Day 10 - Heritage Walk, Ahmedabad

Each morning in Ahmedabad, we sat in the hotel's courtyard for a breakfast buffet, catching up with our fellow tour members and telling stories. We would order our standard breakfast omelet -- as Mat is in love with the mild, soft cheese here in India. Most days, the neighborhood's monkey population visited our group. They climbed down from their perch on the nearby building or swung near the buffet table via the large tree just outside the hotel wall. It wouldn't take long for the hotel owner to scare them away. They were a little more aggressive than the visiting pigeons, but it was fun to see them here in the city. 

After breakfast and monkeys, we embarked again for Old City of Ahmedabad -- this time for a Heritage Walk with our entire group and a local guide. There are so many areas of historical significance in Ahmedabad.  Ahmedabad was established in 1411 by Ahmed Shah.  The ending "-bad" means city or dwelling just as the ending "pur" or "pol" which also means the same thing -- one's habitat. So our tour was taken across the old city by foot to the joining neighborhoods or "pols."

Ahmedabad's "Pol" or neighborhoods are interconnected throughout the old city

The people of this city practice their own form of Feng Shui. The roads of this planned city structure flow north and south, and houses are built east to west so that the sun shines through the front of the house in the morning. Beyond planning the direction of roads and houses, Old Ahmedabad is organized by 600 different communities that live together here. Imagine how areas of America have Chinatown in New York or Boston's Italian population resiides in its North End. To keep everyone living peacefully, this kind of "pol" culture was promoted.  Priest, shepherd, Jain, every community had its own structure, personality, behavior every community. For example, practitioners of Jainism strictly eat vegetarian; if someone next door cooks non-vegetarian food, their religious sentiment may be compromised. Shepherds tend to the animals--so the cow dung might get problematic for others in the community. Priests may have a different daily prayer schedule than the other people and ringing of bells in the early morning may disrupt other city dwellers. So because of their cultural differences they prefer to stay in separate communities.

Though there are distinct neighborhods, every "pol" is connected though over 100 secret passages. Our tour group paused in an alleyway where we were surrounded by doors of many colors, sizes and shapes. The guide then asked us to find the secret passage --a door led beneath the dwellings and into the next neighborhood. After finding a hidden toilet facility and a closet, we did finally select the secret passage into the next neighborhood.

One of the temples we visited during our Heritage Walk

After our city tour, we checked out late from the hotel to make our way to the Ahmedabad station for the last train ride of this pilgrimage--from Ahmedabad to Ajmer.  This train ride was to be a much shorter ride than our first-- only 6 hours.  Mat and I shared a sleeper compartment with an Indian family with children much the same age as our own. We slept in the adjacent bottom bunks, and the children slept above us. The train traveled northeast to Ajmer where we visited Barefoot College.