Ratheesh KrishnaVadhyar (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} ratheesh) wrote,@ 2006-04-07 08:02:00 |
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Mumbai/Aurangabad Trip - X
Ajantha
We checkout from Hotel President Park at 9AM on March 19, and proceeded towards Ajantha on Jaichand's car. Ajantha is 105 kilometers from Aurangabad, off the Jalgaon road. The road condition was even better than the Lonar road, and the locales were picturesque, especially when we reached near Ajantha, when we drove around a hill, offering a nice view of the landscapes. We reached Ajantha at 11.
Ajantha caves (There are 30 of them) are carved on a crescent-shaped area of a hill, surrounded by forests. A small river flows and takes a U-turn in front of the hills, and on the other side of the river there is a taller hill, on top of which there is a viewpoint from where we could see all the caves, it seems. There is an even higher viewpoint behind this, from where the caves were found by a group of British hunters in 1819. The caves, all of which are either Buddhist Viharas (monastery) or Chaithyas (temples) are supposed to be carved during the second to seventh century, and were abandoned and forgotten after the decline of Buddhism in India, until they were rediscovered by the British hunters.
A view from the road to Ajantha.
(A merge of two photos)
Private vehicles are not allowed to go near Ajantha caves. There is a parking area off the Jalgaon road, where we have to park our vehicles, and then take the government buses going to the caves. We can even walk, as it is just four or five kilometers. The parking area looks like a mini-shopping complex, with several shops selling curios and eateries. The restaurant owners would stand in front of their shops and invite the tourists: "sir chai aur bajji khake jayiye na..". In the curio section, there are several handicrafts, but what interested me were the shops selling big colorful stones of irregular shape, calling them "quartz" etc.
We quickly passed through the shopping area, avoiding all shop owners and tourist guides. The green colored government bus (it was air-conditioned) was about to start, and we got inside after taking tickets (it costs 10 rupees). There were lots of tourists, and the bus was full. Within five minutes, we reached Ajantha. There were lots of tourist guide-book sellers there as well, but we didn’t buy any books from them. From the foot of the hill, we have to take few steps to reach the ticket counter. The caves are very dark inside, and the government has installed some lamps inside few of the caves so that visitors can have a good view. There is an additional "electricity charge" for this facility. We bought the entry tickets and electricity passes, and also bought a book on Ajantha published by the archaeology department, for 25 rupees. This was a very informative and detailed book, and was really worth buying.
The lack of discipline among Indians can be seen at any place where a queuing system is in place. As we stood in a queue to enter the caves, a large group of people (looked like members of some joint family) overtook us in the queue behaving as if we didn’t even exist. All of them - they had forty tickets - overtook us one by one, and they were rushing in such a way as if they were participating in some competition to cover the Ajantha caves in shortest possible time. Just when we were about to enter the first cave, we found them coming out of the fifth cave.
We found three guides with identity cards issued by Archaeology department standing near the entrance of the first cave. Unlike at Elephanta, the guides at Ajantha don’t offer the service free of cost and it doesn’t look like they are being paid by the government; Instead, they are just "certified" guides, who take up the job for a payment. They demanded 350-400 rupees, so we decided to explore on our own. However, we were to suffer because of this in the first cave itself, in which we spent some time understanding the rock paintings and reading through the descriptions in the book. A guide came very harshly against us and told that we shouldn’t stay inside a cave for more than fifteen minutes and showed us a board written outside. We soon felt that it would be good to get some patronization from the tourist guides so that we could spent as much time as we want in each cave.
Views from Ajantha caves.
The last image shows an Ajantha painting - Most of it is damaged, but what remains definitely indicates its earlier beauty.
Unlike the caves at Ellora, Ajantha caves have beautiful paintings as well as carvings. The first cave has several paintings, including the famous "Bodhisathwa" image, Buddha in a kind of meditating pose. The expressions on his face are so refined and beautiful, even though the images are partly damaged. There are paintings on the walls, pillars, roofs, everywhere, and I tried to imagine how beautiful the caves might have been in the sixth century.
There was a tourist guide, a lean, short, dark man of around 50, with an old Prem Nazir style moustache, wearing white pants and white shirt, standing in front of the second cave, and he stopped us as we were about to enter the cave. In a dramatic style, he asked us to look at an image of a woman painted on the roof, at a corner. She had a blue colored cloth covering her feet. "Do you see the lady wearing the blue colored socks?" The guide asked us in Hindi. "There are 200 different positions of this lady in this cave!" he continued, "You wont see such information in guidebooks. Only experts like us who have stayed here for 20-25 years know of such things". He offered to guide us for 250 rupees, and after negotiation, we agreed upon 200 rupees.
