All The King's Horses and All The King's Men

Golconda Fort

After our trip to the IT sector, the next days trip was a little more exciting. We climbed up Golconda Fort in Hyderabad. The fort was made out of stone and a couple kilometers long. It was rather hot out but we still made our way up more than 300 stairs to reach the top of the fort. It was a nice workout for all of us but eventually Rita and I had to help Sucharita down all of the stairs because she has bad knees and had taken a fall the previous day. I really liked the fort because once you got to the top, you could see all of Hyderabad as well as the rest of the surrounding fort. The guide gave us a lot of information about the fort but mostly we just saw the beauty of the area and decided to take as many pictures as we could so most of his information about the fort was lost on me. It was an enjoyable visit though and I even got tan from wandering around in the sun.

Me with the city of Hyderabad

We went to eat after that and then made our way to the Charminar and a Muslim mosque. The Charminar was really cool and a very famous part of Hyderabad's architecture, but unfortunately after that my camera died and my extra batteries were in Kolkata, so I didn't get to take as many pictures of it as I wanted to. The mosque was a let down because the boys were not allowed in because they were wearing shorts, and us girls weren't allowed in because we weren'g wearing dupattas (scarves). Women are only allowed into the gates of this mosque and not actually inside the mosque, which just goes to show the male-dominated, patriarchal society that is prevalent in this part of town. Hyderabad has the biggest population of Muslims in India (30% of the population) and many of the Muslim women wore full head to toe, black burkas. The blistering heat was enough to make me sweat in my Ali Baba pants, so I felt really bad that they had to wear burkas in the heat. In other words, the mosque was a bust and the man at the gate was extremely rude and mean so we didn't go inside and instead shopped around for a little while and then proceeded back to the hotel for the night.

The Charminar