The next day was spent at leisure. Most of us got up slowly and enjoyed breakfasting on Diu's waterfront watching trawlers and ferries going out to sea. I walked out to Diu's market with Amol, Diu by daytime is a riot of colour. Roadside stalls and shops sell the usual cheap (and fake) handicrafts in the form of kurtas, kurtis, tote bags, and of course the usual range of shorts and T-shirts. I was however pleasantly surprised to see and open air market selling spices - heaps of cloves, nutmeg, cardamom and so on. Was Diu an important port of call for the spice laden galleons in the days gone by?



Well, there's an old, massive Portuguese fort that seems to answer the question in its own way. Star shaped, with huge walls and an uniquely fortified layout (it's surrounded by sea on three sides and a deep moat, open to the sea on the fourth) it's less of a fort and more of a battlemented mini-city. Sloping walls built of huge stones and towers where imposing cannon look out over the harbour entrance seem to tell a story of the fort's fiery sentinel past. The fort has been very well preserved and one can see a jail, countless chapels and of course the residence and offices for the troops stationed here that would require at least two days to completely ramble over. Unless one were like the parakreets nesting below its now musty arches and unused catwalks; flitting from jail to chapel and cemetry to hospital in a whirr of psychedelic green.

Lest I forget to mention, there's an island bang in the middle of the harbour. What better setting for a prison than this?

Next on the itinerary was a small ramble besides the fort in search of a sheer cliff-face with the waves pounding below, where it would be "Land's End" and a real sea breeze in our face. Our road was less of a road and more of rockface with irregularly occurring spines of granite. The going was tough of course but these amazing steeds of ours had already got us across roads only the foolhardy would ride on! So it was just a question of jouncing along, avoiding the boulders and the growths of thorn while slowly inching closer to the cliffs.

We finally parked ourselves in a line parallel to a cliff face, with the seas pounding on the rock below and the cliff face itself so deeply gouged out so as to give an impression of toppling over anytime!

On the way back, I wandered a bit away and was rewarded by the sight of dolphins (I spotted 8 in all, 4 two-somes) playing in the waters barely half a kilometer from the shore.

The last thing we did in Diu was grab a much delayed lunch at the highly vagabondish hour of 3 in the afternoon. At a beachfront hotel called Dubchick Restaurant.

From Diu, we headed for Gir. Our first stop here was the Gir Lodge, a property of the Taj Group of Hotels, naturally beyond the dreams of us poor bikers. While I trying my hand at hunting out some kind of dormitory accommodation, Gaurav had left in search for roomier alternatives. Our lodging for the night (and the next turned out to be a house almost at the end of Sassan overlooking a river and with the forest just behind it. Dinner was at a roadside hotel bang in front of the Forest Department's complex called "Sinh Sadan". Everybody turned in early because we were to go into the forest at 6:30 in the morning.




Next...
cameras are loaded and we are all ready to be thrown at the lions...(read on)


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