I left Pune by bus about 10:30 on the morning of the 3rd, heading northeast into the Deccan towards the city of Aurangabad, renamed after the Moghul Emperor Aurangzeb after his death in 1707. (Aurangzeb had moved his capital there from Delhi about 25 years before his death, halfway through his 49 year reign, to focus on threats to his empire from the Marathas and others, the Sultans of Bijapur and Golcanda, to the south.) It took about five and a half hours to cover the almost 150 miles between the two cities on an express bus that made few stops. The countryside was dry and mostly uncultivated, with few crops until we crossed the Godavari River just near Aurangabad, and then appeared some cotton, corn, sugar cane and wheat, among other crops. However, lots of green trees and bushes added some more color to the yellows and browns of the dry countryside. Hills were visible most of the way and generally we traveled about 2000 to 2500 feet above sea level. (Aurangabad is something like 1700 feet in elevation.) We passed through hills just before and just after the city of Ahmadnagar (where Aurangzeb died in 1707), the halfway point between Pune and Aurangabad. Aurangabad was hot and I found a hotel and relaxed in my room under a swiftly moving ceiling fan before dinner.
The next morning I had to change hotels and then spent the morning having a leisurely breakfast and reading newspapers. About noon I hired a rickshaw driver to show me around the city. We headed first to Panchakki, a not particularly interesting complex near a Sufi saint's grave with a pool of water and a mill stone operated by the force of water coming from a spring three or four miles away.
We drove next to the Aurangabad Caves in a hilly, dry area north of the city, with good views back towards the city through the heat haze. These are Buddhist rock cut caves, about ten of them in two different areas about a mile apart. They are the product of two different dynasties, one in the 4th and 5th centuries AD and the other in the 6th to 8th centuries AD, although one cave is obviously much earlier, probably from the first century AD or earlier. In it, Buddha is represented as a stupa, similar to the halls in Karla and Bhaja. In the other caves Buddha is represented in human form and there are many other fine figures cut out of the rock. Particularly good is a woman dancing, with other women playing instruments around her, although all this is in the dark and I could see it only with my flashlight and the flash from my camera. Another good group, again in the dark, are kneeling devotees on either side of a Buddha in a sanctuary. The Buddha is illuminated from the light outside. It was hot in the sun outside the caves, but not unbearably so. Inside the caves it was much cooler.
From the caves you can see on the edge of town the Taj Mahal-like Bibi ki Maqbara, the tomb of Aurangzeb's wife, finished in 1678 after about 25 years of work. It was built by their son, but the parsimonious Aurangzeb wouldn't spend the money to complete it out of marble. Only the first few feet from the base are marble. The rest is some other stone covered in white plaster. It looks quite nice from a distance, although the proportions are not as pleasant as the Taj Mahal. The four minarets seem a little pudgy in comparison. Up close the surface of the Bibi ki Maqbara is much inferior to the Taj Mahal, the interface between the marble and the plaster noticeable. I walked around the garden surrounding it, also much inferior to that of the Taj Mahal, and went up onto the platform and into the chamber, with the tomb of the queen below surrounded by a beautiful marble screen. Her tomb apparently is not covered by a marble slab, but only with dirt. It is covered with a colorful sheet, with lots of coins on it thrown by Indians from above. Apparently, the lack of a marble slab and the dirt is a sign of humility, which seems pretty ludicrous inside a tomb of this sort. Despite its inferiority to the Taj Mahal, built 40 years earlier, it still is a very impressive building and I liked it.
I would have liked to have spent the rest of the afternoon there, but decided to continue with my autorickshaw tour, visiting a museum with some interesting stuff on Shivaji and other stuff, and a factory, with looms, for the making of saris and shawls. Aurangabad is famous for its weaving and the silks and cottons with gold and silver thread that I saw in the showroom were indeed beautiful. We passed a few of the restored city gates and saw a remnant of the old city wall built by Aurangzeb. The city was founded only earlier in the 17th century and declined markedly after Aurangzeb's death. I got back to my hotel about 6. My room was very hot that night. I didn't realize until the next morning that my windows weren't fully open. It was over 90 in that room -- my thermometer registered 93 the next morning when I checked soon after I got up.
