Hyderabad

 Hyderabad  

It was going to be a day of mosques and mausoleums. Our first stop was at the Eid Gah mosque in Hyderabad. It was built in 1947 to celebrate independence.

The central path.

One of thr minarets.

The main mosque building. It it largely used for Eid prayers.

We stopped at the Sindh Museum, just up the road. The gates were open and there were staff on duty but th museum was closed. Looking for alternatives, it turned out that all the museums that day were shut. We would be looking for other things to do to fill in the day.

We crossed the Kotri Barrage. It was built in 1955. It is used to control flood water and for irrigation purposes. To the east, it feeds the small Akram Wah canal and the large Phuleli Canal which soon splits into two to irrigate different areas. To the west, it feds the Karachi Canal which is the main water suply for Karachi.

A view of the downstream gates, five of which are open.

A close up of one of the gates.

We recrossed the barrage and stopped at the Mian Ghulam  NabiKalhoro tomb.

It is octagonal in floor plan...

...with a simple stone coffin. He was a king and not a religious man so there is no surrounding wooden lattice work. he ruled in 1775 - 1776. In contrat to the many other shrines and tombs, the inside decortion of this one was rather plain.

Just along the road is the tomb of Mian Ghulam Shah Kalhoro. He was the founder of Hyderabad and ruled 1757 - 1772. The entrance looks more like the entrance to a fort with stout bastions and a crooked approch...

...to th main ornamental gate to the tomb complex.

Th tomb is square in plan...

...with ornate and colourful decorations.

A view of the mihrab in the western wall.

A detail of the decorstion in one of the corners. The dome has been replaced with a flat roof.
 

Another museum on the schedule, but it was closed.

The Holm Stead Hall.

A detail of the corner.

It was built as a memorial in 1905 to Mr Holm Stead who was a surgeon here in 1854 - 1868 and provided valueable service during the cholera outbreak in the region. The building became a radio station after independence in 1947 although after the radio station moved out, it fell into disrepair. It was renovated in 2008 and became a library.

Another view of the insides...

,,,and a view of the side facade.

We passed through an old Hindu quarter...

...another Hindu quarter building...

...to reach the clock tower and bazaar.

The start of the bazaar.

A car soare parts market, not that I am keen on cars but it was en route to the next shrine.

We were visiting the Shah Abdul Latif Kazmi shrine with an elaborately decorated flagpole. There is a sacred relic here of a foorprint of the Imam Ali on a stone. He is one of the five most important figures, the others being Muhammad, Fatima, Husain and Sajid.

The mosque on the site.

The steps up to the shrine although photos are not allowed inside.

We stopped at the gates to the Bombay Bakery, set up here by Pahlajrai Gangaram Thadani in 1911.

The entrance to th shop.

Inside the shop with coffee and marzipan cakes on display within mahogany and glass display cabinets.

Next stop ws the railway station, a long mainly lofty single storey white washed building. 

A locomotive on display outside.

A cafe located in a railway crriage, regretably closed when we visited.

Looking across some of the traks and rolling stock towards the two storey part of the station.

A diesel locomotive about to pull out of the station.


Looking at rolling stock in the station from a footbridge.


A detail of the station.

I wanted to see the fort, but there is little to see of interest. A small section of outer wall has been rebuilt to show what it used to look like

Much of the rest of the former fort walls have lost their facing bricks and the mud brick core is exposed and suffering from erosion.

Another section of heavily eroded wall.

Ranikot Fort

 Ranikot Fort  

We drove out of Sehwan along thr main roa. It hugs a bit of ground betweensome foothills and the vast flat plain. Along side the road and paraleell to it runs a railway line, halfway up the slope of the hill. It would have been easier to build it across the plain but it is subject to flooding. So dispite the extra cost and time to build the line, it runs across the face of th slope. Most railways and roads are built on embankments for much the same reason. It allows evacuation of people and delivery of aid in times of flood.

