Foot-Loose!!

Lonely Traveller goes Ajanta and Ellora.

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I'll shorten my blabber and I'll let the pictures talk about my journey.

In Dec 2005 my annual vacation started, on the 18th, with a trip to Nagpur with the purpose of escorting my sister till the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI). One the way back I planned to visit the cave temples of Ajanta and Ellora. Since I had 3 days to spare before I joined my friends on 24th Dec for my trekk in Goa, I decided to stay at the Youth Hostel at Aurangabad and see places around Aurangabad as well. I included the Elephanta caves near Mumbai also in my list, as I read somewhere that these caves were a natural succession to those in Ajanta and Ellora. That turned out to be a good decision.

I flew from Bangalore to Pune with my sister on 18th, spent an afternoon at my cousin's place in Pune and took the train in the evening to Nagpur. The whole of next day was spent at NEERI. The 'Orange City', Nagpur, is a clean and beautiful city with broad roads.

In the night I went to the railway station to catch my night train to Mandad, only to find that I had done my homework wrong. There was no such train. A kind station master alloted me a dormitory and I took the early morning train towards Mandad. I got fined in the train for not having a proper ticket, and I was an instant celebrity in the coach. A fan, was kind enough to advice me that a bus boarded from Jalgaon was my quickest way to reach Aurangabad. When I reached Aurangabad Youth Hostel it was getting dark. The warden adviced me to catch Ajanta first.

I went to Ajanta the next day to visit the oldest of the caves in my list and probably the most famous. One cannot help but appreciate the splendour and scale of artistry that was employed on the rocks there over a few centuries starting in BC.

On 22nd I went to Ellora to vitness the caves that were evidence to how Budhism became less popular and Hinduism gained deeper roots in the area. The star attraction at Ellora is the rock-cut monolith temple that had almost all the stories from the Shivite beliefs.

On the way back to the hostel I visited the Daulatabad Fort. A small fort with a whole lot of defense mechanisms. At dusk before I returned to the hostel, I visited Bibi ka Maqbara, the chota- Taj Mahal and earnest effort to replicate the famous Taj.

That night I took my train to Mumbai. Early morning from the railway station I took a taxi to the Gateway of India, from where ferries would take one to the Elephanta caves. Elephanta had only one great temple, but I was struck by the similiarity it had with the Shiva temple at Ellora. Two caves temples, one in central India and the other on an island in the Arabian sea looking similiar is no simple thing when you know it would have taken a very determined somebody at that time to replicate it in all its splendour.

I visited my uncle in Mumbai and in the afternoon for a stroll in the Juhu beach. Having recharged myself and my camera cells, I took the night's bus to Goa, where I joined my friends at the Mapusa Youth Hostel the next day.

posted by ദീപക് -:-Deepak @ 7:08 AM