Once the money was fixed, our guide started taking us less seriously. He took us inside the second cave, just showed us the idol of Buddha inside, and asked us to go to the third cave! I felt it frustrating, and talked to the man in English and complained that other tourist guides are explaining things more elaborately than him. I also told him that I didn’t know much of Hindi, and requested him to talk in English. Interestingly, he was a changed person after that, and gave detailed explanation regarding many caves. He took us till Cave 16 during the next one hour, and asked us to visit the remaining caves on our own.
Views from Ajantha caves.
The reclining Buddha can be seen in the second image.
It is generally said that many of our ancient monuments and sites of cultural heritage suffered a lot of damage during the invasions of foreigners, like the Muslim invaders in the tenth century, Portuguese during fifteenth century, etc. However, if we look at Ajantha caves, we can see that the destruction caused by citizen of independent India have far surpassed the damage caused by any other marauder. The caves, being in a remote location, were safe until they were discovered by the British hunters in 1816. They were relatively safe even until India's independence, as probably Indians were still not much into tourism and wandering. Indians in general are least bothered about protecting ancient places of cultural importance, or for that matter they are not at all concerned about anything that would not directly or visibly affect their own lives. They are better off sitting at home and worrying about their day-to-day activities and planning methods to make financial gains. However, probably the "some-body-has-gone-there,-so-I-also-wan
Some of the most significant things to view at Ajantha include a huge carving of Buddha in a reclining position, along with few other carvings in Cave 26. These carvings look more beautiful because of the orange colored electric lights falling on them. In the Viharas, we could see "rooms" used by the monks, with "cots" carved in rock. There are also rectangular sections of rock cut off from the walls, for the monks to sit in Pathmasana and meditate. Cave 16 and 26 have brilliant entrances carved in rock, and another cave has beautiful paintings based on the stories from Jatakas. Other than the caves, the romantic settings of the surrounding hills and the river also creates a unique viewing experience.
We spent nearly five hours in the caves. While returning back, we found that most of the visitors had left and the caves were all empty. So, we could go into some of them for a second time, and have a better view without disturbance from others. After that, we climbed down the stairs to reach a small garden below, in the lap of the crescent-shaped hills. We took our "lunch" there, which was basically just few Haldiram snacks, and we were amused to meet the intelligent and smart squirrels of Ajantha, who were not at all shy, but came near us and collected the pieces of snacks from us directly! There was only very little water in the river in front of the garden. We crossed the bridge over the river, climbed down the hill, caught the government bus, and reached the parking area, where Jaichand was waiting for us.
Panoramaic views of Ajantha caves
Return to Bangalore
We reached Jalgaon at 5PM. Jaichand dropped us in the railway station and said goodbye to us. I gave some tip to him and I was happy to see him look happy and satisfied with it. Our train to Mumbai was at 7:30PM, so we sat in the railway station waiting room for around two hours. It was very hot, and they hadn’t put on the fans in the station. I was worried, thinking whether the train may come late, as we had to catch the flight to Bangalore at 6:15AM on the next day. Fortunately, the train was just 10 minutes late.
Anyone who has ever reserved railway tickets in India from a station other than the starting point of the train might have had a difficult experience to get their reserved seats. I have had this kind of experience many a times, and at Jalgaon, the story was again going to repeat. When we went to our seats, we saw that they were all already occupied, and people had settled there with their friends and family members who had come from other compartments. We had reserved upper berths, and there were people sleeping on our berth, along with bulks of luggage. We informed them that we had a reservation there, and requested them to give us space. However, they gave no notice. Some of them looked at us as if we did some crime. One guy told that he also had a reservation. I asked him to show his ticket and pointed out to him that he had a seat in some other compartment. I tried to wake up one guy sleeping on our berths. He looked at us very angrily once, and then went back to sleep again. The guy on the other berth was kind enough to climb down.
We sat at a corner of a seat for some time until the ticket checker came in. I complained to this guy (in English - this is very important and helps a lot to get things moving), and thankfully, he nudged the angry guy sitting on the upper berth and asked them to get down. We climbed up to our seats immediately.
The train reached Kurla station at around 4:30AM on Monday. Several taxi guys were waiting near the gate to get customers. I went to one guy who looked the most "honest and innocent" person among them, as per face expressions. I had looked at the city map earlier and guessed that the distance to domestic airport from Kurla station would be just 2-3 kilometers "as the crow flies". However, the taxi guy drove on and on and on for nearly half an hour, and then took us near the airport, when his car suddenly, magically, broke down. He asked us to get down there and walk to the airport. The taxi meter showed "20" and he showed some card to us which mapped 20 to 389 rupees! I was shocked. Earlier, we had traveled from the airport to Gateway of India on a taxi and the meter charge was just 179 rupees. I guess the driver didn’t want to take us near the airport because there would be traffic police near there.
