May 10-15: Calcutta to Bangkok to Saipan

My train from Bolpur to Calcutta didn't leave until the afternoon of the 10th, so in the morning I took a cycle rickshaw to Shantiniketan.  I walked around the campus a bit, seeing several groups of yellow and white clad students attending classes under the trees.  I had read a newspaper the evening before reporting a special exhibition celebrating Tagore's 151st birthday, so I went to that when it opened at 10:30.  It wasn't much, but it did have some interesting photos and translations of a few of his poems.  It also had some of his paintings, which are quite interesting.  He started painting late in his life, in his 70's, I think.  After that, I walked around the campus a bit more, went to a bookstore, and took a cycle rickshaw back to the hotel about 11:30 in time for a last Bengali fish and rice lunch at the hotel.

My train left soon after 1 and was uncrowded.  It made good time through the flat Bengali countryside, with only two stops and covering the 90 miles to Calcutta in two and a half hours.  We passed lots of rice fields on the way, with a great many of them freshly harvested, and quite a few huts with the typical sloped Bengali grass roofs.  From the huge Howrah train station I walked across the road and caught a ferry across the wide Hooghly River, with views of the massive Howrah Bridge just upriver.  Reaching the east bank, I was right downtown.  I had planned to take a taxi once there, but they wouldn't use their meters or charge a reasonable rate, so I ended up walking to the hotel where I had stayed last November.  It took about 45 minutes, but I enjoyed walking past all the old colonial buildings and seeing all the street activity.  I relaxed and read a newspaper at the hotel before dinner.  It said Calcutta gets about six big rainstorms between early April and the middle of May, which is why West Bengal is so much greener and more humid now than points further west.  It took me a while to get to sleep that night as my room was hot.

The next morning my room still was hot, 88 degrees when I got up.  The day was a little cooler than previous days, though, with a high of only 95, but very high humidity.  After breakfast I walked around the city center, past many of the old colonial buildings as far north as the Writers' Building, former headquarters of the East India Company (the company's clerks were called writers) and now the seat of the West Bengal state government.  There is lots to be seen just walking along the crowded streets:  vendors selling just about anything, people cooking and selling food, barbers shaving customers.  I saw a guy on the street cleaning another guy's eye, scraping the white of the eye with a little metal utensil.

I stopped in at St. Andrew's Church, next to the Writers' Building,  and later at St. John's Church, the latter a few blocks away and completed in 1787.  Arriving at St. John's I was hot, sweaty, and thirsty and sat under ceiling fans in the vast nave drinking a liter of water I had just bought.  I checked out the plaques on the walls in both churches and the graveyard around St. John's before heading to a restaurant near my hotel for a late lunch. At St. John's there is a tombstone for a woman born in 1725, married first in 1738, remarried to a second husband who died of smallpox within a few days of the marriage, married a third time to a man with whom she had four children, and married a fourth time in 1774.  All this is on the tombstone, along with the names and marriages of the three of her children who survived until adulthood.  All her husbands held distinguished positions.  She died at 87 in 1812, the oldest British resident of Bengal, the tombstone said.  In the late afternoon I ventured out to a bookstore, but that was about it.

I left Calcutta, and India, the next day, the 178th of the 180 days allowed by my visa.  A big cricket match was to be played in Calcutta that afternoon, the Kolkata Knight Riders versus the Mumbai Indians, and the newspapers and television were full of news about it.  My flight left about 1 in the afternoon (on Air Asia and booked about ten days before for something less than $150) and arrived in Bangkok just before 5, local time.  I got to my hotel about 6:30.  It is as hot in Bangkok as it was in Calcutta, but after India Bangkok seems so clean and orderly and quiet.

I didn't do much the next day, another hot day, in the high 90's.  After breakfast I read the Bangkok English language newspapers, and spent most of the day reading and relaxing, with a few short walks.  I spent some time in the very nice Buddhist temple located between Khao San Road and my hotel.   Despite the heat, there are still a lot of tourists in Bangkok, though nowhere near as many as when I was last here in November.

