Palitana

20 or more people squished into a motorcycle-rickshaw 

Birds sitting on cactus in Palitana

Lizard in Palitana

People selling flowers in Palitana

A statue of a temple guardian

Part of the temple

A pile of roses from the temple offerings

A woman starting to climb up Palitana with 28 pieces of cloth on her head

A man being carried up to Palitana by a doli

A group of nuns climbing up to Palitana

From Gir National Park, my family and I drove six hours up to a town called Palitana. Palitana is a holy place for Jains.  There are over a hundred temples on the hill and they are enclosed in fort like walls.  On the way there, we saw a motorcycle-rickshaw carrying more than 20 people. We stayed at a Dharamshala, which is a hotel run by the temples, but you have to bring your own towel and stuff like that. In a Dharamshala, breakfast starts after sunrise and dinner ends at 6 PM. The usual meals at a Dharamshala are simple food. For every meal, you buy a token for each person then sit down at this long table with other people. The severs come around with the food, and they serve you as much as you want to eat until you're full. The day after my family and I reached the Dharamshala, my mom, my dad, my grandma and I went in the car to the place where you start climbing up to Palitana and we hired a doli. A doli, as you can see in the picture, is something that you sit on if you have a hard time walking. It is a cushion attached to ropes, and then the two people attach it to the bamboo and carry you up. To get to Palitana you have to climb 3,200 REALLY steep steps in the hot sun and then go down, altogether the steps for the whole thing up and down would be 6,400 steps. It was really tiring. On the way up to the temples in Palitana, I saw a lot of nuns.  One of the nuns ran down from the temple and she jumped 5 steps at a time, it was really cool!

Siddi Dancers at Gir

Siddi dancer

Siddi dancer

Siddi dancer

Siddi dancer

Siddi dancer

Siddi dancer

When I was in Gir one night at exactly 7:30 PM these dancers came. They are called Siddis. Siddi's are a South Asian ethnic group of Southeast African origin. Members are descended from Bantu peoples from Southeast Africa who were brought to the Indian subcontinent as slaves by Arab and Portuguese merchants. It was REALLY fun to watch them dance because they would come up separately, two people at a time and would make funny poses and faces, imitating animals and birds. They were singing and dancing around the fire and another thing which was really cool was that they would all of a sudden blow fire out of their mouths. It was hard for me to tae these pictures because it was really dark outside. Since we were sitting outside I was looking up in a tree where I heard what sounded like screeching, then I saw a big black thing come out of the tree and it turned out to be a HUGE family of HUGE bats!

Gir National Park

Wild Asiatic Lion (Male) resting in the afternoon after a nice big meal

Chital known as spotted deer

Group of spotted deer

Shikra also know as Changeable Hawk-Eagle

Langur 

Langur

Langur

Rare Spotted Indian Owl

We reached a National Park called Gir at 9:00 PM, we had a quick dinner after arranging a wild safari, my father had to reach the main center at 7:00 AM to get a permit from the rangers because if you don't get a permit you can't go into the forest. One of the main reasons we came to Gir is because we REALLY wanted to see the asiatic lions, and of course the rest of the wildlife. The first picture is of a wild male asiatic lion resting after eating (he probably ate a fat spotted  deer or something), we only saw one wild lion as they are very hard to spot, sometimes it is just luck. The deer were really scared of us sometimes the would run away as soon as they heard your jeep. There are 411 asiatic lions and 46,000 spotted deer in Gir.

SNK School in Rajkot

Part of the SNK School in Rajkot

On December 5th, we flew from Bombay to a place called Rajkot.  We flew out from an airport called Chhatrapati Shivaji, the flight was about 1 hour long. When we reached Rajkot, we got into a car with a driver named Jitu, and then we drove about half an hour and stopped at a school called SNK School. The reason we stopped here is because one of the teachers, Bijal Damani, who spoke at Edmodocon 2013 (edmodocon.com) invited my family to visit her school. She has won numerous awards for using technology in education. Her school has 1,500 kids from Grade 3 - 12.  The school has a great gym, they have four squash courts, a Volleyball court,two swimming pools, badminton courts, indoor cricket pitch, and a soccer field on the roof. The classrooms are really nice. I enjoyed the visit.

Bijal Damani with my dad 

The Racecourse!

Beautiful horse ending it's lap

Jockey with his Horse after doing a round around the Racecourse

Every morning, my parents, my brother, and I go to this place called "The Racecourse" for a walk. The racecourse is not only used as a place to walk, it is mainly used for horse training, riding, etc. I think it is fun to walk there because when you are walking, all of a sudden you will see a horse go past you REALLY fast! And some of the horses get angry in the middle of the racecourse and will throw their jockey off. You can tell that they start getting mad when they start walking/galloping sideways. So in all ways the racecourse is a fun place to be at and the horses go so fast that you can barely see them when they go by. There are also a lot of stray dogs in India but is has luckily gone down a bit because some people are taking the stray dogs off the roads, giving them all of its shots at the vet, neutering them, and keeping them as pets instead of buying dogs from breeders.

Here are some pictures/video that I took:

REALLY fast Horse

 Stray Dog walking around

 Pretty Horse galloping

Group of Horses trotting

School Bus and Taxi

A taxi and school bus in Bombay

This taxi is one of the most common taxis in Bombay, it is black and yellow. A majority of the taxis in Bombay are old like this one, it is a 1930's era model of a Fiat, they mostly all look like this. The newer models of taxis are sky-blue colored, and air conditioned. The school buses are almost always yellow, this is a typical school bus used to transport the students to school. The students have to go by bus, they are not allowed to go in their own car. These school buses come to your home at 7:10 AM to pick you up and they drop you off around 3:00 PM. Traffic is terrible in India, all of the roads are packed and there is also a lot of pollution. If you can fit as many people in a car that you want to you are allowed to, like if I wanted to fit 10 people in a car, the police would allow me to.

Arrived in Mumbai...

The view from my grandparents house.

We arrived at Mumbai on November 30th, at 4:00 AM. It has taken my family and I three days to get over jet lag. One day, I woke up at 2:45 AM and stayed up staring at the ceiling until 6:00 AM which is when I had breakfast. My grandparents whom I call Dada and Dadi are my dad's parents.  They live in South Mumbai in an apartment complex called Seaface Park, which is on the Arabian Sea. This is the view from the balcony.