Ellora and Ajanta's grandiose caves

meganagathe
12 janv. 2018
3 min de lecture

Arangabad is the main city between two really famous set of caves. The Ajanta cave and the Ellora cave. The Ajanta cave being the furthest we decided to see this one the first day. We first took a 3 hours bus ride to a junction where we could find shuttle buses to go to the caves. It was a bit weird. It started on the bus, this man came to talk to us really nicely, offered us some green beans and told us when to go out of the bus. He was stopping at the same place we did and offered us to show us where the shuttle bus was. We said to him that he didn’t have to, that we could find them and that we wanted to eat first anyway. But he didn’t take it as a go away and showed us a place to eat which was actually surprisingly good. And then he even offered us tea and coffee before walking with us to the shuttle bus stop. All the way we kept thinking this is so weird, why is he so nice and that’s the annoying part in India: everyone told us to be so careful that we are now really uncomfortable when someone is being nice to us. To be fair he was acting overly nice, but we still don’t know if it was genuinely or not. Anyway, we finally arrived at the caves. There’s 21 caves each more impressive than the other. Some had amazing sculptures, other really well-preserved painting! Actually, it was really well preserved to fond over it considering how old everything was, but it was not that well preserved when we tried matching the written stories to the corresponding painting. At the end of the visit, we wanted to enjoy some peace and quiet, listening to the monks that just started praying in front of the last cave, and we did stay a little bit but at some point we just left because we couldn’t take anymore having people asking us to take pictures with them. Just before we left it was like they were queuing to get our pictures, it was non-stop! Life as a star is hard! After all this, we took the bus to get back to our hostel. However, in the middle, the bus stopped and the driver told us he was not going any further because there were dangerous strikes in the city we wanted to go to… I have to admit we were at first a little stressed and had no idea what to do next. All our stuff were in the hostel so we really wanted to go back but didn’t want to risk it if it was dangerous. 4 other foreigners were having the same conflict as we were. No one knew how long it was going to last, if it was really dangerous … After some time, thankfully, a policeman drove by and we stopped him to ask about the situation. We showed him the location of our hostel and he told us that no buses were going but that private taxi could. He still gave us his phone number in case something was wrong but the 6 of us actually manage really easily, after this, to go back to our hotel.

The next day we went to the Ellora caves. There were less adventures this time but the caves were even more magnificent that the ones in Ajanta.