Ahmedabad

Indian Tan was all geared up to take the 22hours hell train ride to Ahmedabad, a major city situated in the state of Gujarat. However, much to my dismay, I was very much dreading it. This leg of the journey to explore the Incredible India will be one of the longest, and from previous train ride experience, I can only say that it is with a heavy heart that I embarked on the journey. 22hrs! Imagine that. Just imagine how many times I can go around Singapore with that span of time given. All righty. Back to some facts. The city of Ahmedabad became famous in 1915 as it was the site of Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram.

As we would just be stopping over in Ahmedabad for just like 12 hours enroute to our next destination, Rajasthan, nothing much was planned for this city except to sneak in a visit to Sabarmati Ashram, Gandhi’s former headquarters for the long struggle for Indian Independence.

Sabarmati Ashram, Gandhi’s former headquarters for the long struggle for Indian Independence.

There is nothing much to do in this city, (from the name of it, i think its no one's guess also =p) and frankly we were pretty glad we did not stay much longer than what a stopover permitted anyway. Because not only is the city scorching hot (which goes the same for the rest of India as unfortunately only later that i got to know) and polluted and hardly anyone knows English (or coincidentally its just the 3423 people we approached for directions do not understand English), which thus resulted in us taking up more than 50mintues to find Ghanhi. Again, the fatal error of taking up their directions.

The Sabarmati Ashram shows Gandhi’s philosophy and displays pictorial records of his life, some history on the struggle of India’s poverty and the salt march and some letters he wrote to some random people.

And that’s about it.


Either I didn’t know how to appreciate it or the ashram is not at all that impressive.

We decided to wrap up the ‘city tour’ by rewarding ourselves by splurging some money on restaurant food. Oh finally some meat! Definitely the highlight of this leg of the journey for me. We ordered some Gujarati snacks and dessert which cost us about more than half of our daily budget.

As we are only staying in Ahmedabad for like 12hours, decided to stay in the retiring room in the railway station instead of bunking into some hostel or guesthouses. In India, most of the major railway stations have rooms available and passengers are allowed to stay for up to 24hours for a pretty decent room (double room with THREE fans, huge washroom, quite worthwhile if you ask me) at 400 rupees, or we could just choose to lie on every inch of space available in the station platform vicinity, like what most Indians would just do.

So this pretty much wraps up Ahmedabad.

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