INDIA 2025: RATHAMBORE NATIONAL PARK DAY 2, RANTHAMBORE FORT

   November 29, 2026

Bob's primary interests on this trip were birds and tigers. That got a little tiresome for me, and I needed a break from it and from bumpy jeep rides. Luckily, Ranthambore National Park has a great fort that four of us decided to explore while Dave and Stan went on yet another safari drive. 

An engraved sign at the fort shares some interesting details:

• It is one of the strongest forts in India.
• It dates to the fifth century A.D. (!)
• It changed hands according to who was in power, which included Sultans and Mughals.
• It has seven gates.
• There are two palaces, a mosque, a Jain temple, and several Hindu temples within the walls.

Another embossed brass plaque notes that the fort is a UNESCO World Heritage Monument.

We joined a small crowd of people at the fort entrance. It seemed to me that about 95% were Indians.

There were plenty of other locals hanging out at the fort.

AZERBAIJAN: BIBI-HEYBAT MOSQUE, JUMA MOSQUE OF SHAMAKHI, JUMA MOSQUE OF BAKU

Azerbaijan is almost completely Muslim (99.2%, according to the Pew Research Center), with two-thirds belonging to the Shia branch and one-third belonging to the Sunni branch of Islam. However, while there is a Constitutional guarantee of religious freedom, few locals are "religious" because of the Soviet prohibition of religious practice during the seventy-one years Azerbaijan was part of the USSR. In other words, most of them have lived their entire lives without religion and appear to be fine to have it continue that way.

Still, Islam is a significant part of their ethnic/national identity, and slowly, slowly, young people are being drawn back.

We visited two important mosques built since Azerbaijan became an independent nation in 1991: the Bibi-Heybat Mosque in Baku and the Juma (or Friday) Mosque of Shamakhi. We also visited a third mosque that was remodeled at the end of the 19th century, the Juma Mosque of Baku.

1. Bibi-Heybat Mosque

Although this mosque was built in the 1990s following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it is a recreation of a 13th-century mosque by the same name that was blown up in 1934 by the Bolsheviks as part of their anti-religion campaign. It is the first Stalin-destroyed mosque to have been rebuilt in the post Soviet era.

It sits on one of the major highways of Baku alongside the Caspian Sea:

View from across the highway

View from the courtyard on the Caspian Sea side

KAMASHI, UZBEKISTAN, PART 2: A MOUNTAIN DRIVE TO THE KATTA LANGAR MOSQUE

The great philosopher Minnie Pearl (okay, so she wasn't a philosopher, but comedians tend to know more about life than a lot of people) once said, "Take the back roads instead of the highways."  I wonder why she said that? Had she been to Uzbekistan?

Because that's just what we did. If this isn't a back road, I don't know what is.

After we'd been entertained and fed at a home in what was already a remote village, we went out to the street to see a line-up of a couple dozen cars. Our tour company had arranged for private vehicles driven by their owners, residents of the village, to haul us up the mountain. They must have connected with every car owner for miles around to find transportation for all of us. (The tour company owner, who was on the trip with us, made a point of telling us that they'd worked on these travel plans well into the previous night, and that this side trip was unique to Fun for Less Tours and not something other tours did.) Four of us hopped into a five-passenger sedan being driven by a local man who spoke zero English. We put on our seat belts (where available) and headed up the road. Our friends were in other similar vehicles.

It was an exercise in trust, let me tell you.

We climbed steadily up hill on what was sometimes a paved road and at other times was just a road. The locals have their reasons for choosing alternate means of transportation:

It's not like we were in the middle of nowhere. Of course not.

The scenery was so stark. There was little vegetation, and yet there were homes and other structures along the road most of the time.

KOSOVO, LITTLE MIRACLES Part 1

When we rented our car for our trip to the Balkans, the car rental company told us we could take it everywhere we wanted to go--except Kosovo, which is still considered a war zone. However, a few years ago when my brother-in-law Chris was on a work assignment for several months in Kosovo's capital city of Pristina, a native Kosovar named Inan translated for him and they became friends.  Chris contacted Inan and the two of them arranged a way for us to travel in Kosovo. What are the chances of all those pieces falling into place? It is a series of little miracles.

Inan and Chris