A couple of years ago, during the winter holidays, I went to the ruins of an old fort called Kumbhalgarh in Rajasthan with three friends from my engineering college in Ahmedabad. It's on top of a range of hills, and it's famous for having one of the longest walls in the world after the one in China.
We hired a car and left before dawn, and we arrived just as the sun was coming up over the hills. The first thing you see is the wall, snaking up and down along the ridges for miles. Inside there are dozens of old temples, some still used and some totally ruined, and at the very top there's a palace with small rooms and narrow staircases.
We spent the whole day there. We climbed up to the palace, walked a long section of the wall, and wandered through broken temples where trees were growing out of the roofs. Some parts were in good shape, but in others the stone had collapsed and you could only guess what the rooms had been used for.
How did I feel? At first mostly excited, because it felt like an adventure, a bit like being in a film. But as the day went on, I felt quite reflective. Standing on the wall, I kept thinking about the thousands of people who built it by hand without any machines, and the soldiers who must have stood exactly where I was standing, watching for enemies. As an engineering student, I was honestly amazed by how they managed it. By the evening I was exhausted, but it's still one of the most memorable trips I've taken.