Images of Nirvana: Bhuj - An Antidote To Real Life

Kutch, and especially the wild-west regional capital Bhuj, may well be my favourite place in India so far. It didn't start off too comfortably - after a few days running on empty, I crashed out so hard on the overnight train west from Ahmedabad that I completely failed to wake up when we arrived, and it wasn't until a policeman came through half an hour later and poked me awake with his lathi stick that I realised where we were. After an hour spent trudging through the early morning streets looking for a hotel (or even someone who spoke enough English to tell me where the hell I was), I found a small place called the City Guest House that seems to be pretty much the only cheap hotel in town. Fortunately, it's a friendly place and the room price didn't take the piss too much.

Bhuj itself is small by Indian standards, with a population somewhere in the area of 150,000. Perched between the Little and Great Ranns of Kutch (or Kachchh, to give it the proper unpronounceable transliteration), it sits in an area of dubious agricultural quality and is prone to natural disasters - in 2001, on 26th January (Indian Republic Day) an earthquake devastated the area, killing a staggering 10% of the city's inhabitants. It recovers, and has recovered quickly, though - apart from comments by the locals, you almost wouldn't know that a catastrophe of such magnitude occurred here. The people are friendly to the point of fierceness, and the local children are absolutely charming; everyone I've met on the street seems genuinely happy to see a foreigner, and I've spent a lot of pleasant time trading a few words of butchered Gujurati for a few words of butchered English.

I spent a day looking around the city, taking in the old (and now earthquake-ruined) Aina Mahal and Prag Mahal. These half-palace-half-mansion residences are eerie as all get up, with cracked, broken chandeliers dangling from the ceiling and unsteady gilt-skirted statues leaning out from the walls. The buildings have a kind of Italianate architecture, which is unusual in India (to say the least).

The day after, I had a day off - unintentionally, since although I'd booked an autorickshaw to tour around the countryside, a message got lost in the pipeline and no-one turned up. This was for the best - I lay around in the sun, went for a walk, read a book, at lunch, did some laundry, and basically chilled out. The next day, I sorted out the mess with the rickshaw, and proceeded to take a tiki-tour around some small villages near Bhuj (I would have liked to go further, but it seemed like the rickshaw was one of the dodgy ones with a top speed around 25kmph).

The villages proved to be a photographic goldmine. I got some local kids on my side, who hauled me around the small villages of Dhori and Kotay, persuading all and sundry to get in front of my lens. I've put together a set on Flickr called Village Faces, of which here are some of my favourites: