Palitana

On Saturday we went to Palitana, a mountain with 800-something Jain temples on top of it. It was one of the most beautiful and best-smelling places I've been to in India so far. Yes, best-smelling. There were tons of fragrant carnations, jasmine plants, and also something else herb-y that I recognized but couldn't place. Palitana is about a 4 hour busride from Ahmedabad. We left at 7, got there at lunchtime, ate, and headed up the mountain. Like Junagadh (and Gujarat in general I've concluded) isn't well known to western tourists, so we were once again the only foreigners there. At only 3,600 steps, this was nothing compared to Junagadh...except we started at the hottest time of the day. The views were beautiful though, and the non-temple architecture made it feel like a Greek isle.




We spent a few hours wandering around the temples, then hiked back down, bought some much-needed water, ate a really nutritious dinner of potato chips and ice cream, and got right back on a bus for Ahmedabad. At one point on the bus ride back I was sitting in the aisle seat and dozed off briefly. The bus hit a bump in the road and I flew foreword across the lap of the Indian man sitting in the seat across the aisle from me. Whoops.