Junagadh, Somnath and Rajkot November 17-19

On Sunday morning November 17, we left Dholavira and travelled most of the day before reaching Junagadh, our next stop. The mountain peak of Girnar looming out of the haze as we approached Junagadh was a most impressive sight.

 

The mountain peak of Girnar seen from the Junagadh fort

Late in the afternoon we went to the Junagadh fort to see some underground Buddhist rock-cut caves.

A Buddhist cave

The surface of the area of the Buddhist caves

But we saw little else of the fort beyond a deep well approached down a long flight of steps, because we were pressed for time before sunset to get to the place near the Girnar Mountain where the Emperor Asoka had recorded a number of his famous edicts on a rock in the 3rd century BC.

The steps leading down to a deep water reservoir at the Junagadh fort

The rock bearing the Asoka edicts

The building enclosing the rock with the Asoka edicts

The next morning Monday November 18 we went to the nearby Gir forest and lion preserve, where we took an hour-long bus safari tour at 9:30, which was not all that impressive.

Two lions resting under a tree in the Gir preserve

We then continued on to Somnath, arriving at noon. Somnath is one of the most important temples in India for Hindu nationalists, because of its history of destruction by the Muslim invader Mahmud of Ghazna in the 11th century, leading to its reconstruction as a priority after Indian independence in 1947. Roxna was an especially welcome visitor here, due to her husband, so in the afternoon we were shown around a few temples with caves a short distance from the main temple and then we were escorted to the main temple where we hung out until the evening darshan service got under way. That was the loudest and longest-lasting darshan service I have attended anywhere. Cameras were not allowed so I do not have any photographs of Somnath.

The next morning Tuesday November 19 I left the group because I needed to return to Jordan, while the others continued on for a couple more days to Dwarka, the westernmost point in India.

I took a 7:00 am bus from Somnath to the city of Rajkot, arriving at 12:30. I walked around the city and spent a couple hours at an internet place, before arriving at the airport with plenty of time to hang out before my flight left late at 9:00 pm for Mumbai. My flight arrived at 10:00 and I hung out in the domestic terminal for a while before I took the shuttle bus to the international terminal and then slept for a few hours on the sidewalk outside the terminal, as I have done a couple other times at the Mumbai airport before catching an early morning flight.

The next morning Wednesday November 20 I checked into my flight to Amman at 6:15 am, but they would not let me on the flight because I did not have a ticket for an onward flight from Amman. Showing them my passport full of Jordanian entrance and exit stamps and police registration stamps did not have much of an impact, and I spent the next two hours in limbo until they decided to give me a boarding pass, just minutes before the flight closed. I have not had to face that sort of difficulty ever before.

The flight left Mumbai at 9:30 am and after a change of planes in Riyadh, I was back at the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman at 6:15 pm.