Where desert meets the sea

I wanted to see some offbeat places near Bhuj and after talking around, found that all the offbeat places are not near but a little away. Powered with my RE, I decided to take a LONG drive. I clocked 380+ kilometres today but the ride was totally worth it.

First I went to this temple called Matano Math. The temple is of the popular goddess Ashapura Mata who is supposedly the Kuldevi of a lot of communities including some in Rajasthan. What was striking was the main deity was just a stone. They had tried hard to make it look like a person. It had no hands, legs etc. Just a piece of stone with a tapering shape at the bottom. The temple was around 100km from Bhuj and it took me a good 2.5 hours to reach.

The best part about the temple was they served free Lunch. It was a small Thali (Gujaratis and their Thalis). It was tasty and since I reached there around 1230, it was right during the lunch time. I had filling lunch there.

There were also a lot of sweet shops outside the temple and I tasted the classic milk sweet (Milk, Sugar & Ghee). It called Peda or Khova or variants of it in different places of India. The sweets looked good and fresh. After roaming around a bit, I proceeded to my next destination.

The route was not full of sandy deserts like yesterday but dry terrain with shrubs and no trees. I reached this pace called Narayan Sarovar. Its kinda cut out from the mainland in the gulf of Kutch and the way to reach there is by a road which passes right through the backwaters. It was a classic road-through-water view.

There was a lake called the Narayan Sarovar lake and a temple attached to it inside a fort. The lake was very peaceful and I spent some time sitting there just resting.

When we take the road further and go another couple of kilometres, we are met with the Sea. Yes. It feels like the desert just ended at the Sea. No trees (expect a couple of ones kept inside the temple). The land is still dry but it suddenly leads to the sea. Even the marshland at the starting of the sea has no major vegetation. It was a very strange sight for me.

Right at the spot where the land meets the sea, there is a temple called the Koteshwar temple. Its apparently a very popular temple and its said that Ravan did a penance and Shiva gave him a Linga which was super powerful. Without taking care, he dropped it and it fell on earth at Koteshwar. Shiva, to punish Ravan, created million (Koti) duplicate Lingas. Ravan not knowing which to choose, took a random duplicate one. The original Linga is the deity there.

Barring the temple, the views and the very fact that the desert leads to the sea was fascinating. There was a lot of crowd in the temple but the roads were all empty. I wondered how this is possible and then came to know that all these people travel by busses in groups. So in one shot, 40-50 people land at the temple.

Now I leave to my next place. The abandoned fort.