Amman March 26-April 9

My flight arrived in Amman at 10:45 on Tuesday March 26 at the newly opened terminal.

The new terminal at the Amman airport.

During this two-week stay in Amman at ACOR, my principal work was to finish the draft English translation of Mohammed Ghosheh’s Arabic book about the Dome of the Rock. I also worked on some revisions to the Baptism Site application for UNESCO World Heritage status and did a quick final proofreading pass through the two Gustaf Dalman volumes, which should be out in early May.

This two-week period was filled with a heavy schedule of public lectures that I attended at the French Cultural Institute, the British Institute, the German Institute, the Columbia University Center and ACOR.

On Wednesday morning April 10, I crossed over the Allenby Bridge to Jerusalem. Rustom, the assistant director of the Baptism Site, came by ACOR first thing in the morning to pick up my final edited version of the UNESCO application and he took me to the bridge on his way to work at the nearby Baptism Site. That enabled me to cross in a fast four hours of travel time.

Delhi March 21-25

My flight from Hyderabad arrived in Delhi at 12:45 on Thursday March 21 and I took a taxi to my hotel in Gurgaon, to the south of Delhi. I had picked my hotel to be within walking distance of the American Institute of Indian Studies. In the afternoon I walked around to the old town of Gurgaon, which is a typically impoverished Indian town with little in common with the glitzy malls and skyscrapers that are springing up elsewhere in Gurgaon.

The next morning on Friday March 22 I went to the American Institute of Indian Studies to browse in their art and archaeology library. At noon I walked the long distance to the HUDA City Centre metro, the terminal station of the metro line. I took the metro into the city and got off at the Lodi Gardens. I went to the national INTACH office there and chatted for a few minutes with Lalit Gupta, the head of INTACH; Rani Sarma had let him know I would be coming to introduce myself. I then walked around the Lodi Gardens with the monumental tombs of the Lodi sultans of Delhi and then went to the small Tibet House museum.

The Lodi Gardens

I then took the metro back to the end of the line and went to a nearby shopping area, where I had dinner at a fancy restaurant. I ended up with a bill for 1000 rupees = 20 US dollars. That was way more than I have ever paid for a meal before, due to a ten percent service charge, a 12.5 percent VAT tax, a five percent VAT tax surcharge and an additional seven percent mystery tax.

The next morning, Saturday March 23 I took an auto to the HUDA City Centre metro station; walking the full seven kilometer distance both ways yesterday was enough. I went to the Vasant Kunj housing colony to meet Banashree Baneerjee, a consultant in participatory planning who was involved in the 2002 Bhimunipatnam heritage workshop. In the afternoon I went to one of the big shopping malls in Gurgaon.

On Sunday March 24 I took the metro into the city. I went to the Lodi Gardens again and then Safdar Jung’s Tomb and Humayun’s Tomb in the area.

Lodi Gardens

Safdar Jung Tomb

Humayun’s Tomb

I then went to the neighborhood of the darghah (tomb shrine) of Nizam al-Din, the famous Sufi mystic who died in 1325. I saw there the tomb of the poet Ghalib, who died in 1869, and then the shrine of Nizam al-Din itself. I had been to all of these various places in 2001, but not since.

The tomb of Ghalib

The Nizam al-Din Darghah

On Monday March 25, I spent the day at the AIIS library, browsing through the archaeological excavation reports of the early Buddhist sites that I have been to.

That evening I went to the airport for my flight to Amman that left at 9:30 pm. I had booked an inexpensive flight, but at the cost of an eight-hour layover in Abu Dhabi. That, however, was not so bad, since I managed to sleep a good deal in the airport terminal and as always I could watch video podcasts on my iPad.

Hyderabad March 16-20

My overnight bus arrived in Hyderabad at 7:00 on Saturday March 16, and I checked into the Sai Prakash Hotel in the city center in Abids, where I have stayed before. That evening I went to Shivarampally on the southern outskirts of the city to meet some former students and colleagues from the Henry Martyn Institute. Varghese and his new wife, whose wedding I had missed by arriving in India one day too late, and Poonam and Vijay came to a local restaurant for dinner.

Vijay, Poonam, Me, Varghese and his wife Reeba

The main objective of my stay in Hyderabad was to meet people who have an interest in the heritage buildings of Bhimunipatnam.

On Sunday March 17 I visited S. P. Shorey. Now retired, he had worked for the Hyderabad Urban Development Authority and back in 1980 he had written a Tourism Development and Conservation Plan for Bhimunipatnam. He was also one of the participants in the 2002 workshop.

On Tuesday March 19 I visited Anuradha Reddy, the head of the Hyderabad chapter of INTACH. That afternoon I called on Timothy Marthand, the pianist, and picked up the lens to my fancy camera that I had left behind when I first arrived in India.

