prag mahal: pigeon sanctuary

sean and i, having left cloth at tailors all over ahmedabad, have moved on to bhuj. katie's recommendations have proved to be wonderful recommendations indeed. thank you, katie!! we are now in the region of kutch, completely fascinating. i can only wonder what it looked like when she was here, now it is green and there are puddles everywhere. sadly, we only have two days in bhuj (this trip is flying, we have less than 2 weeks left!). today we spent in town sightseeing and tomorrow we are off on a tour of the countryside. i am really excited about this: we have been doing all of our traveling by train and at night and so i have no idea what the area between the cities we have visited looks like. the countryside is the most interesting to me. we told the tourist bureau we wanted to see the wildlife, people, and handicrafts of kutch. we'll see what we get.

today sean and i visited the prag mahal, the aina mahal, and sarad bagh palace. most impressive by far was the prag mahal. in 2001 there was a huge earthquake in gujarat, 7.7, and the epicenter was in kutch. evidence of the earthquake can still be seen everywhere... or maybe it is just typical less-developed country rubble, but the signs of the earthquake are obvious. since the earthquake destroyed (leveled) a lot of the town, city planners took the opportunity to make some changes. the streets were widened. today walking in the old city we could see where buildings would have extended into the road, but now they just end where rooms used to be. the earthquake killed 20,000 people, including 400 school kids who were marching in a parade for republic day (this year duff and i were walking the hills around ooty for india's republic day and some kids road by on bikes with indian flags attached to the handle bars and gave us little paper flags). the buildings that fared the worst were the newly built highrises, but the buildings we visited today suffered obvious damage.

there was far to little information about the prag mahal. it is a huge building that can be seen from all over the city. the area is abandoned now, and the walls are crumbling and the surrounding area is overgrown. only a handful of rooms in the huge castle (basically) were open and it KILLED me that we couldn't explore all of them. the place had a really ghostly feel to it and was completely inhabited by flapping pigeons. the main room visitors see is the dilapidated durbar hall, which looks like it is right out of a haunted house movie set. the walls are crumbling, there are 11 crystal chandeliers in the room, caked in dust and pigeon droppings. they also are set with large red stones. lining the walls are european classical statues and TONS of taxidermy. i mean tons. there was a taxidermied hippo as well as dear, bears, and all manner of big cats. like everything else these were covered in dust, and pigeons perched on the heads on the dead animals. it was so creepy and fun! the rooms was filthy and a little light made it in through red and blue stained glass windows. i am crushed that we couldn't see the rest of the palace. we did get to visit another room to the side of the main hall, filled with large mirrors and more taxidermy with carpet worn through to the floor. there were absolutely no protective measures engaged here, it is one of the most fascinating buildings i have ever seen.

interestingly, there were some automaton statues similar to those that sean is familiar with from his work with the magic collection. there were two, apparently one from france in terrible condition, and another of an indian man sitting cross-legged smoking a hooka. when we went next door to the aina mahal, which is a museum, sean got into a neat discussion with the curator about their collection. the curator had a passion for the history and culture of kutch and showed us a book and a number of articles he had written on the region, all pre-earthquake. he talked about the challenges of running the museum and preserving the collection because the building was so damaged by the earthquake. apparently they have a very large collection but most of it is in storage because the whole second floor was destroyed. monsoon also seems to cause a problem for the collection, now housed in a non-secure building.

the sarad bagh palace was the home of the maharaja of kutch but the entire third floor of the structure disappeared after the earthquake. the man only died in 1991 and it was neat to see the artifacts of his life which included a number of taxidermied lions and tigers with photos of the kill when he shot them and their measurements (all over 10 feet).

early to bed, our driver picks us up at 8:30 tomorrow morning.