It’s 4pm on Christmas Eve. In normal times, at this hour I’d have finished my family beach walk and be looking forward to my sister’s lobster mac and cheese and eggnog cake.
But these times are not normal! Chris and I just tucked ourselves into a private cabin sleeper bus to start the 16-hour drive from Aurangabad in central-ish India to Goa on the southwest coast. Instead of gingerbread and The Grinch with my nephews, I have Hide and Seeks (think Indian Chips Ahoy) and the streets of Aurangabad. And instead of my usual California (ice-cold) Pacific Ocean nearby, I’ll spend Christmas Day on a sunny Arabian Sea beach.
As I mentioned before, the Indian excursion has been BUSY. Notes from the last two weeks will likely make it into future newsletters, but most likely Instagram will be my only record of Rajasthan (Jaipur, Pushkar, Jodhpur, Udaipur) and Mumbai.
We just finished two pretty amazing days of cave/ruins touring. The Ellora and Ajanta caves outside of Aurangabad, a 6-hour train ride from Mumbai, are medium-popular tourist destinations that (IMHO) merit the renown of Cambodia’s Angkor Wat, Jordan’s Petra, or Egypt’s Luxor.
Over 130 caves have been discovered at the two sites, dating from 200 BCE to 1000 CE. Ancient Buddhists, Hindus, and Jains built their impressive temples and monasteries into sections of sheer rock wall, carving and painting intricate designs, depictions of gods and stories, and so many Buddhas.
We arrived in Maharashtra state a couple days ago to lean that the bus drivers are on strike, so the only option to get to the caves was by private car. I didn’t love the 100x price increase (local busses are CHEAP), but having a nice man pick us up at our hotel and take us everywhere we needed to go in an air conditioned vehicle certainly had its merits.
Ajanta Caves are about 2.5 hours outside of Augangabad. We started at a viewpoint, looking down the caves circling a horseshoe bend in the Waghur (Tiger) River, and made our way down to the 26 caves you can explore. Ajanta is the older of the two sites, used up until about 700 CE when it is believed to have been abandoned for Ellora. They’re not natural caves — you can see in some of the partially finished ones how they were literally carved into the 300-foot cliff wall.
What makes this site unique is the extensive well-preserved cave art. Most of the walls are painted with colorful and intricate stories — people, gods, demons, etc. — and supposedly the art in these caves significantly influenced art in Tibet and Sri Lanka, as well as modern Indian art when they were rediscovered in the 19th century.
On day two (aka this morning) we went to Ellora, less than an hour outside Aurangabad. This site is much larger (over 2km from end to end) and includes 100 discovered caves in sections of Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain. Perhaps the most impressive is the Kailasa Temple, which is "the climax of the rock-cut phase of Indian architecture" and archaeologists believe made from a single rock!
Ellora only has one cave with (minimal) painting — I’m not sure if the later ancients weren’t into painting, or it just didn’t survive the centuries — but excellent carvings and really impressive multi-story caves.
When I’m at museums in the US, I always feel guilty that I am not into this type of art — I breeze through anything involving masks, sculptures, tools, etc. But that’s because context matters! (If you prefer, I’m also happy to mount my high horse and lecture on how everything ancient in “Western” museums is stolen). Monets were made for salons or museums or fancy homes that may as well be museums. Carvings of the bodhisattva were made for temples and monasteries. Anyway, my point is that being in a literal cave, smelling the dust and incense and looking into the eyes of the Buddha, makes for an excellent experience.
Merry Christmas from India!
Merry Christmas Mollie! Thanks for these newsletters and photos. I miss traveling so much and love traveling vicariously through you.