A Different Sunday

Went out roaming this Sunday. Did some of the exploring my beloved goa that I had mentioned earlier. First we went to some old deserted forts, some which even the locals living there don’t know about.How can people stay next to monuments which are so involved in making history, and don’t even know about it? Well we went to some forts built by the Portuguese in th 1700’s, so that other conquerers, mainly the Dutch and the neighboring maratha and mughal emperors could not invade their territory. One thing that I learned about forts is that most of them have sloping ramps instead of steps. It makes the construction a lot more complicated, but the ramps are needed to haul the heavy machinery needed to make gun-powder and of course the cannons themselves up into the fort. We were lucky to have two Central Government Archaeologists with us, so we even had access to some areas restricted to normal tourists when we visited some of the more popular forts. Here are some pics that I took: click on the pictures to see them.

(L to R- A wall of the fort around which a banyan tree had spread itself; the kind of paths that we walked on; a cave that we found)

(L to R- A lily that my father picked for me; view from the lighthouse on fort aguada; a friend holding up a flower called agnishikha. This flower’s petals turn a full 180 degrees when it’s completely open. Hence, you can see the pollen outside and the petals inside..he is holding it upside down to prove the point. The flower is used to induce labour pains during pregnancy. Here’s all the information about the flower that I could find)

This is the most special part of the day’s adventures. Aguada in Portuguese means water reservoir. That’s exactly what was special about this fort apart from it’s prison cells and lighthouse. This underground water “tank” (so to say) has the capacity to store 23,76,000 gallons, thats is one crore and 6 laks litres of natural rain water. Seems like that the invading Portuguese knew more about the importance of natural rain water harvesting that us. The hole on top through which light is flooding in is one of the many ways the rain water flows into the tank.

All in all, it was a very different Sunday for me.