anyways, "the locals know best" they say and "when in Rome do like romans", so when in Jamnagar do as Jamnagarians do, right? So we went searching through the windy muslim area of the city to
find the elussive "chicken lollipop". We finaly located a fine eating establishment that prepared this local delicacy but to my dissapointment it didn't really live up to all the hype. Its basically some random piece of boneless chicken with one big bone sticking out for you to hold it like a lolli then deep fried back to the stone ages.
While in Jamnager we also went to visit a bird sanctuary near by where flamingos, kingfishers and litereally hundereds of other species like to chill out and hang loose. We had a blast there, escaping the noisyness of the city and doing some great "spotting"(needs to be said with thick English accent). After visiting the park rangers office in town "to discuss our intentions and plans to visit the park" (??) we had to take a rickshaw for 45 minutes to get there and once we arrived at the sanctuary our guide told us we needed to use the same rickshaw to get around the park because the distances were quite large between the viewing stations. Our heavely bearded and 60 something muslim driver had no idea what he had gotten himslef into when he picked us up in
the middle of a busy intersection in Jamnager! Now he had to drive us around bumpy dirt tracks looking for birds. He was a good sport and I think that he enjoyed escaping the citys mayhem for a few hours. He asked for an extra 50 rupees, on the aggreed upon price, for his safari duties. We gladly forked it over. It was quite a sight, the three of us crammed into a small rickshaw, putt-putt-putting our way around the place, trying to sight rare birds.
From Jamnager we went to Dwarka, a fascinating pilgrimage city that is know as Krishnas dwelling. Apparently Krishna hung out there for a while and made it his capital, many many moons ago. Anyways, the major focus of this town is the awe inspiring Krishna temple that looms over this dusty town and the pretty seaside that is littered with temples. Jenny and I went to visit it on our first day. Before you enter you have to sign a piece of paper saying that you are either:
A: A Hindu
B: a Hari Krishna
C: That you repesct Krishna
Selecting option C we got in after some more hoop jumping.
Step well
A cool feature of Gujarat; Step wells. The temple itself is really amazing, with carvings galore and a genuine religious fervor that permuates the atmosphere. The weird thing about this place, for us non believers, is that the main attraction of this place is a crude black rock with glued on eye balls that is suppose to represent Krishna. This is what people come to see and line up for.
Dwarka is a bit like a Varanasi by the sea, with many many saddhus and pretty ghats on the ocean instead of on the Ganges.
Seeing the ocean for the first time of the trip felt absolutely sureal. India is such a chaotic, nosiy, dusty and crowded place which makes the calming endless vista of the sea even more powerful than usual. The contrast really could not be more pronounced. It was magical moment the first afternoon we spent sleeping on an empty beach north of the town.
The other salient event that happend in Dwarka was that Jennifer went against my instructions and decided to watch the movie Godzilla one night. As I had forwarned her, she has been plagued by monsterous nightmares ever since.
After D-Town we went to Junagadh where
Hanuman
The god monkey. on the way there we met an energetic 85 year old man that dished out life advices faster than speeding bullets. He told Jen that upon her return she had to buy coconuts and offer them as gifts of gratitudes to all the teachers that have made a difference in her life. At one point he asked me to squeeze his hand as hard as I could than proceeded to call me a weakling. After that he said he ran 100m in less than 20 seconds.
Junagadh was an awesone city full of architectural gems, including a vast amount of Jain temples that are scattered on a hill nearby called Ginar hill. To see them you have to climb 10,000 steps which is a fairly crazy endeavor. It took us all day and almost killed us, physically and emotionally, but it was defenitely worth it. On the way up we met this uber friendly Gujarati teenager that explained to us a whole lot of things about Jains. First of all Jains are hardcore vegetarians. This means No meat, no eggs and for some, nothing grown in the ground for fear that insects may have been killed in the process
Lucky restaurant
Peep the green tombs! of retrieving the vegetables from the ground. Not killing things is central to Jain philosophy. So much so that some of the Jain pilgrims that you see on the way up have a piece of cloth around their mouth to make sure that bugs don't come in to their mouth while they are talking. They also sweep the ground before them as to not involuntarily step on an insect. I wonder how Jain feel about Indias nuclear weapon arsenal?
Another strange thing about Jains is that Jain monks have no hair on their head. At first glance this is a fairly normal look for a monk, whatever his religion, but apparently they achieve this appearance not by shaving their head but PLUCKING their hair out one by one! Whoa.
A funny feature of climbing pilgrimage hills in Gujarat is seeing people being brought up on palenquins. A Palenquin is a carriage mounted on bambboo sticks that allows sick, elderly, and more often than not, wealthy chubby people to be carried up the hill by hard working young chaps trying to earn a buck.
All in all the places we visited in Gujarat were amazing and we got
Arabic writing
Great spot, 10 km away from Ahmedabad. to see drastically different things that we had seen up to that point on our trip. We had done some hardcore sight seeing from the second i got out of the hospital and after Junagadh we were ready for some serious relaxation. Lucky for us a mirage of an island, called Diu, laid not too far in the distance.
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Anil Mulchandani
non-member comment
Lucky restaurant
The story of Lucky is that it was, and is, Ahmedabad's popular place for tea and a bun with their own fresh butter from decades. When they decided to expand and add a South Indian/snacks place, they found that the graves below the shop they had been using by chance. They did not know who were buried here but decided to respect them by not destroying the tombs but covering them with fresh flowers daily. This is not a cementry but the restaurant owners respect for those buried below the place he has been using for decades.