We had great difficulty in carrying our luggage to the airport, and then we stood in a long queue to check-in. We were just in time for the boarding, and at 8, we reached Bangalore. It was indeed a journey which I will always cherish in my mind.
Ajantha
We checkout from Hotel President Park at 9AM on March 19, and proceeded towards Ajantha on Jaichand's car. Ajantha is 105 kilometers from Aurangabad, off the Jalgaon road. The road condition was even better than the Lonar road, and the locales were picturesque, especially when we reached near Ajantha, when we drove around a hill, offering a nice view of the landscapes. We reached Ajantha at 11.
Ajantha caves (There are 30 of them) are carved on a crescent-shaped area of a hill, surrounded by forests. A small river flows and takes a U-turn in front of the hills, and on the other side of the river there is a taller hill, on top of which there is a viewpoint from where we could see all the caves, it seems. There is an even higher viewpoint behind this, from where the caves were found by a group of British hunters in 1819. The caves, all of which are either Buddhist Viharas (monastery) or Chaithyas (temples) are supposed to be carved during the second to seventh century, and were abandoned and forgotten after the decline of Buddhism in India, until they were rediscovered by the British hunters.
(A merge of two photos)
Private vehicles are not allowed to go near Ajantha caves. There is a parking area off the Jalgaon road, where we have to park our vehicles, and then take the government buses going to the caves. We can even walk, as it is just four or five kilometers. The parking area looks like a mini-shopping complex, with several shops selling curios and eateries. The restaurant owners would stand in front of their shops and invite the tourists: "sir chai aur bajji khake jayiye na..". In the curio section, there are several handicrafts, but what interested me were the shops selling big colorful stones of irregular shape, calling them "quartz" etc.
We quickly passed through the shopping area, avoiding all shop owners and tourist guides. The green colored government bus (it was air-conditioned) was about to start, and we got inside after taking tickets (it costs 10 rupees). There were lots of tourists, and the bus was full. Within five minutes, we reached Ajantha. There were lots of tourist guide-book sellers there as well, but we didn’t buy any books from them. From the foot of the hill, we have to take few steps to reach the ticket counter. The caves are very dark inside, and the government has installed some lamps inside few of the caves so that visitors can have a good view. There is an additional "electricity charge" for this facility. We bought the entry tickets and electricity passes, and also bought a book on Ajantha published by the archaeology department, for 25 rupees. This was a very informative and detailed book, and was really worth buying.
The lack of discipline among Indians can be seen at any place where a queuing system is in place. As we stood in a queue to enter the caves, a large group of people (looked like members of some joint family) overtook us in the queue behaving as if we didn’t even exist. All of them - they had forty tickets - overtook us one by one, and they were rushing in such a way as if they were participating in some competition to cover the Ajantha caves in shortest possible time. Just when we were about to enter the first cave, we found them coming out of the fifth cave.
We found three guides with identity cards issued by Archaeology department standing near the entrance of the first cave. Unlike at Elephanta, the guides at Ajantha don’t offer the service free of cost and it doesn’t look like they are being paid by the government; Instead, they are just "certified" guides, who take up the job for a payment. They demanded 350-400 rupees, so we decided to explore on our own. However, we were to suffer because of this in the first cave itself, in which we spent some time understanding the rock paintings and reading through the descriptions in the book. A guide came very harshly against us and told that we shouldn’t stay inside a cave for more than fifteen minutes and showed us a board written outside. We soon felt that it would be good to get some patronization from the tourist guides so that we could spent as much time as we want in each cave.
The last image shows an Ajantha painting - Most of it is damaged, but what remains definitely indicates its earlier beauty.
Unlike the caves at Ellora, Ajantha caves have beautiful paintings as well as carvings. The first cave has several paintings, including the famous "Bodhisathwa" image, Buddha in a kind of meditating pose. The expressions on his face are so refined and beautiful, even though the images are partly damaged. There are paintings on the walls, pillars, roofs, everywhere, and I tried to imagine how beautiful the caves might have been in the sixth century.
There was a tourist guide, a lean, short, dark man of around 50, with an old Prem Nazir style moustache, wearing white pants and white shirt, standing in front of the second cave, and he stopped us as we were about to enter the cave. In a dramatic style, he asked us to look at an image of a woman painted on the roof, at a corner. She had a blue colored cloth covering her feet. "Do you see the lady wearing the blue colored socks?" The guide asked us in Hindi. "There are 200 different positions of this lady in this cave!" he continued, "You wont see such information in guidebooks. Only experts like us who have stayed here for 20-25 years know of such things". He offered to guide us for 250 rupees, and after negotiation, we agreed upon 200 rupees.