The next morning about 9 I took a bus 18 miles northwest to the Ellora Caves. This set of 34 caves, hacked out of a hillside with a gentle slope from the 6th to the 11th centuries, makes all the other caves temples I've seen pale in comparison. The caves run for over a mile along the hillside and are in three groups. Buddhist caves (1-12), Hindu caves (13-29), and Jain Caves (30-34). The Buddhist caves to the south are the oldest, 6th to mid-8th centuries; the Hindu caves in the middle come next, 7th to 9th centuries; and the Jain ones to the north date from 9th to 11th centuries. The document the decline of Buddhism and the resurgence of Hinduism during this period, although the ruling dynasty at the end of this period adopted the Jain religion.
Arriving about 10, I went first to the grandest of the caves, #16, the Kailash Temple. It is not a cave at all, but a huge temple hacked out of the hillside. Unlike the others it is not cut into the hillside (although some of its side galleries are), but was constructed by cutting out rock from the top down. It is estimated that something like 200,000 to 250,000 tons, or 80,000 cubic meters, of rock were cut out and carted away, with outcrops left to be carved into temples, towers and sculpture. It is an incredible site and a big one, about 110 feet wide and 165 feet deep into the hillside. The highest point, the shikhara or tower of the main temple, rises almost 100 feet. It is thought it may have taken a century, or maybe two, to complete. It is an amazing place to see, and still in good shape for the most part, despite considerable weathering due to its being open to the elements, and subject to the destructiveness of Muslims.
It is dedicated to Shiva, the Lord of Kailash (a mountain in Tibet, which I visited in 1994, considered to be the center of the universe). The stone was once covered in white plaster and painted, though very little of that remains. The monumental sculpture, mostly focused on the Shiva and his consort Parvati, is fantastic and the way galleries are cut into the cliff, with massive overhangs of bare rock, is awe inspiring. Such a huge amount of work went into this temple. I wandered around enjoying it all. Hordes of tourists started coming in after 11. Almost all were Indian. April is hot and past the usual season for foreign tourists, though there were some. There was one big group of uniformed school girls, several hundred of them in their brown uniforms, from the Ryan School in Bombay. After granting a few, I started declining photo requests right and left.
About noon I left the Kailash Temple and walked down to Cave #1 and spent the next four hours slowly making my way, cave by cave, back to the Kailash Temple. I really enjoyed seeing the different caves, most of which I would have spent much more time in had they been at a site all by themselves. It was interesting to see the Buddhist temples becoming more elaborate, as they had to compete with the more exciting sculptural themes of the Hindu temples being built at the same time. Only one of the Buddhist temples had a hall with a stupa as in Karla, Bhaja and Aurangabad, and it had a huge Buddha in human form right in front of the stupa. Besides serene Buddhas, the Buddhist temples did have massive door guardians and other sculpture, and the arrangement of the temples was almost always a little, or sometimes a lot, different from the previous ones. Many were quite large, one something like 60 feet wide and twice that deep into the hillside.
The three Hindu temples (13-15) just before Kailash were a marked contrast from the Buddhist ones before them. At least two of these are thought to be converted Buddhist temples. They contain huge and intriguing action-filled sculpture centered on Shiva. About 4 I took a break at a snack bar near the Kailash Temple. Unfortunately, they had only warm bottled water. It was a very hot day, probably a 100 or more. Fortunately, the caves are cool and you needn't walk far in the hot sun between caves.
I went back into the Kailash Temple after my break. By then the crowds were smaller. I had hoped to see all the caves in one day, and had gone faster than I would have preferred in Caves 1-15, but I eventually realized I couldn't see them all in one day. I spent another hour and a half looking all around the Kailash Temple and then climbed the path that allows you to climb up one side and look down into it. In fact, I circled around the back and down the other side, with great views of the temple below. I left as they shooed us all out about 6:30, just before sunset. A full moon was rising just over the hillside, which faces the west. I caught a bus back to Aurangabad, arriving about 7:30, after dark. Despite my windows being fully open that night, my room temperature was still in the 90's. Very hot. Still, I was so tired I slept well. The weather here in the day time is hot, but, having grown up in California's Central Valley, I am used to hot, dry weather. The very hot nights are harder to take. It does cool down outside, but hotel rooms do not cool down much.
