We climbed up a mountain, without a real trail.
There was an awesome view from the top. Also, there were many megaliths at the top. They're big stones that someone quarried from miles away, and dragged up a mountain to make huts out of. Noone knows why this was done, or who exactly did it. Some local legends say that the huts were houses of the Pandavas (the heroes of the Mahabharata), although they would have been built much later than the epic was set. It's pretty common, as you may have noticed from these posts, to attribute important structures to epic figures.
This is a place known as "Sita's Bath." It's said to be the place that Sita, the heroine of the Ramayana and the Hindu model of the ideal wife, dropped her jewelry. All of the little bundles attached to the tree are offerings to Sita from women praying for fertility.
At the top of the mountain, there was also a pond with natural lotuses! Lotuses are the national flower of India. They also symbolize the path to enlightenment, in Buddhism especially, because they grow in murky, inhospitable water before breaking through to the surface and blossoming. These flowers were one of the things that I most wanted to see in India, and I had almost resigned myself to not seeing any in their natural habitat at this point in the trip.
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