After having obscenely publicized all my travels and convincing almost everyone I could find here at MICA that I love travelling, it was more than 2 months into the course and the furthest I had gone from the campus was to Iscon Megamall (!). So here we were, one fine morning, set out to explore the hinterland, to a place called Lothal.

My companions here, whom i shall hereon refer to as Bora and Bong, were only too excited but neither of us had any idea whether we would actually reach Lothal. Our research was just a random google search, some info about train schedules and a lot of help from Google Earth.

For beginners, we rushed to the mess in the morning and stocked up on upma, bread and 3 glorious eggs (another blog about this later). Now i had woken up Bora and Bong really early on a rest day. That it considered a criminal offence in MICA. But i was so afraid we would miss the train to Lothal (which is painfully infrequent) that instead, we ended up reaching almost an hour before the train actually arrived!

Now what? We spent the next hour clicking random stupid pictures of ourselves, railway tracks, dogs, kids, shadows, hands, feet and almost everything that could be photographed! Now Bora and Bong (Bong more than Bora) were used to a relative level of comfort in their earlier travels. So the train came as a bit of a shock. Hee Haw Haw!

Like any other train in India, the Ahmedabad- Botad Passenger train was jam-packed with men, women, children, bags, boxes and their respective odours. Eventually we all did get a place to sit, but this probably wasn’t the best part of the trip-yet.

Lothal Bhurkhi Station is about 2 hours away from Ahmedabad. Just like Sarkhej where we boarded the train, this one too is a non-descript scar on the landscape that no one could care less about. Nevertheless, for us, it was nothing short of the Eiffel Tower. So we spent the first 10 minutes in the statin clicking even more pictures. It was only later that we realised that we missed the ‘Chaggda’ ride that would take us to the Lothal Site some 7 kms away! But it was still early in the day and enthusiasm was running high. So we decided to walk. Yeah!

About 3.5 kms later, we had comfortably plonked our butts on the burning tar road and had devoured nearly half of the upma. The sun was white hot above our heads and i could actually feel myself melting away. But there was hope- 2 kms away from the site, we found a mini-tempo transporting people to villages in the vicinity. With not a moment to lose, we hopped on and for a sum of Rs.10 (no kidding!) we reached the site.

Now the Lothal Site is nothing much more than a big pile of bricks and strange looking structures. Without a visit to the museum and a guided tour around the site, it would mean nothing. The museum in itself is awesome. Some of the artefacts found there are proof to the fact that we are now evolving backwards! Their jewellery, articles of daily use, toys and even a couple of skeletons (spooky!) have been restored. The museum was a real highlight of the trip.

We spent the day there, sitting by what was erstwhile dockyard and consuming 3 packets of Hippo!

The way back from the site was pretty uneventful. We found a rickshaw back to the station and came back to Ahmedabad in a doubly crowded train. But by this time Bora, Bong and I were so tired that we slept even in the most uncomfortable of positions in the train and awoke only moments before reaching Sarkhej again.

In the end, we were even a little surprised at ourselves for even having managed to complete the trip!