I was tired and got a later start the next day, catching a bus after 10 on the way back to Ellora, but I stopped off just about two miles before Ellora at the little town of Khuldabad to see Aurangzeb's grave. He wanted a very simple grave, open to the sky, and near the grave of a Sufi saint, and that is what he got. His grave is "open to the sky," that is, topped with dirt rather than, say, a marble slab. There were flower petals on the dirt and a sheet around the grave, with a cut out for the grave itself. There is now a marble screen around the grave, built about a century ago by the Nizam of Hyderabad upon the suggestion of Lord Curzon, the Viceroy. I also visited the grave of the Sufi saint, another Chisthi (they all seem to be from the Chisthi family). His was much more elaborate, housed in a small shrine with an interesting string of ostrich eggs hanging above it.
From Khuldabad I caught a shared autorickshaw to Ellora, arriving just before noon and eating a quick, and pretty terrible, sandwich, before spending the afternoon seeing Caves 17-34. I went through them slowly and very much enjoyed them. 17 through 29 are Hindu, with great sculpture, particularly in 21, 25 and 29, though there were gems in the other caves, too. 29 was particularly fine, with a cruciform shape and three entrances, to the north, west and south, with the sanctuary to the east. It has great panels depicting the stories of Shiva. It also has scores, or maybe hundreds, of squeaky bats hanging in the dark corridor just behind the sanctuary. I enjoyed all the sculpture, though I was sorry to see the serene Buddhas in the sanctuaries in the Buddhist temples replaced by Shiva's stone penis in the Hindu ones. It was a very hot day. At one point I checked my thermometer in my daypack and it registered 104. I was hoping there wouldn't be many tourists on this stretch, but there were lots of noisy Indians. You can drive to some of the temples on this stretch, and there were cars and autorickshaws parked.
I hadn't brought water with me, as the day before it had become very warm, almost unbearable to drink, in the heat. I had hoped to get cold, or at least cooler, water on the way. But to my great disappointment the canteen near the Jain caves was closed. I was very thirsty as I looked through those very interesting temples, with their distinctive rigid statues of Jain tirthankars. They did, however, contain some great sculpture and even some paintings on the ceilings.
Very thirsty, I walked back along the hillside after 5 and got to the gate after only twenty minutes or so. I drank a liter of water in about two minutes and then bought another liter which I drank on the bus back to town. Once back at the hotel, I downed another liter. I probably had another liter before bedtime, another warm one in that hot room. But I slept well.
The next morning I caught a 9 o'clock bus to Daulatabad, about halfway between Aurangabad and Ellora. I had passed this impressive fort going to and from Ellora and looked forward to exploring it. At its center is a 700 foot high volcanic pinnacle that has had a fort on it since at least the 11th century and possibly earlier. The Yadava Dynasty shaped the lower end of the pinnacle so that is has sheer 200 foot high sides and below those sheer vertical cliffs a 50 foot deep moat. It was first captured by Muslims in 1296 and in 1328 Tughluq, the Muslim Sultan of Delhi moved his capital from Delhi to Daulatabad because it was better positioned to facilitate his attempts to conquer the south. In fact, he not only moved the capital, he forced all of Delhi's residents to move, an epic journey of almost 700 miles that cost thousands of lives. However, because of drought and famine, after 17 years he moved the capital and its people back to Dellhi, costing more thousands of lives. A local dynasty took over the fort in the next century and in 1633 the Moghul Emperor Shah Jahan captured it. The Nizam of Hyderabad took it over in the next century.
The fort has three circles of walls before you get to the pinnacle and they present a formidable appearance. Inside the walls in the flat area beneath the pinnacle are a 200 foot high tower built in 1435 that once was covered with blue tiles, a huge water tank, wells, ruins of palaces, and a mosque built with the columns of former Hindu and Jain temples that now has been turned into a Hindu temple, with a colorfully painted god at the end of the columned prayer hall. I passed through several impressive gates and by a couple of ruined palaces, including the Chini Mahal, once covered with Chinese tiles, and reached the moat, once infested with crocodiles. A wooden bridge now crosses it. The old stone bridge has steps down and then up and could be flooded with water to prevent passage.