The first of my flights home left the next morning about 11 from Bangkok.  I had booked the flights only a few days earlier, costing me only 15,000 reward miles and a little over $100. The very comfortable Thai Airlines flight to Osaka took about five and a half hours, arriving in Osaka about 6:30 Japan time.  On the way I had some great views of the Vietnamese coast just north of Danang, the southern tip of Taiwan and some of islands between Taiwan and Japan.  It was cloudy over southern Japan, so I saw little of it until just before we landed, when I got some good views of Kobe and Osaka and the mountains behind them before we landed.   My  next flight left Osaka about 9, arriving in Guam after about three hours, at 1 in the morning local time on May 15.  Because of mechanical problems, my flight from Guam to Saipan was delayed about an hour and a half, but we finally took off soon after 4 and arrived in Saipan about 5.  I got home just before 6, just after sunrise.

May 4-9, 2012: Bishnupur, Shantiniketan, Tarapith

It felt cool in Ranchi on the morning of the 4th when I walked over to the train station to buy my ticket to Bishnupur.  I had breakfast at the station and later read a newspaper in the lobby of a nearby hundred year old railroad hotel recently refurbished into a luxury hotel.  The temperature the day before in Ranchi, it reported, had been 97 degrees, a break from the 100 plus degrees weather I'd been having.  About 9:30 I left on the train to Bishnupur, about 150 miles to the east.  My ticket cost me all of 34 rupees, about 65 cents.  The train was all unreserved seating, but was uncrowded.  I sat in the last car and at times had it almost to myself.

The train made many stops as we passed through the scenic hilly and forested area of eastern Jharkhand (a state created only in 2000 out of the southern portion of Bihar), a sparsely populated area.  I enjoyed the trip.  We crossed into West Bengal and the terrain became flatter, but with big stone hills rising over the dry landscape.  A teacher boarded the train at the first stop in West Bengal.  He told me school runs from 6:30 to 11 in the morning in the summer and he was on his way home, in the city of Puruliya.  I talked with him for the hour and a half it took us to reach Puruliya.  He pointed out hills about twelve miles to the north and said there were wild elephants and Maoist Naxalite guerrillas there.  The land flattened as we headed east and became greener, though not as green as when I took a train west through West Bengal last November.  The rains start earlier in West Bengal than further west.  I spotted a few very green rice paddies and even the dry grass had a bit of green in it.  Further west, it had all been brown.  The train filled up a bit here and there, but was never overly crowded.  It clouded up and I saw lots of oil palms dotting the landscape.

We arrived in Bishnupur, at only 220 feet elevation, about 4, only ten minutes late, which is pretty good considering Bishnupur was the 32nd stop from Ranchi.  I took a cycle rickshaw to a hotel about two and a half miles from the station, and enjoyed the ride through the streets of that small city, with a population of around 60,000.  It is much more humid and green here.  I walked around a bit before dark and watched lots of cricket being played by boys in dusty fields.  It gets dark here about 6:30.  That evening there was quite a bit of thunder and lightning, but only a little rain.  I slept well under a fast moving ceiling fan.

The next morning after breakfast at the hotel I hired a cycle rickshaw to take me to the temples around the town.  These temples date from the Malla Dynasty of the 16th to 18th centuries.  My guidebooks don't explain who the Mallas were and how they managed to thrive at a time of Muslim dominance in Bengal.  The temples are made of either brick or laterite, the latter a rough, pockmarked red stone.  The brick temples are covered with terra cotta sculpture while the laterite ones are plastered, although much of the plaster has worn off.  They often have roofs modelled after the sloped straw roofs of Bengali style huts.  I enjoyed moving through Bishnupur's narrow lanes in a cycle rickshaw, with views of small town life everywhere:  men and women washing at water pumps or in small ponds, repair shops, food shops, school kids in uniform. People were very friendly.  There were quite a few hammer and sickle emblems painted on the sides of buildlings.  The Communist Party governed West Bengal from 1977 until just last year, when they were finally ousted in elections. 

Over the morning we must have stopped at between fifteen and twenty of these temples.  Some were covered with spectacular terra cotta tiles depicting scenes from daily life and from stories about Krishna and others.  I think all the temples are Vishnu temples.  Some of the brick temples had hundreds of panels and thousands of figures, and I very much enjoyed picking out all the details, often very fine, though it was hot standing in front of the temples in the midday sun.  At one temple my feet began to sting and I noticed that I had stepped among many very tiny, stinging ants.  We also passed the two remaining gates and the dry remnants of a moat from an old fort.  Flame trees, like those from Africa and Saipan (brought from Africa during the German era), grew around town.

