Ellora and Ajanta caves

Ever since I visited the fake caves at the Hyderabad Bollywood movie sets I've been dying to see the real Ellora and Ajanta caves. They're in central Maharashtra (the state of Mumbai). Doug had some work to do this week in Mumbai and I hadn't visited our Maharashtra activities in a while so I spent half the week in Nasik (wine country, India) and Malegaon and we met up near the caves for a long weekend.

The town that's the jumping off point for the caves is sadly .. nothing. The first day we did a government sponsored bus tour to Ajanta caves which is like 2.5 hours away. Once we got to the caves we ditched the group - as I'm really adverse to moving in packs and explored ourselves. It's a semi circle of caves dug into the mountain side by buddhists sometime between like 400BC and 600AD. It wasn't discovered until 1875 or something. From the movie sets I was expecting lots of cool sculptures but Ajanta is actually more about the paintings. I mean pretty impressive and rare that these paintings from 2000 years ago are preserved but I'm not really all that into paintings. At the back of most caves was a huge buddha statue - and those were impressive. In the last cave it was shaped like an arc (will full fake wooden beams carved out of the rock) and had tons of sculptures around the perimeter. Including the reclining buddha pictured, which was as least 10ft long. The whole thing was really impressive but I was vaguely disappointed versus the fake ones. Also - due to the paintings they don't allow flash photography (fair enough) but they also don't allow tripods or any camera stands. That I don't understand!

The second day we went to Ellora, which I had expected to be the duller one of the two. It's only 20 minutes or so outside the town. Ellora is newer than Ajanta - like 800AD-ish - and was built in three waves, first the buddhists, then the hindus and finally the jains. These were really cool. Tons of stone sculptures. Some of the caves that were dug out were three stories high and were all carved from the top down so they didn't need scaffolding. The biggest cave is a hindu one and is called Kailasha for the Mt Kailasha of the Himalayas. In the middle is what's meant to be a chariot, covered in sculptures flanked by two huge elephants. It's said to be bigger than the coliseum! The guide we hired for that cave really annoyed me (between his trying to relate to our culture by telling me a chariot was like an Amish buggy - I just said I was from the States, no other info and believe me it looked nothing like a buggy, a chariot would have been a better explanation - and his patronizing explanation of Indian culture and female gender roles and finally is sometimes completely inaccurate explanations).

The hindu and buddhist caves were right next to each other and while some of the depictions were clearly of different religions they also had a lot in common. The Jain temples were about 1km away and really did look different. They also featured a really pretty waterfall. In the one picture you'll see the women's breasts have been touched so often that they are totally shiny. I saw this in Ankor Wat in Cambodia as well. Universal temptation?

One thing, besides the clear artistic merit and incredible effort that went into these caves was the acoustics. There were some where knocking on the beams (solid rock) at different parts of the cave would make different reverberations. Obviously lots of echoing. At one point we were surrounded by SCREAMING school children and with the echoes it was one of the most overwhelming moments of the last year or so! But various points in different caves had amazing acoustics.

Overall a great trip - one I'm really glad I made. I have to try not to get so jaded (oh, ANOTHER 10 foot solid stone buddha from 2000 years ago?).