Aurangabad is a fairly large city in central India. It is best known for being home to the relics of an impressive Buddhist culture, Ellora & Ajanta, both of which are UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
Join me for a brief tour of these two surreal ruins as well as a peek at a lovely town that is too often overlooked by visitors to India.
All photos by the diarist
Also posted @ The Laughing Planet
The state of Maharashtra includes Mumbai & Pune, but Aurangabad is one of the fastest growing cities in the world. For the lushes out there, it's also the beer capital of India.
(Map via Google)
Let's waste no time getting to the good stuff
Ellora was built between the 5th and 10th centuries out of the sandstone
Charanandri hills.
From my earlier writing about the area-
The caves of Ellora is
where dozens of Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain caves are strewn about a desert scape for intrepid explorers to discover. Only the largest requires paying the hefty 250 rupee admission (Indians pay 10 rupees) and I wasn’t in the least disappointed by the free areas alone. Massive sculpture carved from the volcanic cliffs leave any visitor in awe.
Some of the statues are very well-endowed.
The centerpiece of the Ellora caves is the Kailasa or Kailasanatha Temple.
This gargantuan structure – designed to recall Mount Kailash, the abode of Lord Shiva – looks like a freestanding, multi-storeyed temple complex, but it was carved out of one single rock, and covers an area double the size of Parthenon in Athens.
It was carved from the top down out of a solid slab of rock.
I got a fairly good tour for free looking down from the rim. My feathered friend below suggested it.
Wildlife:
A parrot snuck in without paying the admission fee and gets a bird's eye view of the Kalasha.
For those who suspected these caves might attract bats, the answer is "Boy, howdy!"
These langurs have a good life.
You can see the Ellora caves in the background behind this nursing langur mother & her baby.
They seem to be quite content letting the local people eat their picnics and living off whatever is donated to them or left behind.
Ajanta:
Is home to
rock-cut cave monuments dating from the second century BCE, containing paintings and sculpture considered to be masterpieces of both "Buddhist religious art" and "universal pictorial art"
I'm not going to bother reprinting much of the history here; if you would like to learn more, the wiki entry is actually quite good & thorough.
The Indian gov't has a good racket going with the postcard mafia. There are no tripods allowed in the Ajanta caves. Rude paid guards keep a close eye on the visitors, especially the foreigners with their fancy cameras.
Painted frescoes can’t be viewed up close due to overprotective management and lots of velvet rope.
Still, I felt I did pretty well overall holding my breath & using my poise in lieu of a tripod.
Heaving masses of Hindu tourists suffocate the tiny locale & hound any foreign visitor to pose in pictures with them.
The town itself had plenty of charms. Wandering around the neighborhood is always one of my favorite pastimes in a new place.
Kids a pleased to see you and most people were shocked we cared about more than just the big-ticket items.
A Jain temple on the back alleys.
Bibi Ka Maqbara:
Not the Taj, but a nice imitation that would fool your average Joe.
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