Snapshots from Saurashtra...Part 2(Porbander, Dwaraka and Rajkot)

Porbander....dotted with shops, all closed (on Sundays)

The town square, with Mahatma Gandhi at the center..

His birth place

Beautiful three storeyed house

Snapshots from Saurashtra...Part 1 (Junagadh, Gir and Veraval)

A Vav(deep well) at Junagadh fort. It's one of the earliest known Vavs and is cut from a single rock.

A Bavdi...(smaller well)

We spotted a Neel Gai at Gir quietly grazing. (Asian Antelope) It looks like a cross between a cow and a deer.

And lions, lazing around in the sun..

Orissa!! - Puri to Bhubaneshwar and back(Images)....

Places on the way from Puri to Bhubaneshwar
Walls in Puri are painted with scenes and art:

Orissa!! - Konark (The sun temple) and Chandrabhaga beach

Konark defies expectations....It's beautiful, it's old, mind boggling and huge. It's difficult to believe that it is a temple! There are a lot of legends and conspiracy theories floating around that lend a mysterious and magical feel to the temple.

The smaller front portion is the dancers hall, with carvings of different dance poses and figures with musical instruments. The taller building is the common hall. There was a taller structure behind this, almost double the height of the common hall, that was the actual temple that housed the Sun god. That has however been destroyed long time back by natural forces and invaders.

The dance hall was for entertainment, and has strageically placed pillars that allow the first ray of the sun to pass through to the temple from any angle(which changes with the season)

Orissa!! (or Odisha?) - Puri(Day1 & Day2)

The first thing that happens when you reach Puri is you smell fish. Everywhere....
Puri is a strange town, it's more of a hotel town......and frankly none of the hotels are really clean. The one we stayed in, was supposed to be the cleanest, and by that benchmark, I shudder to think what the average clean looked like. The best part of the hotel room was though the brilliant patch of sea view...a little away from the "commercial" part of the beach. We used to wake up to fishermen pulling in neverending lines of fishnets and the continous lulling crash of waves...

The Jagannath temple -
Frankly I would have loved to give it a miss.....the free for all loot fest starts right from getting a "Panda" who takes you to the main temple. He promises that the only money you will have to pay, will be whatever you wish to give the Panda. "Apni khushi se" is the most abused phrase throughout Orissa.