Ahmedabad won’t appear on many “Top 10” lists; our first order of business was to arrange for onward bus tickets to Udaipur. You might wonder what we were doing in this dirty, noisy, polluted place. The answer is the Nalsarovar Bird Sanctuary, 80 km by hired taxi from town and a major stop on the migratory routes to and from Europe and Asia. The other attraction is India’s most elaborate step well, Ahalaj Vav. It’s hard to imagine why anyone would go to such trouble to decorate what is basically a pit, 70 steps down to a water supply, but there it is.
Ahalaj Vav, the art of getting water
The skinny on Nalsarovar is the best birding is from a boat, which may be true at times, but we saw many more species on the 2 km walk from the entrance to the pier. Sadly, our “target species,” the painted stork had already come and gone but we did manage to add a dozen new species to our list, including the Eurasian spoonbill.
Eurasian spoonbill
I have a confession; we stayed at the Holiday Inn Express in Ahmedabad. It's hardly authentiic Indian but I won’t apologize. The price was right, the restaurant was good, the service lived up to US standards and it was outside of the chaotic old quarter. Besides, we will be dropping down a notch or two shortly.
