We've spent the last few days outside the city of Palitana at a great heritage home stay place. The house was built by one of the sons of the ruler of the Palitana area in 1906. His grandaughter and her son are running it as a guest house as a way to make money so that they can restore the whole property. It is outside the city and wonderfully quiet and beautiful. We climbed the steps to the 900 Jain temples. There were 3,000 steps up a mountain! The 2+ hour climb was hard but the descent did in my calf muscles and I've been toddling around and limping for 2 days now...

We had some great experiences talking with people as we went and of course all the children found us fascinating and at one point we had a flock of school kids following us giggling, trying out their english and asking for photos to be taken of them. There were only 2 other Westerners that we encountered there. The next day we returned to the bottom of the climb to look at the temples there and we were scooped up by an older man eager to tell us about Jainism and show us the temples. We ran into a woman who was curious about us and spoke english and we went and had tea and snacks with her while her brother expounded on the spiritual path. They were Jain and had come to stay at the temples for the rainy season, but live in Mumbai. They were incredibly gracious and gave us gifts as well.

This morning we left for Ahmedbad for one night and then on to Patan, Modhera and another hertigage home stay.


fran