We drove from Ahmedabad to Palitana, starting out at 5:30am in the morning!
Enroute, we wanted to see Lothal, a site from the Indus Valley civilization circa 3000BC. Gujarat has many such Indus Valley civilization sites, including at Lothal and Dholaveera. Related sites include Mohenjodaro and Harappa which are now inside the borders of Pakistan. Having been to these sites in Pakistan, I was looking forward to picking up some shards and ceramic remains from the site. Unfortunately, we started out so early from Ahmedabad that we reach Lothal before dawn and therefore could not see it!
Anyway, we moved on to Palitana... or wait... how do we get there? It turned out that our driver was illiterate... an unfortunate problem for a driver since he could not read any of the road signs! Anyway, I read the signs in Gujarati (similar to Hindi script, thankfully). Our driver also refused to eat all day except at truck-stops which he knew from his truck-driving days... The photo shows dawn on the road to Palitana.
We finally reached Palitana and had lunch at one of the many dharamshalas or religious hostels there. Palitana is a very important Jain religious site with 863 temples on a hilltop. The earliest of these temples was built in 900AD but was then destroyed by Mahmud of Ghazni. Since 1100AD, many new temples have been built, each of them more intricate than the next.
We walked up the 3000 steps, seeing many Jain monks, nuns, and just regular folks climbing up and down. For the weary or elderly, there are also chairs or dolis that were carried by four strong men (and sometimes women) going up and down the stairs. We noticed that we saw some people running up and down- some were attempting to ascend 99 times in one day! After walking through the temples, we walked down, realizing too late that we had walked down the opposite side of the mountain. We both had a very uncomfortable ride back to Palitana from the other side of the mountain (over 10 kilometers away)!
The experience of seeing Palitana was great and we were now ready to move on to Kutch in Gujarat...
-Dev
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