Cave temples galore

Note: this post was delayed several days because the guy at the internet cafe tried to fix my internet by shutting off my computer while I was in the middle of writing this. Thankfully, most of it saved automatically, but I was so frustrated that I didn't come back to it until now.

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As we get ready to leave Aurangabad for Hyderabad tomorrow morning (at 4 AM - ick), it seems to me that now is a good time to write a post about the time we've spent here. Our initial plan was to stay here for less than 48 hours - to get in at 4 AM, find a hotel, buy train tickets and run off to Ellora, then see Ajanta the next day and take a train out that night. But things didn't quite work out that way: we found out (after buying our train tickets) that Ellora was closed that day, and we didn't have time to see Ajanta instead since it's several hours away. This meant that we'd have to choose between the sites, as we only had one day left. The next morning, Jordan woke up feeling too sick to go out, so we decided to change our plans altogether and stay in Aurangabad for two extra days, which gave him time to get better and gave me and Jill time to see the sights. This ended up working out really well for everyone.

First, some photos from lovely Mumbai and Elephanta Island, since I just got those up:


SO much nicer than Delhi.


The train station in Mumbai. Amazing! It's actually a UNESCO World Heritage Site (as is Elephanta Island).


This is the most famous of the carvings at Elephanta Island: Shiva in his three forms (Creator, Destroyer, Preserver).

The first day, after a lot of scrambling around and trying to figure out how to get to Ajanta in time before finally giving up, we went to see one of the local sights in Aurangabad: the Bibi Ka Maqbara, commonly known as the poor man's Taj Mahal. It's a mausoleum built by a son of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb for his mother, and it does very much look like a cheaper, scaled-down version of the Taj Mahal. Jordan and I struggled against the temptation to compare it to the real thing, and tried to appreciate it for what it was: a very cool building in a serene garden setting. It wasn't swamped with tourists, so we had a rather laid back experience as we wandered the grounds. It was definitely what everyone needed after our hectic morning.

Looks familiar...

The next day, Jordan was feeling too sick to go out, so Jill and I headed to the ruined 13th century Daulatabad Fort, which ended up being a lot more impressive than either of us had expected. The place was huge and designed to be virtually unassailable. The main building of the fort was set atop a high hill, and getting there involved going through a pitch black, bat-infested windy cave, with murder holes in the ceiling for good measure. They haven't lit the cave for tourists, so Jill and I had to fumble our way through with the flashlight that I had thankfully remembered to bring. After that, it was a brutal, seemingly never-ending walk up to the top, but the Indian tourists we encountered on their way down encouraged us on, telling us there was cold water up at the top. When we got there, we were disappointed to find that the cold water we were promised was just a bucket of tap water. But we still felt a sense of triumph, and spent a few minutes sitting on the window sills of the highest building, surveying the territory we had just crossed.

Some photos from that day:


Cannons!


These doors had spikes on them to prevent attack elephants from ramming them.


I forget what this was called - it translated to something like "Spire of Victory".

After we headed down from the fort, we attempted to take the bus back into town. This ultimately proved impossible, but in the meantime we sat and chatted with some locals who tried to help us flag down passing buses. Eventually, they were able to get us into a shared jeep heading back to Aurangabad, which sounds a lot more comfortable than it actually was. They were just barely able to wedge us into the back of the jeep along with 19 other passengers, including two guys who were hanging out of the back of it. I felt like it epitomized the experience of India: sweaty, smelly, and uncomfortable, but a lot of fun if you can just roll with it.

The next day, Jill and I ventured out to the caves at Ajanta. We took the two-hour trip on a local bus, which was surprisingly comfortable and easy to use despite being the cheapest form of transportation. The caves are all clustered in a beautiful (now dried up) river valley; there are 30 of them in all, but most of them are only one room, and several of them were closed. The main draw of Ajanta's cave temples is the paintings lining the walls - some of them are simply decorative designs, but most of them depict important figures and scenes from Buddhist mythology. I wish I'd known the stories so I could understand better what was going on, but I still felt a certain peace while looking at their serene faces (that is, when the temples weren't full of screaming young Indian children, which was usually the case, much to our disappointment). The paintings were remarkably well-preserved for being so old; the oldest temples were dated at 200 BC, the newest at about 600 AD.

I didn't get many photos of Ajanta, because it was dark and my camera ran out of batteries right at the beginning. But the ones I did get are pretty cool:


The pretty scenery around the caves.





Jordan was feeling better the next day, so all three of us took the quick half-hour trip to Ellora to see its famed cave temples. Ellora is interesting because it has a mix of Hindu, Buddhist and Jain temples all right next to each other. Easily the most impressive of these was the magnificent Kailasa Temple, which was absolutely massive, and mind-boggling to imagine that the whole thing had been carved out of a solid mountainside. It took workers 10 generations to finish it. Here are some pictures, but they really don't do it justice:











After we'd fully explored Kailasa Temple, we moved on to the smaller Buddhist and Hindu temples. These were less impressive, but a lot less crowded as well, and exploring them gave us a brief respite from the brutal sun. It was very hot and dry in that area, and the wind would kick up huge dust clouds that would completely cover us in dirt, so that every night when we came back to Aurangabad, I would see a visible layer of dirt covering my face and have dust-and-sweatsicles in my hair. This was made even worse by the fact that while we were in Ellora, a big fire started burning somewhere nearby, adding ash and smoke to the already blinding dust. The heat tired us out pretty fast, and we ended up skipping the Jain caves, since there were only 5 of them and they were a kilometer up the road by themselves, and by the time we'd already been to 29 other caves, we just didn't have it in us to walk all the way up there and back.

More pictures from the other temples:


Buddhist.


Hindu.


Also Hindu.

We took off the next morning for Hyderabad, where we have spent the last two days just relaxing in our (surprisingly nice!) hotel, spending most of our days watching crappy movies on TV. We're all feeling pretty rested today though, so we're going to head out and see the sights: today we're off to see Charminar and the surrounding bazaars of Hyderabad's old city. Then tomorrow night we take off for Hampi!

Please check out our Flickr feed, as there wasn't room to post the vast majority of the pictures we took here! Check the "sets" on the right side to view them organized by location. There are LOTS more photos there!