Once past the moat, the way up is through a dark, difficult passage of uneven steps that spirals up through the rock. A modern stairway now bypasses this route, but I used my flashlight and made my way through the pitch black, bat filled, difficult passage, with spots where intruders could be ambushed or attacked with hot oil or other unpleasantries. There were hundreds of bats clinging to the rock ceilings, and occasionally squeaking and fluttering around. Once past this amazing passage, more steps take you up to the Baradari, a large pavilion about a hundred feet below the summit that may have been built by Shah Jahan. I looked through it, with great views over the hilly countryside, and then made my way to the very top, with more spectacular views. I could follow the outline of the old city walls and the fort walls directly below the pinnacle. There is a small citadel with a couple of old cannons on the top.
I came back down to the Baradari about 12:30 and sat in the balcony overlooking the fort below, with the modern town just outside its walls. You can see past the town to the dry hills all around. A cool breeze blew and it was fairly comfortable up there. I spent about four hours, the hot part of the afternoon there. The number of others diminished in the afternoon and at times I had it to myself. I ate the food I had brought, sharing some of the peanuts with the squirrels, and read when not enjoying the views. Once it had cooled down a bit in the late afternoon, I walked down, enjoying again the dark, bat-filled passage and exploring around the lower fort. I caught a bus back to Aurangabad about 6.
The next morning I had a leisurely breakfast and read two Sunday newspapers until about 11. My plan had been to go from Aurangabad to a town near the rock cut Buddhist caves at Ajanta to the north, but the Ajanta Caves are closed on Mondays, so I decided to postpone that journey and head to Ellora again for the rest of the day. I got there just before noon and went into the Kailash Temple. It was not as crowded as when I was there the first day, though it still was crowded. I walked around leisurely and enjoyed seeing what I had seen before along with some details I had missed in earlier visits. It really is a remarkable place. I next revisited Caves 10-15 to the south. It was very hot in the sun going the short distances between caves, but the caves themselves were cool, even pleasant, sanctuaries from the sun.
April and May are India's hottest months, with temperatures often above, and sometimes well above, 100 degrees. Originally, I had hoped I would have made it back to Calcutta in about late March and then planned to spend April and early May (my time in India under my visa ends no later than May 14) in Darjeeling and Sikkim in the cool Himalayas. As usual, I traveled more slowly than expected and at one time considered putting off the Bombay to Pune part of my route until next year, and going directly to Aurangabad from Nasik, which I think would have gotten me to Calcutta in early April. Eventually, I decided not to do that, in part because the chances of seeing tigers in the game parks I am heading to in eastern Madhya Pradesh on the way to Calcutta are better in the hot dry months of April and May.
I saw a group of maybe twenty Tibetans, the women in traditional dress, visiting these caves, both Buddhist and Hindu ones, just south of the Kailash Temple. I had plenty of water this time. In the late afternoon I came back to the Kailash Temple for one last look and then took the route that ascends the rocky hillside around and behind the Kailash Temple, with fantastic views down into it. I caught a bus back to Aurangabad about 6:30.
The next morning I had to change hotels and then spent the morning having a leisurely breakfast and reading newspapers. About noon I hired a rickshaw driver to show me around the city. We headed first to Panchakki, a not particularly interesting complex near a Sufi saint's grave with a pool of water and a mill stone operated by the force of water coming from a spring three or four miles away.
We drove next to the Aurangabad Caves in a hilly, dry area north of the city, with good views back towards the city through the heat haze. These are Buddhist rock cut caves, about ten of them in two different areas about a mile apart. They are the product of two different dynasties, one in the 4th and 5th centuries AD and the other in the 6th to 8th centuries AD, although one cave is obviously much earlier, probably from the first century AD or earlier. In it, Buddha is represented as a stupa, similar to the halls in Karla and Bhaja. In the other caves Buddha is represented in human form and there are many other fine figures cut out of the rock. Particularly good is a woman dancing, with other women playing instruments around her, although all this is in the dark and I could see it only with my flashlight and the flash from my camera. Another good group, again in the dark, are kneeling devotees on either side of a Buddha in a sanctuary. The Buddha is illuminated from the light outside. It was hot in the sun outside the caves, but not unbearably so. Inside the caves it was much cooler.
