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Published: November 21st 2007
War
The Shiva of War!!!! Its reign of terror is upon us!Wow, after a long ass bus ride we finally arrived in Aurangubad in the early hours of Monday morning. I had never heard of this place, along with the next 6 or so places we would go but Hawk had some sort of plan put together with his partner in travel (the Lonely Planet) or as many call it, the bible.
Although in the middle of nowhere, there was still posters plastered up everywhere screaming "Go watch 'Om Shanti Om'!" As we departed the bus, Hawk was busy chatting up some blonde lady, who I realized was scared of everyone and begged Steve to look out for her. She appeared to be in her late thirties, from Italy, spoke very poor broken English and her name was Pennelope. She asked us to go to her hotel and stay there so nothing would happen to her, but we explained we had other arrangments but did eventually end up sharing a cab with her. As we arrived at our hotel, we said goodbye to Pennelope, or as I would later call her... Psycho Lady, however she suckered us into to take her to Ajanta caves with us the following day.
This
Sheesha Time
My mystical beard of smoke! first day we would head off to the Ellora caves (30kms away), here is a quick summary of what these caves entail:
The Ellora Caves are a World Heritage Site and represents the epitome of Indian rock-cut architecture. There are 35 caves which are comprised of Buddhist, Hindu and Jain cave temples and monasteries all built between the 5th and 10th century. The 12 Buddhist caves, 17 Hindu caves, and 5 Jain caves are all built in proximity, which demonstrate the religious harmony prevalent during this period of Indian history.
Finshing these caves and with a few hours left in the early evening, we headed back into Aurangubad and stopped at the Daulatabad Fort. It was a cool fort, and swarming with monkeys... luckily these monkeys were not hyped up on the hormones as the evil sex monkeys we faced on Elephanta Island in Mumbai. After a quick look around we made it home to our hotel, chilled out in the open terrace, ate some dinner and then got incredibly dizzy off of a shit load of mixed fruit sheesha smoked way to fast off the hookah pipe.
Our next and final day in this area was to
Monkey'n Around
Who's a monkey?... Who's a dirty little monkey?! be one of our weirdest. After eating breakfast and our taxi arriving, we headed off to Pennelope's hotel to pick her up. Little did I know that Hawk never threw a good luck flower he had received into the river like he was suppose to, instead he choose the trash can. Arriving at Pennelope's hotel we waited almost an hour until she was ready. Running late on time we tried to make good timing but was again interrupted when Pennelope was hungry for breakfast, of which we had already eaten, we had to stop for another hour to watch her eat. Finally ready to go we were back in the car. We pulled into the Ajanta caves parking lot and were required to board a bus to make it throught the national park where the Ajanta caves were, this wasn't too bad except Pennelope didn't enjoy the constant pushing from the Indians to board the bus.
The Ajanta caves are rock-cut cave monuments dating from the second century, containing paintings and sculpture considered to be masterpieces of both "Buddhist religious art" and "universal pictorial art". Since 1983, the Ajanta Caves have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site and are
Shiva or Budah
Geeze, I'm really bad at remembering which ones are which. Hawk would know, he seems to have some idea as to what is going on in this country. I only read about India on Wikipedia before I arrived. located in a wooded and rugged horseshoe-shaped ravine.
So we started from one end of the horseshoe-shaped ravine and slowly and I mean very slowly crawled our way to the other end. This was due to Pennelope constantly chatting with the touring Indians. It was obvious to us that it was her blonde hair, slender tall body and blue eyes which made her stand so far out from the rest. But she insisted that it was her spirtual enlightenment that made them all connect with her so well. She was slow... slow to talk, slow to walk and very slow to think on her own. Hawk kept thinking this was his good deed and that in helping her that somehow maybe he would have the favour returned. Anyways, back to the caves, we finished them up after about 5 hours (which should have only taken 2) and headed back to the car park.
Here Pennelope got lost with all the touts selling garbage. I wandered around a bit, and bought some nice stone coasters for my pad in Sydney. I then saw Hawk haggling with some touts in a shop. I went over and followed along in the
Ellora Caves
A small portion of the 35 Ellora caves. bargaining. 1800 rupees they wanted for some cheap gift, I laughed and told Hawk no more than 100 rupees for the larger one and 50 for any of the small ones. Unfortunately he thought I was being sarcastic, and as I left to go shop some more, I later found out he paid 1000 rupees for the gift, shame on him! As me and the taxi drver laughed at Mr. Hawkshaw in his first attempts to haggle, this would all soon be forgotten when low and behold Pennelope returned with a handful of cheap colored rocks she claimed had "spiritual powers flowing with energy" of which she had traded her mobile phone for (which had camera powers flowing with video). My god, double shame on her!
On the drive home we stopped at a nice little restaurant for dinner. We were attacked by swarms of mosquitos, and with neither me nor Hawk on any anti-malarial meds the hosts moved our table to the middle of the parking lot and started massive bush fires in a triangle around us to smoke out the mosquitos. Now that is customer service!
Back in town we were now ready to depart Pennelope,
Master of Caves
Shhh.... I must become one with the rock caves. but oh she had one last suprise for us. No money, she did not expect to help pay for the taxi ride as she thought for some reason that she was our guest.
$*#@!!!!!!!! What the hell is wrong this this Psycho Lady!!!! %*@&#!!!!
Well, we paid for it all, then grabbed our bags and headed to the bus terminal, to catch 3 buses into Badami.
Later, Hawk laughed as he told me he had thrown his good luck flower in the trash 😞
Note: there are 2 pages of pictures on this story, so click the next page link at the bottom of the photos to see the rest!
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Hulkshaw
Hulkshaw
Stones!
But ah cahn get five mobils in Italia, only here in Adjanta can ah get ze stones. So full of energy! Lookit this one... Steve... Steve... Steve... Steve look, it is so nice and full of energy from the caves!