Vadodora

Date arrived: 5th December 2023

Date Departed: 8th December 2023

Favourite sight: Laxmi Palace

Average Cost: £42.50 PPPD (a short visit with lots of travel)

Vadodara is modern city with a lot of history. We stopped for a few days as a break out west, and enjoyed it more than we expected.

5th December 2023

We had booked tickets on the super fast express train between Kota Junction and Vododara, which travelled 428KM in just 6 hours and 25 minutes. Now this is pretty quick for India... But still makde for a fairly long train journey! Getting in mid afternoon left us with time to find a rickshaw to the hotel, and have a bit of dinner in the adjoining restaurant before retiring for the evening. Long train journeys absolutely take it out of you here, so who knows how we'll fare over the next few weeks, with trips twice this long and more to manage!

6th December

Our hotel in Vadodara was the 7 Apple Hotel, which is a kind of Premier-Inn style business hotel. The rooms are tiny but comfortable, and being back in a city seems to have brought back things like rooms being serviced daily (although I think there are laws in Rajasthan about entering rooms without explicit permission.) This meant clean towels and freshly made beds each day, which was nice.

The hotel also had a pretty good and inexpensie restaurant on site - aptly named Appetite - which served an excellent breakfast. This is how we started our first day in Vadodara, before electing to visit the main tourist site of the city - the Lakshmi Vilas Palace. Built by Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III in 1890, the place is an absolutely stunning example of what a bit of care and a lot of money can achieve, and was believed to be the worlds largest private dwelling at the time of its construction.

The Gaekwad family still lives in the palace now, in what used to be the old women's quarters, but the rest of the palace is open to visitors. We've seen some pretty impressive palaces in six weeks in India, and while others excel for various reasons - setting, age, history, etc, this is the most magnificent single building we've seen thus far. Every room and passageway is sumptuously decorated, in the style that you might expect a Mahorajah to adopt.

The tour is well planned and includes an audioguide, which talks you through the history of the various bits of the palace, including commentaries from the current Mahorajah, who spent his childhood growing up here. The palace is split into three parts, the public section (Durbar Hall,) the family residence, and the women's residence (the Zenana). The Durbar Hall in particular is an architectural masterpiece, with a pillarless design and beatiful ceiling, floor, and stained glass windows making it a truly impressive room. Unfortunately photography was banned inside the palace!

From the palace we went on to visit the palace museum - which involved a walk of about 1.5KM out to the main road and back in through a different gate. Vadodara was a lot easier to walk around than some other places in India have been, and even though much of the walk was along the side of a main road, we weren't too wiped out by the time we reached the museum. Certainly nothing a chai couldn't fix anyway!

The museum contained a lot of the Majorajah's personal collection, much of which comprised either original European paintings and sculptures, or copies of significant European pieces. Many of the pieces were contemporary to the period, suggesting the Mahorajah was patronising a number of artists across Europe, as well as India.

The narrative of the exhibits was that the pieces had beeen procured and brought back to Baroda (the old name of Vadodara) to share with its people, allowing them to learn about art as practiced in other parts of the world. Unfortunately there was a no pictures rule again - however we did manage to take a picture of a fully working miniature Flying Scotsman steam train that the Mahorajah had procured from Europe for his children. He had installed a 7KM track in the palae grounds, and the young prince used to ride the train each day to his school room! Talk about a toy...

From the museum we made our way back into part of the city and sought out some lunch, stumbling across a small thali restaurant which served us a delicious and inexpensive plate of vegetarian food. Well fed once more, we managed to do a little bit of shopping, partiularly finding some contact lens solution for Julie. We continued exploring and came across a shopping mall which included a branch of Marks and Spencers! This was unexpected, and we just had to pop in...

By this stage we were fairly exhausted, as while Vadodara was proving easier to navigate than some places, it was still tough going in 28 degree heat, so we got a tuk-tuk back to the hotel. Out of sheer apathy, we ate at the hotel restaurant once again this evening.

7th December

Well today was fun! We ecided to set out to the ancient capital of Gujarat - Champaner. The city was the capital for a mere 30 years at the end of the 15th century, and has some fantastic ruins, alongside the adjoining hill fort of Pavagadh. The whole region is a UNESCO world heritage site.

After breakfast we tried to find an Uber to take us tehre and wait for us for a few hours, which kind of worked! We got an Uner driver turned up, who spoke no English, and asked where we wanted to go. Of course, Uber tells the driver all of this before they accept the job, which was a bit odd, but we did enventually manage to get the hotel reception to translate for this guy, who agreed to take us, but wanted 200 rupees more then the Uber fee. It was still in range, and we were comfortable to pay that, so we agreed. After that he drove us a KM away and then transferred us into his brother's car - not a licensed taxi!

In hindsight we should have aborted at this point, but fortunately it all worked out. The driver took us the 50KM to Champener, and agreed to wait for us for two and a half hours, giving us his phone number. 

We spent half an hour looking round some of the fabulous mosques at the Champener world heritage site, and then tried to work out how to find the shared taxis up to the lower cable car station, to take the cable car up to the top of the hill. The hill fort is in ruins now, but the Kali tample up there is supposed to be quite interesting.

I've never seen as many jeeps anywhere in India as were parked up at the bottom of that hill, but could we find anyone wanting to take us? No we could not. In the end we asked a a police check point where we shoudl go, and they told us to wait. I'm not really sure how it happened, but after about 5 minutes, one of the police man flagged down what look ed like a private car, and told us to get in, whilst clambering into the front seat himself. As we set off up the hill, we realised that neither the driver nor the police man spoke any English (others at the check point had) so it was a bit tricky to figure out what we'd gt ourselves into. We did figure out that Danish (our driver) was going to the top of the hill on the cable car, and would take us up there.

