Ellora Caves

Today we had the rickshaw serviced and tuned up and hired a driver to take us to Ellora Caves. I felt guilty for about 10 seconds that we weren’t slogging away over the mountains to get there in the rickshaw. It was nice to be in a car and not exposed to the dust and roadside chaos for a while.

The Ellora Caves are a UNESCO World Heritage Site located in the Aurangabad district of Maharashtra state. It is one of the largest rock-cut temple cave complexes in the world, with artwork dating from the period 600–1000 AD.

One of the caves features the largest single monolithic rock excavation in the world, the Kailash temple, a chariot-shaped monument dedicated to the god Shiva. The Kailash temple excavation also features sculptures depicting various Hindu deities as well as relief panels summarizing the two major Hindu epics.

There are over 100 caves at the site, all excavated from the basalt cliffs. These consist of 17 Hindu, 12 Buddhist, and 5 Jain caves. Each group represents deities and mythologies prevalent in the 1st millennium as well as monasteries of each respective religion.They were built close to one another and illustrate the religious harmony that existed in ancient India.

In one word, awe-inspiring. Well, maybe that is two words. In any case, the caves are a mind boggling feat of engineering. People picked away at them more than a thousand years ago and needed to be calculating size of rooms, columns, doorways, meditation rooms, sculptures as they were carving them out of the side of a mountain. Some of the stone was hard, some of the stone was soft. And they took hundreds of years to build. Joe the Geologist was in heaven.

It was Sunday, so what we didn’t think about was the fact that there would be a lot of tourists there. And school buses full of kids. Thousands of kids. Which essentially resulted in Joe and I being treated like celebrities every step of the way there. The kids were literally like paparazzi. Begging for selfies. “Please Auntie, can I have selfie?” Over and over and over again. How could we say no?

So, I am pretty sure our photos are on the phones of hundreds of Indian children today. I wonder what they think about when they look at those pictures? “And this is a picture of some random white people I saw at the Ellora Caves. And here is a sculpture of Shiva. And here is me with my best friends,” and so on.

In any case, it was nice to be famous and awed in one day. And not be driving.Read more