From the caves you can see on the edge of town the Taj Mahal-like Bibi ki Maqbara, the tomb of Aurangzeb's wife, finished in 1678 after about 25 years of work. It was built by their son, but the parsimonious Aurangzeb wouldn't spend the money to complete it out of marble. Only the first few feet from the base are marble. The rest is some other stone covered in white plaster. It looks quite nice from a distance, although the proportions are not as pleasant as the Taj Mahal. The four minarets seem a little pudgy in comparison. Up close the surface of the Bibi ki Maqbara is much inferior to the Taj Mahal, the interface between the marble and the plaster noticeable. I walked around the garden surrounding it, also much inferior to that of the Taj Mahal, and went up onto the platform and into the chamber, with the tomb of the queen below surrounded by a beautiful marble screen. Her tomb apparently is not covered by a marble slab, but only with dirt. It is covered with a colorful sheet, with lots of coins on it thrown by Indians from above. Apparently, the lack of a marble slab and the dirt is a sign of humility, which seems pretty ludicrous inside a tomb of this sort. Despite its inferiority to the Taj Mahal, built 40 years earlier, it still is a very impressive building and I liked it.
I would have liked to have spent the rest of the afternoon there, but decided to continue with my autorickshaw tour, visiting a museum with some interesting stuff on Shivaji and other stuff, and a factory, with looms, for the making of saris and shawls. Aurangabad is famous for its weaving and the silks and cottons with gold and silver thread that I saw in the showroom were indeed beautiful. We passed a few of the restored city gates and saw a remnant of the old city wall built by Aurangzeb. The city was founded only earlier in the 17th century and declined markedly after Aurangzeb's death. I got back to my hotel about 6. My room was very hot that night. I didn't realize until the next morning that my windows weren't fully open. It was over 90 in that room -- my thermometer registered 93 the next morning when I checked soon after I got up.
The next morning about 9 I took a bus 18 miles northwest to the Ellora Caves. This set of 34 caves, hacked out of a hillside with a gentle slope from the 6th to the 11th centuries, makes all the other caves temples I've seen pale in comparison. The caves run for over a mile along the hillside and are in three groups. Buddhist caves (1-12), Hindu caves (13-29), and Jain Caves (30-34). The Buddhist caves to the south are the oldest, 6th to mid-8th centuries; the Hindu caves in the middle come next, 7th to 9th centuries; and the Jain ones to the north date from 9th to 11th centuries. The document the decline of Buddhism and the resurgence of Hinduism during this period, although the ruling dynasty at the end of this period adopted the Jain religion.
Arriving about 10, I went first to the grandest of the caves, #16, the Kailash Temple. It is not a cave at all, but a huge temple hacked out of the hillside. Unlike the others it is not cut into the hillside (although some of its side galleries are), but was constructed by cutting out rock from the top down. It is estimated that something like 200,000 to 250,000 tons, or 80,000 cubic meters, of rock were cut out and carted away, with outcrops left to be carved into temples, towers and sculpture. It is an incredible site and a big one, about 110 feet wide and 165 feet deep into the hillside. The highest point, the shikhara or tower of the main temple, rises almost 100 feet. It is thought it may have taken a century, or maybe two, to complete. It is an amazing place to see, and still in good shape for the most part, despite considerable weathering due to its being open to the elements, and subject to the destructiveness of Muslims.
It is dedicated to Shiva, the Lord of Kailash (a mountain in Tibet, which I visited in 1994, considered to be the center of the universe). The stone was once covered in white plaster and painted, though very little of that remains. The monumental sculpture, mostly focused on the Shiva and his consort Parvati, is fantastic and the way galleries are cut into the cliff, with massive overhangs of bare rock, is awe inspiring. Such a huge amount of work went into this temple. I wandered around enjoying it all. Hordes of tourists started coming in after 11. Almost all were Indian. April is hot and past the usual season for foreign tourists, though there were some. There was one big group of uniformed school girls, several hundred of them in their brown uniforms, from the Ryan School in Bombay. After granting a few, I started declining photo requests right and left.
About noon I left the Kailash Temple and walked down to Cave #1 and spent the next four hours slowly making my way, cave by cave, back to the Kailash Temple. I really enjoyed seeing the different caves, most of which I would have spent much more time in had they been at a site all by themselves. It was interesting to see the Buddhist temples becoming more elaborate, as they had to compete with the more exciting sculptural themes of the Hindu temples being built at the same time. Only one of the Buddhist temples had a hall with a stupa as in Karla, Bhaja and Aurangabad, and it had a huge Buddha in human form right in front of the stupa. Besides serene Buddhas, the Buddhist temples did have massive door guardians and other sculpture, and the arrangement of the temples was almost always a little, or sometimes a lot, different from the previous ones. Many were quite large, one something like 60 feet wide and twice that deep into the hillside.