On Wednesday March 20 I went to the Andhra Pradesh State Department of Archaeology and Museums to meet K. Padmanabha and then Ramakrishna Rao, who had signed my permit.

That afternoon I went to the Henry Martyn Institute in Shivarampally only to discover upon arrival that a two-day conference on Spirituality and Secularism was in progress. I had lunch with the conference participants and then attended the afternoon session, which was followed by a performance of Carnatic music and dinner.

The HMI campus with the conference participants at lunch

The Carnatic music performance

The next morning I went to the airport for my 10:30 am flight to Delhi.

Chennai and Bangalore March 12-15

My overnight bus arrived in Chennai on Tuesday March 12 at 5:45 am and having received good directions, I took a bus to Velacherry on the south side of the city and then walked to the house of the Benoit family, arriving at 7:45. The Benoits are the family with whom I had travelled around visiting Roman Catholic pilgrimage churches in December 2011. I had known Florina Benoit and her husband Ashok from my days at the Henry Martyn Institute in Hyderabad. The family members are building an apartment building for themselves, where some members have already moved in.

The Benoit apartment building

After settling in, I went back to the city, where I spent the day traveling around by bus and metro. I got a bus ticket for my onward travel to Bangalore and did some shopping, before returning to the Benoit building. That evening Florina and Ashok, who live in the city, came by to have dinner with the rest of the family.

The next morning I went to the city again. I originally had ambitious plans for sight-seeing, but once I arrived at the central bus station at 10:00, my enthusiasm dwindled and I decided to check into the dormitory for transit passengers there instead. So I took naps, did some reading and hung out for the rest of the day until my 11:30 pm bus to Bangalore.

The bus arrived at the central bus station in Bangalore at 6:00 am on Thursday March 14. I walked around and got a ticket for my onward travel to Hyderabad and then took a bus to the Indian Institute of Management in the south side of the city and checked into my hotel nearby at 9:30.

I had come to Bangalore to meet Kiran Kiswani, an urban planner and architect with an interest in the heritage buildings of Bhimunipatnam. She was the person who organized a workshop about heritage conservation in Bhimunipatnam in 2002. In the afternoon I went to meet Kiran on the IIA campus, where her husband is a faculty member, and we chatted for a couple of hours.

The next day, Friday March 15, after spending much of the morning browsing the internet at the hotel, I went to the Bannerghat National Park south of the city, in the afternoon. I took the safari bus trip, which lasted under an hour. A good number of animals were to be seen, including various antelopes, lions and tigers, including one albino..

Some antelopes

An albino tiger

Otherwise there was nothing much else to do there, so I took a bus back to the central bus station, arriving at 5:00. I walked around for a while and hung out at a nice public park right next to the station, before my bus to Hyderabad left at 7:45. The bus was a slower, non-air-conditioned coach, which made a number of stops along the way.

The park in Bangalore

Machilipatnam March 11

On Monday March 11 Mohammed Silar took me around to see sights in Machilipatnam and the surrounding area.

After saying my goodbyes at the Home of Hope orphanage, Mohammed took me to the campus of the Noble School to see the administration building from the 19th century there. Then we went to see Kekinimahal, a palace in the city center that is no longer in use, and then stopped briefly at a number of other older buildings.

The Noble School

Kekinimahal

First Building

Second Building

Third Building

Fourth Building

Fifth Building

But the main objective of the day was to see early Buddhist sites. We went to the site of Ghantasala where there is a large excavated and conserved stupa and a site museum. Mohammed Silar had arranged for the local newspaper reporters to be there for an interview.

The stupa at Ghantasala

The site museum

Mohammed Silar in the museum

The newspaper interview

We continued to the town of Gudiwada, the third place I have been to with that name. The early Buddhist stupa there was not well preserved. More interesting was the historic Jain Temple.

The stupa at Gudivada

The main shrine of the Jain Temple

Another part of the Jain Temple

We had lunch and then Mohammed droppedme off at the central bus station, from where I took a bus at 3:10 to Vijawada, arriving at 4:30. I had a booking for a 6:00 am train the next morning to Chennai, but I changed my plans and rather than check into a hotel for the night in Vijawada, I decided to take an overnight bus to Chennai instead. So I hung out at the bus station and spent some time browsing the internet, before my bus left at 10:00 pm.

Machilipatnam March 10

I had traveled to Machilipatnam at the invitation of Mohammed Silar, the head of the local chapter of INTACH, to see the heritage sites at this historic port on the east coast. Machilipatnam was the port for the city of Hyderabad and the Dutch and later the British established settlements there.

I arrived at 8:30 and Mohammed Silar met me and took me to the Home of Hope Orphanage where I settled in and had breakfast. At 10:15 we went to the nearby historic Dutch cemetery, where we were met by two others and some journalists. Remarkably, modern signs identify the texts of several of the tombstones.

