Devin's Travels: Ajanta and Ellora Caves

From Khajuraho I headed further south to visit the world heritage sites of the Ajanta and Ellora caves. From Khajuraho I took a train south (well actually from Satna) to Jalgaon and about an hour outside of Jalgaon it hit me: Delhi belly. I had finally gotten sick in India, something that happens to almost everyone who travels here. As a result I spent the rest of the day and the following day just lying in my hotel room running to the toilet every few minutes. Needless to say that day and a half weren't very pleasant.

Once I finally recovered enough to be able to travel I left Jalgaon and headed to the Ajanta caves. The caves were absolutely amazing pieces of work. I expected them to be like natural caves that had some sculptures and paintings in them but they were actually more like rooms that were carved out of a cliff face. The caves are carved out of a cliff face that overlooks a bend in a river (although the river was dry right now) and the amount of work that went into the caves is amazing. They all have almost perfectly flat floors, ceilings, and walls with carved pillars evenly spaced throughout them as well. Of the 30 caves or so a few of them had some absolutely beautiful paintings on the walls and the ones that have been restored (an ongoing operation) are extremely colourful and breathtaking. Aside from the paintings in a few of the caves, every cave contained lots of carvings and sculptures. The sculptures were mainly of Buddha (since all the caves at Ajanta were Buddhist caves) but most of the pillars and some walls contained very intricate patterns carved into them.

After leaving the Ajanta caves I hopped on a bus and headed to Aurangabad which is located much closer to the Ellora caves than Jalgaon. So the following morning I headed out to visit the Ellora caves with a quick stop at Daulatabad Fort. Daultabad Fort is a huge complex that centers itself on a hill just outside of Aurangabad. The actual Fort is located up on the hill but there i a large area surrounding the hill where a city used to exist and is enclosed by the fort's exterior walls. The fort itself contains a pretty intricate defense system including several walls, a moat, and to top it all off the only passage up to the top of the hill is through a narrow dark tunnel where the defenders could pour boiling water or oil or anything down through at the invaders. Needless to say it was very impressive. The view from the top was quite nice too and it made an excellent side trip before the Ellora caves.

From Daulatabad Fort I headed out to the Ellora caves. My first impression of the Ellora caves was that they weren't exactly caves as it seemed to be more of a temple that had been carved out of the rock, meaning that an entire area of rock had been removed (leaving something like an open pit) and a temple put in it's place. All around the temple there were fairly small caves carved into the rock but not as intricate as those at Ajanta so I was slightly disappointed. The temple though was very beautiful and completely carved out of the rock so it was definitely worth going to see. Also this first "cave" was a Hindu cave, not Buddhist like all the caves at Ajanta, so it was interesting to see the different carvings there. After the first cave I headed out to visit some of the other ones in the area. The interesting part of Ellora is that there are 3 different religious caves there: Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain. So after seeing some Hindu caves (the first one was by far the best) I came upon the Buddhist caves. The Buddhist caves here didn't seem as spectacular as those at Ajanta as they didn't have any paintings on the walls and the sculptures were very similar to those at Ajanta. The one thing that the caves at Ellora did have which was better was that they were much bigger, some of them were as big as 3 stories while there was only one cave at Ajanta that even had 2. Finally after visiting the Hindu and Buddhist caves I came to the Jain ones. The Jain caves contained some absolutely stunning carvings on their walls, but they were definitely the smallest of all of them.

After visiting the Ellora caves I returned to Aurangabad and boarded a bus heading to Amhedabad where I spent a day touring around some of the sites. My main purpose of spending a day in Amhedabad was to visit a textile museum that was supposed to contain some amazing samples of textiles in the region. Lonely Planet said that it was open in the afternoon, but when I arrived there I found that it was closed and as a result I spent the afternoon touring around the science city. All in all it was a fairly good day as the science city was pretty enjoyable however it wasn't what I was hoping for. That evening I jumped on another bus to head to Udaipur which will be my next entry.

A view of all the cave entrances on the cliff face at Ajanta.

Standing in one of the oldest caves at Ajanta.

A sample of some of the artwork that's present in a few of the caves in Ajanta. Unfortunately you weren't allowed to use flash photography inside the caves so it was difficult to get a good picture.