The three Hindu temples (13-15) just before Kailash were a marked contrast from the Buddhist ones before them. At least two of these are thought to be converted Buddhist temples. They contain huge and intriguing action-filled sculpture centered on Shiva. About 4 I took a break at a snack bar near the Kailash Temple. Unfortunately, they had only warm bottled water. It was a very hot day, probably a 100 or more. Fortunately, the caves are cool and you needn't walk far in the hot sun between caves.
I went back into the Kailash Temple after my break. By then the crowds were smaller. I had hoped to see all the caves in one day, and had gone faster than I would have preferred in Caves 1-15, but I eventually realized I couldn't see them all in one day. I spent another hour and a half looking all around the Kailash Temple and then climbed the path that allows you to climb up one side and look down into it. In fact, I circled around the back and down the other side, with great views of the temple below. I left as they shooed us all out about 6:30, just before sunset. A full moon was rising just over the hillside, which faces the west. I caught a bus back to Aurangabad, arriving about 7:30, after dark. Despite my windows being fully open that night, my room temperature was still in the 90's. Very hot. Still, I was so tired I slept well. The weather here in the day time is hot, but, having grown up in California's Central Valley, I am used to hot, dry weather. The very hot nights are harder to take. It does cool down outside, but hotel rooms do not cool down much.
I was tired and got a later start the next day, catching a bus after 10 on the way back to Ellora, but I stopped off just about two miles before Ellora at the little town of Khuldabad to see Aurangzeb's grave. He wanted a very simple grave, open to the sky, and near the grave of a Sufi saint, and that is what he got. His grave is "open to the sky," that is, topped with dirt rather than, say, a marble slab. There were flower petals on the dirt and a sheet around the grave, with a cut out for the grave itself. There is now a marble screen around the grave, built about a century ago by the Nizam of Hyderabad upon the suggestion of Lord Curzon, the Viceroy. I also visited the grave of the Sufi saint, another Chisthi (they all seem to be from the Chisthi family). His was much more elaborate, housed in a small shrine with an interesting string of ostrich eggs hanging above it.
From Khuldabad I caught a shared autorickshaw to Ellora, arriving just before noon and eating a quick, and pretty terrible, sandwich, before spending the afternoon seeing Caves 17-34. I went through them slowly and very much enjoyed them. 17 through 29 are Hindu, with great sculpture, particularly in 21, 25 and 29, though there were gems in the other caves, too. 29 was particularly fine, with a cruciform shape and three entrances, to the north, west and south, with the sanctuary to the east. It has great panels depicting the stories of Shiva. It also has scores, or maybe hundreds, of squeaky bats hanging in the dark corridor just behind the sanctuary. I enjoyed all the sculpture, though I was sorry to see the serene Buddhas in the sanctuaries in the Buddhist temples replaced by Shiva's stone penis in the Hindu ones. It was a very hot day. At one point I checked my thermometer in my daypack and it registered 104. I was hoping there wouldn't be many tourists on this stretch, but there were lots of noisy Indians. You can drive to some of the temples on this stretch, and there were cars and autorickshaws parked.
I hadn't brought water with me, as the day before it had become very warm, almost unbearable to drink, in the heat. I had hoped to get cold, or at least cooler, water on the way. But to my great disappointment the canteen near the Jain caves was closed. I was very thirsty as I looked through those very interesting temples, with their distinctive rigid statues of Jain tirthankars. They did, however, contain some great sculpture and even some paintings on the ceilings.
Very thirsty, I walked back along the hillside after 5 and got to the gate after only twenty minutes or so. I drank a liter of water in about two minutes and then bought another liter which I drank on the bus back to town. Once back at the hotel, I downed another liter. I probably had another liter before bedtime, another warm one in that hot room. But I slept well.
