Rokadia Hanuman Temple, Porbandar

On the eastern approach to Porbandar, where the town's low houses give way to open scrub and the Rajkot highway, stands one of Saurashtra's busiest roadside shrines — the Rokadia Hanuman Temple.

• The name is the key to its popularity: in local Gujarati, "rokad" means cash, or something paid on the spot, and by tradition this Hanuman is the deity who settles a devotee's plea at once, granting wishes without delay.
• For pilgrims threading the long coastal circuit between Dwarka, Somnath and Porbandar, it has become a natural pause — a place to fold hands, tie a thread of intention, and ask for a quick answer before the road carries on.
• The presiding image is a tall, vermilion-smeared Hanuman, garlanded and gleaming under oil lamps, depicted in a striking posture: the deity is shown pressing Shani, the planetary lord Saturn, underfoot.
• In folk belief across Kathiyawad this iconography signals Hanuman's power to lift the "sade sati" — Saturn's testing years — from a troubled devotee, and it draws a steady flow of those seeking relief from misfortune, illness or delayed fortune.
• Upstairs, a quieter sanctum holds Ram, Lakshman and Sita, completing the devotional circle, for Hanuman is forever the servant-hero of the Ramayana.
• The complex itself is modern and unpretentious rather than ancient — broad, brightly painted, built to absorb crowds — but on Saturdays and Tuesdays, Hanuman's sacred days, it fills with families, the air thick with the scent of oil, jaggery and burning incense.
• Porbandar wears its own quiet fame as the birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi, and many visitors pair a morning at the Kirti Mandir heritage site and the seafront with a stop here.
• The temple keeps long hours, asks nothing for entry, and offers the unhurried, small-town devotion that big pilgrimage centres often lose.
• For food, Porbandar is comfortably pure-vegetarian territory once you know where to look.
• Near the temple and along the town's main roads you will find simple pure-veg Gujarati and Kathiyawadi thali houses serving unlimited rotli, shaak, dal-bhaat, kadhi and farsan, alongside dependable South Indian and Punjabi pure-veg diners near the bus stand and Chowpatty beach.
• Ask for a pure-veg Gujarati thali restaurant and you will be well fed on ghee-rich, homestyle cooking; teatime brings fafda, gathiya, dhokla and jalebi from the town's sweet shops — plenty to sustain a pilgrim before the drive onward to Dwarka or Somnath.