Travelogue: Pachmarhi Trip - Day 1

In the process of exploration, we had already covers ten and more destinations in this year. In the continuation of our exploration, we were planning to explore unseen and less explored beauty of India so we decided to visit Bhopal, the capital city of Madhya Pradesh, and Pachmarhi, a hill Station in Satpura mountain Range.

We reached Bhopal in the morning. The biggest task, after reaching Bhopal, was to find a decent hotel to rest a little. Auto drivers offered us the rides within 20 rupees to some good family hotels. But being a shrewd person, I declined all such offers. It made me struggle for almost half an hour, and finally I got an indecent hotel in cheap rate.

At 10 AM, we checked out the hotel assuming that we could cover Bhopal by lunch time, and start for Pachmarhi. We started our trip with Laxmi Narayan Temple. Though the temple is new and it’s just like any other Hindu temple, but it offers a panoramic view of Bhopal overlooking both the lakes and other important monuments. As temple didn’t offer much, so we excluded remaining temples from our itinerary.

Laxmi Narayan Temple, Bhopal.

We moved to Birla museum which is adjacent to the temple. The museum exhibits the demolished but beautiful idols, ancient art object and artillery, and other objects representing the life style of people living in ancient Madhya Pradesh. All these artifacts were found during the excavation of various sites across the state. There were innumerable items to observe; so we rushed through them after examining a few with complete intent. Oh! I do not have any photographs from the gallery, as the guard kept an eye on us only.

Our auto driver was kind enough to leave us near Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya - National Museum of Mankind which is situated next to the Bari Lake. We filled our tummy in a restaurant near the lake. Don’t expect to fill your tummy with the things you desire, because these restaurants do not operate fully until noon.

We started exploring the national museum of mankind with the intent to finish the tour within an hour. This museum can be divided in two major areas i.e. outbound and inbound. Outbound area is spread across various hectors to demonstrate the life style, home, culture of various tribes, people, and states, whereas inbound area exhibits the human evolution, living style of various tribes of India.

We ignored few of the places on the way. First major halt was at Fisherman village. It village was primarily to represent the living style of fisher mans across country. In the similar fashion, living styles of various states i.e. Rajasthani, Gujrati, Oriya, Keralite, Nagpura, and etc and its tribe were demonstrated on the way to internal museum. We were really exhausted by the time we reached to the inbound museum.

Gallery to demonstrate the Art work of various states

Poles erected in front of a tribe house, Outbound portion of the Museum

Creations of a porter

Inbound museum has 13 galleries in it. Each gallery is rich with thousands of artifacts about the style, living, fashion, ornaments, rituals, weapons, and etc. It became way too difficult to keep track of each and every artifact. Information received today was way too more than a mind could hold. Now every new area or gallery was becoming intolerable. We were looking for food as we had already spent 4 hours in the museum.

Oriya tribe's house

The only restaurant, approved by central government, was another 500 meters away from the inbound museum. To add to our existing irony, there was not any meal available for next one hour. Anyway we managed to flatter the owner and sneak out two plates for us after waiting for 30 minutes. We had already missed our deadlines, but we were still positive about leaving Bhopal. So we planned to drop by at another important sight for 15 minutes only.

Van Vihar is a zoo situated next to the lake. Animals are not sheltered into cages but they have been provided enough space to survive. We hired bicycle, provided by MP tourism, to stroll through Van Vihar. It took us around 3 hours to cover the complete zoo on bicycles. It was the ride of approximately 12 km in the zoo. We were ecstatic with the use of bicycle after so many years in such a beautiful environment.

We getting ready for our ride in the park/zoo/Van Vihar

Lake glitters with the light of Run, on the way back from Van Vihar

Now we were sure that it was not possible to leave Bhopal today, so we relaxed at the lake for a while. Gathering, in the evening, near the lake was very similar to a fair in a town. People of various ages were swarming it. Couples were sitting under a tree shade and were engulfed with each other without the knowledge of people around. Elderly folks were walking briskly to keep their body and soul intact. Ladies were all around eatery stalls, and boating facilities. Due to a little emergency, we had to leave the place little earlier than planned, but it all was fun to become a spectator of such a lively environment.