The road and railway leave the edge of the hills and start across the desert. We turned off the road and bumped along a rough road. There were no fields, no houses, just empty esert except for a few grazing goats. Just as we reached our first stop of the day, we met a road repair crew. They were laying a new surface with several trucks full of warm asphalt ready to be laid and rolled flat.

Ww had arrived at Ranikot Fort. We were at the bottom of a wadi. Up the hills on either side ran a tall wall. It is part of the Great Wall of Sindh. It was built in the 18th century. It stretches either side of the wadi for a total of 35 kilometres.

A view of the walls stretching up the hill to the east.

The break in the wall for the wadi. The road crosses through the wall just here across a sandy wadi bottom. There are holes in the wall to allow beams to be pushed in to form a fence and a wooden gate. Water can pass through but not people or livestck without permission.

A view of the climb up the east wall.

A view of the west wall from part way up the east wall. I choose to walk up the east side despite the number of steps looking less and the radient ws not so steep. It might be an easier walk but in the morning, the photos looking back at the east wall would have been into the sun so not wuite so good.

It would have been easy to walk just a little further to the next tower or hilltop but we got to the top of the first hill to the east and took in the view. But we returned to the car in the wadi. Whilst I had been ascending the wall with my guide, the driver had been checking with the road crew on the condition of the road going further into the mountans.

They would be moving onto to repair this section a little later but were positioning aggregate ready for the next phase. The fact that they were here meant that the road was in dire need of repair. It was rough, often just a gravel track but it was negotiable. But neither the guide nor th driver had been this far before. There was a fort further into the mountains and we were so close and had time that we couldn't miss the opportunity to explore.

The fort from a distance across a wadi.

The 'road', just a gravel track. There had been a tarmac surfsce but most of it had crumbled away.

A closer view of the front facade.

The protections in front of the main gate.

The second gate. In the archway, there is a doorway that leds to a flight of stairs that give access to the tops of the walls. Visitors can walk all the way around the top.

A view of the entrance from the corner bastion. The walls are in good condition after rebuilding by the Endowment Trust Fund. However, there is little to see inside the fort itself. There are some recently built stone buildings including toilets but no original structures.

When we ot back to the wadi opening through the wall, the road crew had been busy. They had laid a couple of hundred metres of new tarmac. Unfortunatly the tarmacing machine was two lanes wide and we had to wait until it had finished the road through a cutting before we could bounce across some desert to get around it and back to the main road.

The next section of road to be laid on freshly rolled aggregate.

We drove on towards Hyderabad and had lunch en route. We stopped in Hala to see some local crafts for which the area is known for. First was a bed making workshop. The bed legs are turned and painted in pretty colours.

 A partially assembled bed.

A frames used to make a rocking bed.

The carpentry workshop that creates the turned wood.
                                        
The final touches, giving it a coat of resin and turning it by hand with a bow and scraping off the resin to leave a bright shiny and durable surface.

Next stop was a pottery with baths to mix the clay to a consistent texture...

...and making it into whatever shape is required.

After firing, the skill of the designer is paramount to create the patterns, all by hand and eye.

Other finished items.

Next was a fabric printing workshop. The fabric comes in as plain fabric. The artisans here create their own natural pigments from plants, no chemicals are used. to create the colours

Small carefully carved wood blocks are used to transfer one colour of the pattern onto the fabric. More complicted pattrns like this one can take 17 separate sessions to complete.

Some plain fabric and at the top of the photo are some of the small wood blocks, and some cast blocks used to transfer the pattern onto the cloth.

Last stop of the day before we reached our hotel in hyderabad was the tomb of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai (1689 - 1752). He was a Sufi mystic and poet, widely considered to be the greatest poet who wrote in the Sindhi language. The statue is located in a public park overlooking a lake.

The entrance to the tomb complex.

Entrnace to the tomb.

The doorway.

A collection of musicians playing outside the doorway.

His tomb itself.

His fathers tomb.

Another building within th complex of similar design to several Iranian and Central Asian structures with an open portico and tall columns.