A Day Trip to Surat

About 120 km north of Vapi is the old port city of Surat. With a population of nearly 5 million, it's a pretty sizable city. There's not a whole lot for tourists to see here, but the shopping is good!

Old Surat shows its Portuguese heritage. There were a lot of wooden shutters, and the rounded corners give the architecture a somewhat European flavor. The streets were considerably wider than those in Ahmedabad, but still narrow.

The outskirts of Surat are much like those surrounding many growing Indian cities: new construction vying with agriculture. Herds of cattle crossing the road no longer surprise me, but when two-wheelers decide to try their merging techniques with tonnes of buffalo, it's quite a sight:

Our main objective was to check out shopping, so we stopped at the brand-new VRSurat mall. (VR stands for "Virtuous Retail" and the company operates several malls throughout India. I'm not sure what is so "virtuous" about shopping!)

A typical up-scale shopping mall -- it goes up rather than sprawl. Parking is in the basement. The shops are also much smaller than those in a typical American mall, even though many of the brands are the same.

This mall makes an effort to bring local arts into the public spaces. The Diwali lanterns are hand silk-screened and make one of the largest "kinetic" art installations in the world. (Or so the signage says.)

Another piece of art was a full-size sailboat:

The boat and it's supports are painted in the same style as the sail.

And finally, no road trip is complete without a couple of pictures taken along the road:

Large temples along the road are fairly common. This one was easier than most to photograph from a moving car.

Just north of Vapi is a small mountain / large hill that is being systematically turned into crushed stone.