When we go to the lower cable car station he parked up (he and the police man moving ropes around to do so, suggesting he had ties with the authorities?) and we entered the cable car station, where we think he was offering to pay for our tickets. We'd already tried to give him some money in return for the lift, which he'd refuseed, but we did manage to persuade him to let us buy all three cable car tickets.

At that point we entered what turned out to be an hour long queue for the cable car, and we realised there was no way we would make our pick up time. Unfortunately we had no mobile signal to call the driver! Fortunately an Indian gentlemen in the queue came to our rescue, speaking good English, and happily chatting to us, and helping to translate a bit with Danish. We worked out that Danish was going to spend about an hour at the top of the hill, and would take us round while he did so, then accompany us back down and drive us back to the bottom of the hill.

Our new friend was also kind enough to call our driver and arrange a new time for us to meet him - phew!

So we enjoyed the cable car trip up to the top (after an hour queuing!) and then walked fairly rapidly through the substantial commercial district, making our way up to the very busy Kali temple. I'm sure the views would have been fabulous, but it was so smoggy we couldn't see a thing!

And then we made our way back down... Danis wanted to buy us some food - so we asked for a Kit Kat, which was the only thing we could recognise in the store!- Fortunately there was next to no queue for the return cable car journey, and once we reached the lower station, Danis found his car again, took us the 5KM back down the hill, then waved us good bye.

The whole thing was more than a little surreal.

We still had a few minutes before our newly arranged pick up time, so we grabbed a quick plate of rice between us from a street stall (it was really good) and then managed to meet our driver, who drove us the 50KM back to Vadodra.

Julie and I had already agreed we needed to give him some extra for the additional wait, so when he asked for more money this was fine - except he asked for twice as much as we felt was fair. At this point we were fairly firm, and gave him the cash we'd set aside. As this was almost 600 rupees more than Uber had quoted (and that quote had been for more time than we had) we didn't feel as if we'd done anyone any disservice.

After our busy and surreal day, we ended up back at the hotel's appetite restaurant for a third day in a row!

8th December (Vadodara and Ahmedabad)

Today was a big travel day, encompassing train journeys from Vadodara to Ahmedabad, and then on to Bhuj in the far west of Gujurat. In total this comprised some 450KM of train journeys, with almost 8 hours of travel, and nearly 6 hours to kill in Ahmedabad in-between. We planned it out quite carefully - and indeed it almost worked...

In Ahmedabad we had to change train stations, from the main Ahmedabad Junction station to a smaller station called Sabermati, out near the crocket ground we'd visited in November. Fotunately the metro ran between the two, so it looked quite straightforward. We deposited our big bags in the luggage office at Ahmedabad Jn, then frabbed an Uber our to the Ahmedabad City Mesuem, which is well reviewed. And, as it turns out, closed.

Okay - plan B. We'd gone through a few options, so we were ready here and decided to grab another Uber to the Lalbhai Dalpatbhai museum, adjoining the engineering college of the same name. So far so good! Open - and free. Oh, and really, really good. The museum had a number of really good sculptures, both stone and wood, as well as paintings and miniatures, with lots of information, and a superb section on coinage of the various Indian states over the centuries. 

After our info dump, we headed across the road to an advertised "Mystery Kitchen" only to find it so mysterious the doors were locked and windows blacked out - so we went to the pizza shop over the road.

Then it all went a bit weird. We booked an Uber back to the main Ahmedabad Jn railway station, and the chap turned up, but seemed to drive past us, turn around, and then come back past about three times before eventually stopping. I thinought this was a bit weird, but he could have just not seen us. He then proceeded to go a bit of course and stop hi Tuk-tuk to go and get a cup of chai! he left us for about ten minutes, then returned, and proceeded to slowly dive  fairly circuitous route to the train station. Anyway, when we got there, the Uber app demanded 50% more than we had originally been quoted, which I pointedly refused to pay on a ccount of the drivers obvious manipulation! Anyway, I no longer have a perfect 5.0 Uber feedback score...

We collected our luggage (all okay) and made our way to the Metro station. I'd forgotten how badly located Ahmedabad's metros are, so should not have been surprised that we had to walk almost half a kilometre to get to this one. But we got there and got on a train - only to find that the Sabarmati Raiway Station stop just doesn't exist!

It seems that plans for a new high-speed rail link from Mumbai to Ahmedabad will include a new combined train and metro station, which shows on all of the maps and route plans, until you get on the train, at which point it just doesn't exit. Aaaanyway, we got off the metro 1.5KM away from the Sabermati station, and got another Uber...

And phew. Made it to Sabermati. 45 minutes to go until our train goes, so no worry that it isn't at the platform yet - sit down and have a rest. Until somebody tapped us on the shoulder to ask where we were going, and to explain that the Bhuj train doesn't go from this Sabermati station. It goes from the other Sabermati station - 500 metres away. Okay - let's walk across - but no. You can't walk, you have to go around a 3KM route round the roads to get there - so another Tuk-tuk it was!

We eventually reached our train with 20 minutes to spare, and really quite ready for a sit down!

The subsequent 6 1/2 hour journey was delayed by an hour, making almost an 8 hour journey, and we were very relieved to reach our accommodation in Bhuj - fortunately 400M from the station - by 1.30AM, and collapse into a very comfy bed!