Today’s journey would lead us by car out of Udaipur and into the Indian countryside. We first stopped in Kumbhalgarh, a fort with the second longest wall in the world and the birth place of Maharana Pratap, the great king and warrior of Mewar. Second stop was Ranakpur, a small city which housed “the best” Jain temple in India – and once seen, no other lived up to its beauty. Finally, we would continue into Jodphur, but not without encountering a problem from the wildlife of India.
Train was the most optimal form of transportation within India, but Udaipur didn’t provide a great hub for transfer to Jodpur so the more expensive route by car was the only option. However, this worked out fine because by car we were opened up to India’s countryside and could call the shots to stop in certain areas if we wished. As a matter of fact, Mel made a call early along the trip when she spotted a nice valley over the hill. I’ve mentioned many times in my blog that as a photographer, when you see something along the road don’t hesitate about stopping. With luck, not only did the valley offer us a good landscape to shoot but we came across a mother with her child walking their goats, without housing or other life for kilometers around them.
The Kumbhalgarh fort, 82km north of Udaipur, secluded from any city except for the intimate towns close by, was built by Rana Kumblha in the 15th century and later enlarged in the 1800s. While reading up a bit about in the Wiki I found this:
According to legend the Maharana of Kumbhalgarh tried so many times to build the wall of the fort but each time failed to do so. They consulted a local pilgrim about their construction problems. The pilgrim advised that he be beheaded and after cutting his head to build a temple where the head should fall, and to build the wall and the fort where the rest of his body lay. Following his advice, they succeed in building the world’s second largest wall.
Kumbhalgarh wall exeeds 36km and was named the second largest next to the Great Wall which is 4000km – what a difference in length! The fort was also the birthplace of Maharana Pratap, a great warrior and king of Mewar which the City Palace museum in Udaipur goes into great detail about. Occupied until the nineteenth century, the fort is now open to the general public as a museum and is spectacularly lit for a few minutes each evening.
The steep hike up to the fort would’ve left invading armies fatigued by the top because it took me a sweaty 12 minutes to walk it (irrelevant to the story but I felt like I had to share). I bumped into a friendly cricket team and once I took a photo with one of them the rest wanted one too while their friends documented every single moment on their Nokia camera phones. Once I avoided that road block, I made my way to to the top of the fort and got the best vantage point: a 360 degree view. The view was spectacular and the only sound was gusting wind. It was one of those times in your life where you’d give anything to be a bird. Imagine having the chance to be on top of the Empire State Building in New York with just the wind under your arms and a clear view of being above everything else.
One thing to note which I found came up frequently in India, but was noticeably absent here, was the honking of car horns. Noise pollution wasn’t a problem here despite the use of honking as a universal driving sign. With all the times I heard the horn go off, it was to warn people ahead to watch out, ask a car or person to move, alert of a car coming up ahead, and even say thank you. The car coming up ahead signal was especially important because of the narrow roads we always traveled on, which could only fit a car and a bike. Whenever two cars stood off like wild gun-slingers, one (if not both) had to drive two wheels into the dirt to get through. Just a little honking in India 101 for ya there.
*Click to enlarge
Ranakpur is a village located in the Pali district of Rajasthan in western India. It is located between Jodhpur and Udaipur, in a valley on the western side of the Aravalli Range. Ranakpur is easily accessed by road and is widely known for its marble Jain temple.
Architecture
Light colored marble has been used for the construction of this grand temple which occupies an area of approximately 60 x 62 meters. The temple, with its distinctive domes, shikhara, turrets and cupolas rises majestically from the slope of a hill. Over 1444 marble pillars, carved in exquisite detail, support the temple. The pillars are all differently carved and no two pillars are the same. It is also said that it is impossible to count the pillars. Also all the statues face one or the other statue. There is one beautiful carving made out of a single marble rock where there 108 heads of snakes and numerous tails. One cannot find the end of the tails. The image faces all four cardinal directions. In the axis of the main entrance, on the western side, is the largest image.
The temple is designed as chaumukha—with four faces. The construction of the temple and quadrupled image symbolize the Tirthankara’s conquest of the four cardinal directions and hence the cosmos.
History
The dating of this temple is controversial but it is largely considered to be anywhere between the late 14th to mid-15th centuries. Inspired by a dream of a celestial vehicle, Dhanna Shah, a Porwad, is said to have commissioned it, under the patronage of Rana Kumbha, then ruler of Mewar. The architect who oversaw the project is said to have been named Deepaka. There is an inscription on a pillar near the main shrine stating that in 1439 Deepaka, an architect, constructed the temple at the direction of Dharanka, a devoted Jain.
This temple was nominated as one of the top 77 wonders in a contest for the new seven wonders of the world.
The temple was magnificent, just above and beyond the sculpting detail I’ve ever seen in any other place in the world. The patterns get so detailed and repetitive you’d think India gathered up all most creative individuals with obsessive compulsive disorder and just handed them a hammer and chisel. You could also see how big some of these pillars got when Mel stood next to them. As the light shifted through the temple over the day the columns’ coloring shifted from bluish-white to gold. I was told that when the mogul emperor Akbar visited this temple he had made an inscription on one of the columns, which says, “No one ever will be allowed to destroy this jewel of architecture.” I asked the guards about it, but they didn’t know of such a thing.
The final journey to Jodphur from here would take almost 200km to complete. Driving along a quiet stretch of road on a dusk lit evening the unthinkable happened – we hit a deer on the right-side headlight. We knocked it back a couple of feet and saw it struggle back up to its feet and eventually run off into the forest again. I think most of the damage was done to the car at that point. It started, but the headlights weren’t functioning properly. The driver drove us into the town up ahead and we were we informed there were no other cars near by. We were to wait until tomorrow or to grab the next bus through town for the rest of the way.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq9y_i56RXo
Waiting for the next day was out of the question, so Mel and I dropped into the bus stop and waited for the next three-hour bus ride to Jodpur.
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