Once the money was fixed, our guide started taking us less seriously. He took us inside the second cave, just showed us the idol of Buddha inside, and asked us to go to the third cave! I felt it frustrating, and talked to the man in English and complained that other tourist guides are explaining things more elaborately than him. I also told him that I didn’t know much of Hindi, and requested him to talk in English. Interestingly, he was a changed person after that, and gave detailed explanation regarding many caves. He took us till Cave 16 during the next one hour, and asked us to visit the remaining caves on our own.
The reclining Buddha can be seen in the second image.
It is generally said that many of our ancient monuments and sites of cultural heritage suffered a lot of damage during the invasions of foreigners, like the Muslim invaders in the tenth century, Portuguese during fifteenth century, etc. However, if we look at Ajantha caves, we can see that the destruction caused by citizen of independent India have far surpassed the damage caused by any other marauder. The caves, being in a remote location, were safe until they were discovered by the British hunters in 1816. They were relatively safe even until India's independence, as probably Indians were still not much into tourism and wandering. Indians in general are least bothered about protecting ancient places of cultural importance, or for that matter they are not at all concerned about anything that would not directly or visibly affect their own lives. They are better off sitting at home and worrying about their day-to-day activities and planning methods to make financial gains. However, probably the "some-body-has-gone-there,-so-I-also-wan
Some of the most significant things to view at Ajantha include a huge carving of Buddha in a reclining position, along with few other carvings in Cave 26. These carvings look more beautiful because of the orange colored electric lights falling on them. In the Viharas, we could see "rooms" used by the monks, with "cots" carved in rock. There are also rectangular sections of rock cut off from the walls, for the monks to sit in Pathmasana and meditate. Cave 16 and 26 have brilliant entrances carved in rock, and another cave has beautiful paintings based on the stories from Jatakas. Other than the caves, the romantic settings of the surrounding hills and the river also creates a unique viewing experience.
We spent nearly five hours in the caves. While returning back, we found that most of the visitors had left and the caves were all empty. So, we could go into some of them for a second time, and have a better view without disturbance from others. After that, we climbed down the stairs to reach a small garden below, in the lap of the crescent-shaped hills. We took our "lunch" there, which was basically just few Haldiram snacks, and we were amused to meet the intelligent and smart squirrels of Ajantha, who were not at all shy, but came near us and collected the pieces of snacks from us directly! There was only very little water in the river in front of the garden. We crossed the bridge over the river, climbed down the hill, caught the government bus, and reached the parking area, where Jaichand was waiting for us.
Return to Bangalore
We reached Jalgaon at 5PM. Jaichand dropped us in the railway station and said goodbye to us. I gave some tip to him and I was happy to see him look happy and satisfied with it. Our train to Mumbai was at 7:30PM, so we sat in the railway station waiting room for around two hours. It was very hot, and they hadn’t put on the fans in the station. I was worried, thinking whether the train may come late, as we had to catch the flight to Bangalore at 6:15AM on the next day. Fortunately, the train was just 10 minutes late.
Anyone who has ever reserved railway tickets in India from a station other than the starting point of the train might have had a difficult experience to get their reserved seats. I have had this kind of experience many a times, and at Jalgaon, the story was again going to repeat. When we went to our seats, we saw that they were all already occupied, and people had settled there with their friends and family members who had come from other compartments. We had reserved upper berths, and there were people sleeping on our berth, along with bulks of luggage. We informed them that we had a reservation there, and requested them to give us space. However, they gave no notice. Some of them looked at us as if we did some crime. One guy told that he also had a reservation. I asked him to show his ticket and pointed out to him that he had a seat in some other compartment. I tried to wake up one guy sleeping on our berths. He looked at us very angrily once, and then went back to sleep again. The guy on the other berth was kind enough to climb down.
We sat at a corner of a seat for some time until the ticket checker came in. I complained to this guy (in English - this is very important and helps a lot to get things moving), and thankfully, he nudged the angry guy sitting on the upper berth and asked them to get down. We climbed up to our seats immediately.
The train reached Kurla station at around 4:30AM on Monday. Several taxi guys were waiting near the gate to get customers. I went to one guy who looked the most "honest and innocent" person among them, as per face expressions. I had looked at the city map earlier and guessed that the distance to domestic airport from Kurla station would be just 2-3 kilometers "as the crow flies". However, the taxi guy drove on and on and on for nearly half an hour, and then took us near the airport, when his car suddenly, magically, broke down. He asked us to get down there and walk to the airport. The taxi meter showed "20" and he showed some card to us which mapped 20 to 389 rupees! I was shocked. Earlier, we had traveled from the airport to Gateway of India on a taxi and the meter charge was just 179 rupees. I guess the driver didn’t want to take us near the airport because there would be traffic police near there.
We had great difficulty in carrying our luggage to the airport, and then we stood in a long queue to check-in. We were just in time for the boarding, and at 8, we reached Bangalore. It was indeed a journey which I will always cherish in my mind.