The next morning I caught a 9 o'clock bus to Daulatabad, about halfway between Aurangabad and Ellora. I had passed this impressive fort going to and from Ellora and looked forward to exploring it. At its center is a 700 foot high volcanic pinnacle that has had a fort on it since at least the 11th century and possibly earlier. The Yadava Dynasty shaped the lower end of the pinnacle so that is has sheer 200 foot high sides and below those sheer vertical cliffs a 50 foot deep moat. It was first captured by Muslims in 1296 and in 1328 Tughluq, the Muslim Sultan of Delhi moved his capital from Delhi to Daulatabad because it was better positioned to facilitate his attempts to conquer the south. In fact, he not only moved the capital, he forced all of Delhi's residents to move, an epic journey of almost 700 miles that cost thousands of lives. However, because of drought and famine, after 17 years he moved the capital and its people back to Dellhi, costing more thousands of lives. A local dynasty took over the fort in the next century and in 1633 the Moghul Emperor Shah Jahan captured it. The Nizam of Hyderabad took it over in the next century.
The fort has three circles of walls before you get to the pinnacle and they present a formidable appearance. Inside the walls in the flat area beneath the pinnacle are a 200 foot high tower built in 1435 that once was covered with blue tiles, a huge water tank, wells, ruins of palaces, and a mosque built with the columns of former Hindu and Jain temples that now has been turned into a Hindu temple, with a colorfully painted god at the end of the columned prayer hall. I passed through several impressive gates and by a couple of ruined palaces, including the Chini Mahal, once covered with Chinese tiles, and reached the moat, once infested with crocodiles. A wooden bridge now crosses it. The old stone bridge has steps down and then up and could be flooded with water to prevent passage.
Once past the moat, the way up is through a dark, difficult passage of uneven steps that spirals up through the rock. A modern stairway now bypasses this route, but I used my flashlight and made my way through the pitch black, bat filled, difficult passage, with spots where intruders could be ambushed or attacked with hot oil or other unpleasantries. There were hundreds of bats clinging to the rock ceilings, and occasionally squeaking and fluttering around. Once past this amazing passage, more steps take you up to the Baradari, a large pavilion about a hundred feet below the summit that may have been built by Shah Jahan. I looked through it, with great views over the hilly countryside, and then made my way to the very top, with more spectacular views. I could follow the outline of the old city walls and the fort walls directly below the pinnacle. There is a small citadel with a couple of old cannons on the top.
I came back down to the Baradari about 12:30 and sat in the balcony overlooking the fort below, with the modern town just outside its walls. You can see past the town to the dry hills all around. A cool breeze blew and it was fairly comfortable up there. I spent about four hours, the hot part of the afternoon there. The number of others diminished in the afternoon and at times I had it to myself. I ate the food I had brought, sharing some of the peanuts with the squirrels, and read when not enjoying the views. Once it had cooled down a bit in the late afternoon, I walked down, enjoying again the dark, bat-filled passage and exploring around the lower fort. I caught a bus back to Aurangabad about 6.
The next morning I had a leisurely breakfast and read two Sunday newspapers until about 11. My plan had been to go from Aurangabad to a town near the rock cut Buddhist caves at Ajanta to the north, but the Ajanta Caves are closed on Mondays, so I decided to postpone that journey and head to Ellora again for the rest of the day. I got there just before noon and went into the Kailash Temple. It was not as crowded as when I was there the first day, though it still was crowded. I walked around leisurely and enjoyed seeing what I had seen before along with some details I had missed in earlier visits. It really is a remarkable place. I next revisited Caves 10-15 to the south. It was very hot in the sun going the short distances between caves, but the caves themselves were cool, even pleasant, sanctuaries from the sun.
April and May are India's hottest months, with temperatures often above, and sometimes well above, 100 degrees. Originally, I had hoped I would have made it back to Calcutta in about late March and then planned to spend April and early May (my time in India under my visa ends no later than May 14) in Darjeeling and Sikkim in the cool Himalayas. As usual, I traveled more slowly than expected and at one time considered putting off the Bombay to Pune part of my route until next year, and going directly to Aurangabad from Nasik, which I think would have gotten me to Calcutta in early April. Eventually, I decided not to do that, in part because the chances of seeing tigers in the game parks I am heading to in eastern Madhya Pradesh on the way to Calcutta are better in the hot dry months of April and May.
I saw a group of maybe twenty Tibetans, the women in traditional dress, visiting these caves, both Buddhist and Hindu ones, just south of the Kailash Temple. I had plenty of water this time. In the late afternoon I came back to the Kailash Temple for one last look and then took the route that ascends the rocky hillside around and behind the Kailash Temple, with fantastic views down into it. I caught a bus back to Aurangabad about 6:30.
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