(Message sent Wed, 29 Nov 2006 05:24:00 -0700)
Hello everyone. I've spent the last couple of days pottering about on the lovely island of Diu, just off the south coast of Gugarat. The place should show up well on Google Earth. Here are the co-ordinates of my hotel: 20 43.122 N 070 59.295 E. Diu is very calm and laid-back holiday island, with very little traffic on the roads. I have spent my time just relaxing, reading, and wandering about the island. The place is so laid back that the shopkeepers can only just be bothered bestirring themselves to take your money.
I took two days to get from Junagadh to Diu, stopping overnight in a town called Veraval to see a temple there. Veraval is on the coast, so I was keen to get my first look at the ocean. I chose a road that seemed to go in the right direction and started walking. The road ended in a busy fish and vegetable market, with a row of buildings between it and the sea. A narrow lane led between two of the buildings. It was full of trash (as in, knee-high rubbish to either side, with a narrow tramped-down path through the middle), but I could see the water at the end so I ventured into the lane. It ended in a sea wall, which the rubbish was piled up against, overflowing into the ocean below. I tried to close my mind to the image of a trash waterfall, and looked out over the water. It was a lovely scene - perfectly smooth gray water with many fishing boats at anchor stretching off in to the distance.
I turned my head to look along the shore, and thought to myself, what are all those women doing squatting down amid the rubbish? With a start I realized that I had blundered, dumb tourist style, into the local women's latrine. Needless to say I skedaddled in considerable embarrassment, but I couldn't help reflecting on how strange the world is. Land that would be worth $10,000 a square metre in New Zealand is here, by poverty's irresistible logic, used as an open latrine in the middle of a rubbish dump.
The trip from Veraval to Diu was interesting. A decrepit old bus was driven along a very bad road at ball-busting speeds. The road was so narrow that at times the driver was pruning the forest on both sides of the road at once with the sides of the bus. But it got me where I wanted to be. And that's Indian infrastructure for you: it's dirty, it's uncomfortable, and it sure smells funny, but at the end of the day it gets the job done.
The very best of the local buses wouldn't be allowed anywhere near a New Zealand road (the LTSA would take a dim view, for example, of the bars over the windows preventing any hope of escape), and yet they work, they leave on time, they don't break down despite being asked to handle atrocious roads, and they get you where you need to be.
While Diu is basically a chill-out destination, there are still lots of interesting things to see. It was a Portuguese colony, so the town has lots of those tall white-washed churches that seem to be a staple of Iberian colonial architecture. Most of the churches have been converted to other uses, but the main one is still a church. Inside, someone has taken a big slab of polystyrene packaging, written "WORD OF GOD" on it in blood-red letters, and then glued the thing on to the lectern. I don't know why but it struck me as very strange.
Diu town is a strange mixture of old and new. In places the buildings - some dating from the colonial era I suspect - are decrepit and tumble-down and abandoned, but in other places the houses - always tall and narrow - are freshly and brightly painted with colours designed to contrast starkly with one-another. It reminds me a little of Mexico for some reason. There's clearly money to be made here, presumably on the back of the tourist trade. (By tourist I mean Indian tourist - there are only a tiny number of western tourists here.)
The town is sandwiched between an old city wall to the west and a fort to the east. The city wall isn't all that impressive, but hey - any town with an still-standing city wall is OK by me.
The fort is an impressive piece of work. The eastern edge of the island tapers to a point, and the Portuguese built tall walls right on the edge of the sea, forming two sides of a triangle. The third side went across the land, but they then cut a deep trench from shore to shore, just outside the third wall, forming a sea moat and effectively turning the fort into an island. Despite being 500 years old, the fort is in good nick, and great fun to wander around.
Speaking of being in the nick, part of the fort is used as the town jail. The security measures seemed a little lax however, consisting as they did of a rope cordon, a sign that said, "No Entry," an open door, and a guard asleep in a plastic chair.
(The Indians are very curious about us westerners, and entirely uninhibited about approaching us. I am writing this sitting on a beach on the south side of the island, and I keep getting surrounded by hordes of people who stare at me, giggle, and look over my shoulder to try and make out what I am writing. The Gurarati youngsters call me "uncle", and then once they know my name "Joff-uncle". I haven't yet established if this is the English word used in a very broad context, or a similar-sounding Gugarati word. And if so, what it means.)
Just outside the city wall is a place called the Naida Caves. These 'caves' were apparently formed by Portuguese quarrying efforts. Rather than just dig a single pit, for some reason it seems that they sank hundreds of shafts and then hollowed out the stone at the base of the shafts, presumably targeting a particular stratum of rock. All these shafts interconnect at the bottom, resulting in a very strange, vaguely geometrical set of caves with roofs containing big square holes and supporting pillars chiseled to within an inch of their structural lives.
My favourite feature was the exit path - a set of steps chiseled into a narrow wall between two of the caves, I suspect created by the original quarry workers.
Near the caves I saw a sign that said, "This way to the waterfall." Waterfall? Waterfall? On a small dead-flat island with no surface water? So of course I followed the sign and found what I suspect was some person's great dream, now gone to ruin. The 'waterfall' was basically just a concrete ramp with small stones set in it to make it seem a bit rivery, with pumping equipment to cycle water from a tank at the base up to the top of the ramp. The tank was empty, the pumps off, the 'waterfall' dry. It was all very forlorn, and I suspect that the pumping equipment was turned off for the last time not long after it was turned on for the first time.
While wandering about the island I stumbled upon a curious scheduled monument that doesn't seem to appear in the guidebooks or the tourist maps. It consisted of three structures in an enclosure. Two of the structures held little interest, but the third, well I just don't know what to make of it. From the outside it looks like a squat round building - a grain silo perhaps. There is one opening half way up, reached by a ramp. When you climb the ramp and enter the building you find yourself on a stone platform, the round wall all around you, but open to the sky. In the middle of the stone platform is a shaft two or three metres across, going down to ground level. Carved into the top of the platform are a series of shallow trays arranged radially around the central shaft. Each tray is about two centimetres deep, and has a drainage channel connecting it to the central shaft. In most cases the trays reach from just outside the central shaft to just inside the surrounding wall, but in a couple of places the space is divided into two half-sized trays, with the outer one provided with its own drainage channel to the main shaft.
Now it is abundantly clear that this structure was designed for liquid to pool in the trays and then drain into the central shaft. The question becomes, what kind of liquid? Perhaps I've watched too much Buffy, but it's very hard to resist the notion that the liquid involved was blood, and that this was a place of mass animal sacrifice, and that each tray marked the place where an animal thrashed out the last of its life. But I haven't yet found out anything about the place, so it's hard to say.
Well, I've had a fun relaxing time in Diu, but it's time to get moving again.
Love to all, Joff.
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