Mohammed Silar and his friends with me at the Dutch cemetery

We then proceeded to the Dutch and British cantonment and fort at Bandar, which is an historic monument protected by the central government on the outskirts of the modern town. The site consists of a fort around a central courtyard, along with an isolated belfry for a no longer extant Church of St John the Evangelist that was destroyed in the cyclone of 1864, and at a distance an armory building.

The sign at the fort

The fort

Another view of the fort

The belfry and armory seen from the fort

The armory

Adjacent to the fort is a hospital built by the Nizam of Hyderabad and a jaggery (sugar cane) factory from the 1920s, now both in ruinous condition.

The Nizam’s hospital to the right and the jaggery factory to the left as seen from the fort

Vats in the jaggery factory

The overgrown perimeter wall of the jaggery factory

We then went to see the historic British cemetery nearby. Among those buried there is Michael Topping, the first modern professional surveyor in India who died in 1796. The inscription on his tomb is in Latin.

The historic British cemetery

The tomb of Michael Topping

We then went to the northeast of the town to see a Portuguese tomb marked by a pillar that Mohammed had discovered a month earlier. That is one of the few surviving traces of the earliest European settlement in the area.

The Portuguese tomb

Back at the Home of Hope at 2:30, I had lunch and read some articles that Mohammed had given me about the town. At 4:30 we went on an afternoon visit of historic places in Machilipatnam.; Moses, the director of the Home of Hope, joined us. We first went to a Dutch building and then to the government complex, where there are number of buildings from British times.

The Dutch building

The Governor’s building

We then went to the St Mary’s Church, with a cemetery from British times and still in use. Inside the church is a funerary monument for Arabelle Robison, who died in 1809 and therein hangs a tale. Arabelle was the daughter of Captain Robinson stationed at the Machilipatnam fort. She and Major General John Pater, the commander of the fort, fell in love, but they could not marry because he was said to already have a wife back in England. But hey moved in together anyway, causing a great scandal. Before the matter of his previous marriage could be cleared up, Arabelle died. She was refused burial in consecrated ground, so John Pater had her buried in a private ground. He had her body embalmed and put in a coffin that he could raise to the surface by pulling a knob to better contemplate his loss.

St Mary’s Church and the cemetery with Moses

The funerary monument for Arabelle Robinson with me, the local pastor, Mohammed and Moses

Back at the Home of Hope at 7:00, I was able to use the internet on the director’s computer, before attending the evening gathering of the orphans, at which I said a few words, followed by dinner with Moses, the director. The Home of Hope orphanage has been in operation since 1995 with the support over the years of two women from Finland.

The evening with the orphans at the Home of Hope Orphanage

Visakhapatnam March 8-9

I stayed on in Visakhapatnam for two more days. On Friday March 8 I spent the morning at my hotel, browsing the internet and writing emails. At 2:30 Rani and her sister picked me up and we went to visit two early Buddhist sites that had been brought to our attention by an enthusiast for early Buddhist sites who was a friend of the Ameya World School hostel warden.

The first site was Gudiwada Dibba, recently identified on a hill not far from Tagarapuvalasa, near Bhimunipatnam. The small site consists of slight remains of an elongated building that is curved at one end and some brick fragments and rock cuttings elsewhere on the hill top

The curved structure

Rani, her sister and me with the local informant at the site of Gudiwada. (The Chitavalsa Jute Mill is just visible to our left across the river)

We then went to the second nearby site of Kota Cherkupalli, where there were only slight traces of the curve of a presumed stupa above bedrock.

The few stones aligned in a curve at Kota Cherkupalli

The view from Kota Cherkupalli. Gudiwada Dibba is the hill in the center horizon

On our way back to Visakhapatnam, we stopped at a nursery and Rani got a few plants. The nursery has an interesting sculpture garden.

A sculpture of fish morphing into human heads

Back at the hotel that evening, I watched the first half of an old Telugu movie with English subtitles that has a few scenes shot in Bhimunipatnam. We had gotten a copy of the movie from the DIET director.

On Saturday March 9 I checked out of the hotel and went to Rani’s house in the late morning. We chatted at length and I spent a lot of time on the internet. At 6:30 I took an auto to the train station to catch an overnight train to Machelipatnam.

That ended the survey project for this second year. Outside of the international airline tickets to get to India, the expenses were minimal, since we had free room and board at the school. I paid 12 US dollars a day for the ten days we hired our auto driver. I also donated ten US dollars a day for the eleven days we three had lunch with the sisters. The rented cars and drivers for the two Sunday trips, the taxis between the airport and Visakhapatnam and between Visakhapatnam and Bhimunipatnam and the hotel and restaurant bills added about 350 US dollars more, so my total project expenses for the two weeks were around 600 US dollars or 30,000 rupees.