Ellora and Daulatabad

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The caves at Ellora truly take your breath away. There are 35 of them (mercifully you don’t get to visit them all!) hewn out of a basalt cliff. There are Jain, Hindu and Buddhist temples and monasteries, each with different art forms, carved between 600 A.D and 1100 A.D.

The most impressive of all is the Kailasha temple. It’s a series of temple buildings created to form the shape of a giant chariot. The whole thing is carved from stone out of the cliff – so they had to cut down four stories or more from the top of the cliff, leaving a big lump in the middle, then gradually carve out the various buildings, ending up with the ornate carvings on the walls. It covers an area twice the size of the Parthenon! And despite Ellora getting half a million visitors a year (only 20,000 of whom are foreigners) it did not feel over-crowded.



After a short break for lunch, we went to Daulatabad, where a huge fort sits atop a massive rocky outcrop. The place was built with defence in mind, and was impregnable to attack though not, sadly, to attackers bribing someone on the inside. There are S shaped entrances, a myriad doors leading into dead ends where attackers could be pelted with rocks and other unpleasant projectiles, a massive moat and – worst of all for visitors – a long pitch black tunnel. Near claustrophobia set in, made infinitely worse by the stench of bat shit from the thousands of bats who have taken up home there. Sara developed a migraine at this point, and stumbled down the long slope back to the entrance to the relative cool of the car and some suitable medication. Who says taking every medicine under the sun on holiday isn’t a sensible thing to do?

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Comments

[Sarah Pillay]

Did you guys get to ride on an elephant????