Message #20: Ten thousand? We could almost buy our own ship for that!

(Message sent Fri, 24 Nov 2006 05:41:02 -0700)

I've just been on a pilgrimage, up the 10,000 steps of Girnar Hill. It was just amazing. In fact, I reckon it's the best thing I've done in India so far.

I arrived at the first step before dawn, and started up the hill as the sun was rising. There were lots of people there. It being a pilgrimage I was expecting a somber, decorous mood among the walkers, but not so. It was more like a carnival atmosphere, with groups of excited school kids, people carrying enormous loads of things to sell to pilgrims further up, a group of women in saris carrying stout walking sticks and making for the top with alacrity, and a tiny old lady making the ascent in bare feet.

The first thing that makes the walk so extraordinary is that the terrain changes, abruptly, four times. At first you are climbing steadily through light forest, a great craggy bluff in front of you becoming more distinct as the sun rises. Next you are climbing the bluff itself. This is an amazing sheer face of fissured, holed rock so steep and so fractured that you keep expecting sheets of it to peel off and go crashing down the valley, glacier style. What the ascent must have been like before the steps went in I can hardly imagine. And building the steps through such terrain must have been a nightmare.

Once above the bluff you climb through open, gentle terrain, and this is where the first of the major temples appear - a big complex of them.

Finally the path reduces until you are walking up a razor-back ridge, with the land falling away on each side. Far below to your right is a pleasant wooded valley, dotted with hills. To your left is a broad valley with a lake in it.

You climb up this ridge and eventually, having done nothing for 2.5 hours but walking up stairs, you get to the temple on the highest point of Girnar Hill. And then the hard part begins.

I must admit that by the time I had reached this highest point I had just about had enough fun for one day, but I couldn't leave the last bit undone, so I plunged down the other side. I'm pleased that I did, for the last section - set to test the determination of the faithful I'm sure - was the hardest but also the best.

You plunge way down a set of steps, and then up again to a temple perched right on the top of this huge, fang-like upthrust of black rock. From a distance you can't believe that you are going to actually end up at the top of such a forbidding peak, but the stairs lead you there, surely if steeply.

When you finally enter the temple at the top you sit on the floor before a three-headed statue of the god, receive a handful of prasad (blessed food) from the priest, smear some black paste on your forehead, leave a donation, and then it's time to start the long walk back.

The thing is, the temple is completely enclosed. You've gone to all that effort to get there and you don't get the reward of a view! I guess it's supposed to be all about the god.

One Indian guy I met towards the top was making his first ascent (for many people it was their 6th or 10th or 12th). He was making very tough work of it. Well you should have seen the grin on his face when he came out of the temple. He had seen his god and got there under his own power and boy was he happy about it.

You don't actually have to walk up yourself. You can get someone to carry you. The device used consists of a small square wooden frame with strips of material woven across it. This is tied on to a long pole by ropes at the four corners of the square. The pilgrim sits on the square, and two men lift the pole and put it on their shoulders, one in front and one behind the passenger. I saw some really thin guys carry some really big people up some really steep stairs using this contraption. They get a bit of revenge though, as they get paid by weight, and so there's a human-sized set of beam-balance scales for weighing the passenger! (I am not making this up.)

The walk up and back was physically exhausting, but it was tough socially as well. The path was very crowded, and I think I was the only western tourist on the hill. Everyone was super friendly, so I shook a thousand hands, got welcomed to India a thousand times, and got told about Stephen Flemming's current good form a thousand times. I know it's churlish to complain about such friendliness, but boy it was tiring. The worst came when a swarm of school kids surrounded me. One asked for my autograph in his notebook, and then of course they all wanted me to sign their stuff. Good training for my inevitable super-stardom I guess.

The start of the stairs is at 21 31.526 N 070 30.357 E, the final temple near 21 31.625 N 070 31.916 E. (In fact this reading was taken during the descent from the final temple. I forgot to take a reading at the top, and there was no freaking way I was going back up!)

Small-town Gugarat is certainly a much nicer environment that the tourist traps of Rajasthan. In the town I am in at the moment (Junagadh), I can walk the streets at will without being constantly pestered, and the shopkeepers seem to be charging me the Indian price.

However there is a downside. In the tourist centers you can get all the basic travel essentials on every street corner. In Junagadh on the other hand all the shopkeepers speak English, bit no-one has even heard of toilet paper, not when shown examples can they begin to comprehend what it might be used for. And there's a limit to what one is willing to achieve with mime. A while back I swapped books with another traveller, winding up with a Frederick Forsyth. The writing was so eye-wateringly bad that I couldn't get past the first few pages, so I got rid of it. Which I am now regretting - it would have come in very handy right about now...

While the town is quite nice, I don't suppose I will ever get used to how dirty the streets are. One evening I bought a coconut drink - a green coconut with the top whacked off and a straw inserted. After I had finished the 200ml of coconut milk I was left holding a one kilogram organic mug. What the heck was I supposed to do with it? Well of course I knew what the heck I was supposed to do with it - just chuck it on the street. But I couldn't bring myself to do it. So I gave it to my hotelier who chucked it on the street for me.

For those of you who are heartily sick of hearing about forts and wells, you will be pleased to hear that Junagadh has a fort with two wells in it!

The fort isn't much by Rajasthan standards, but it does have a charm that comes from the fact that it's mostly overgrown. In some places it feels like you are walking through a forest, with only occasional glimpses of old crumbling wall.

As for the wells, it's amazing how many variations on the basic hole-in-the-ground people have come up with. The two wells inside the fort are different from each other and from all the others I have seen.

The first is based around a basic round shaft (although much, much bigger than what you usually think of as a well). Then a narrow sloped slot has been cut into the rock, forming a man-made canyon that deepens as you descend towards the water.

There is water at the bottom of this well, although it is covered in a filthy slick of plastic and who knows what else. It looked like the trash compacter scene from Star Wars actually. When I got to the bottom I noticed that the crud had been cleared away from a small portion of the water, and wet human footprints lead from it up the stairs. Good grief - someone had been swimming in it!

The second well, bigger and deeper than the first, is based on a square design. A big square shaft goes down into the rock. Then a big access tunnel has been bored into the rock in such a way that it wraps itself around three sides of the main shaft as it descends. So it's sort of like an anti-tower. The tunnel is lit and ventilated by holes bored inwards to connect with the main well shaft. This works fine up high, but down low the tunnel becomes almost totally dark. I had to inch my way forward, making doubly sure that there was somewhere to put my foot down before putting my foot down.

Once again your reward for reaching the bottom is a foul cesspit of filth. No swimmers this time though.

One thing that I really liked about both wells is that they contain no carvings and no inscriptions and little in the way of datable stylistic elements. This means that no-one knows how old they are, and they may be among the oldest such structures anywhere.

Junagadh is also interesting because some of Ashoka's edicts are located just out of town. Ashoka was the greatest emperor of the earliest Indian empire about which much is known for certain. He was fond of erecting edicts dictating the proper deportment of his subjects, and he built them to last. In Junagadh they take the form of words chiseled into a huge round boulder. To stand there and look at these writings, the commands of a long-dead emperor, still perfectly legible after 2300 years, really does my head in.

***