After a lunch break from about 1 to 3, we headed to seven laterite temples just north of town and explored those until about 4:30.  The laterite temples are not as well decorated as the brick and terra cotta temples. The sculpture is carved into the rough laterite blocks and then plastered.  In the late afternoon I walked back to some of the finest temples and watched boys playing cricket in the nearby dusty open spaces.  The townspeople were friendly and curious.  It was sunny all day, with no clouds.  Hot and humid, but not unbearable, and really not bad at all in the shade.

The next morning I walked to the Shyamarai Temple, dating from 1643 and the finest of the lot, with hundreds of panels.  I watched a lizard crawl along the panels and just generally enjoyed the site in the morning sun.  It was hot in the sun, but pleasant in the shade.  In the sun I photographed a dung beetle rolling a ball of dung perhaps thrice his size and soon noticed I was dripping with sweat.  The morning's newspaper had said the high was only 93 the day before, but humidity about 85%.  

I had lunch at the hotel and caught a bus at 1 heading north, then west, then north again to Durgapur.  The bus was slow, with lots of stops, but passed through a scenic area of small villages and bounteous rice fields.  Some of the golden rice was being harvested.  The bus became much more crowded and the countryside much drier as we approached Durgapur, which we reached a little before 4.  I hopped on another bus, this one heading to Bolpur, which left at 4.  This was another small bus, which eventually got very crowded.  Fortunately, I had a window seat so no standees were leaning against me.  The aisles were packed, like the bus I took from Umaria to Tala.  I did have a mother and her screaming child seated next to me for a while.  The mother appeared to think that screaming back at the child might stop her. 

Durgapur seems to be a city of big factories and I remember seeing them before as I  passed through the city by train headed west last November.  Our bus headed east, then north, then east again to Bolpur, arriving at 6:30, at dark. The road was wet from rain in places and we passed through a forested area, in flat terrain, for a few miles, a surprise to me in densely populated Bengal.  Bolpur is only a little more than 50 miles from Bishnupur, but with the slow buses and indirect route, it took me five and a half hours to get there.  I took a cycle rickshaw to a hotel, with a few drops of rain and some impressive lightning on the way.  The hotel turned out to be a good one and I had a very good dinner at the hotel of Bengali style fish (a river fish; Bengalis are famous for their fish dishes), vegetables and rice.

The next morning I walked up the road about a mile north to Shantiniketan, the location of a university founded by Rabindranath Tagore, India's Nobel Prize winning (in 1913) poet.  His father, Debendranath Tagore, considered a great maharishi of a 19th century reformist Hindu sect, bought a farmhouse here in the 1860's, soon after Rabindranath (his fourteenth child) was born in 1861.  Rabindranath spent a lot of time here and moved here from Calcutta in 1901 to start a school, with five pupils taught under the trees.  It became a university in 1921.  Indira Gandhi (then Indira Nehru), among other notables, attended.  I visited several buildings, including the farmhouse expanded into a two story mansion and some other interesting smaller houses where Tagore lived off and on until his death at 80 in 1941.  The houses have some of the original furnishings and lots of photos.  Gandhi visited several times, as early as 1915 and as late as 1940.  There are photos of him and Tagore:  Tagore tall, dressed in a long white robe, with a flowing long white beard and hair and Gandhi, small, his head shaved, wearing only a white dhoti not falling below his knees.  There is also a museum, but I was told it is closed for renovation.

I walked through the campus, mercifully under shady trees, including some huge banyan trees, and saw some of the students walking around and attending classes under the trees.  Under one tree surrounded by students seated on the ground stood a blackboard permanently fixed onto the ground.  The students wear very stylish yellow and white uniforms:  the boys in white trousers with almost knee-length yellow shirts; the girls in white trousers and yellow blouses with white scarfs or else yellow saris with white top garments.  There were quite a few tourists and I met an architect from Bangladesh and walked around with him for a while.  The sky clouded up around 2 and that made it seem cooler.  I got back to the hotel about 3:30 and spent most of the rest of the afternoon there.

The next morning I took a cycle rickshaw to Santiniketan about 7:30, reaching the small glass-walled temple near the mansion just after a prayer service commemorating Tagore's 151st birthday had ended.  He was born on May 7, 1861, but this year his birthday under the Bengali calendar falls on May 8.  I walked to the Uttarayan complex, with all the small houses where he lived, and sat under an awning in front of one of the houses to await a birthday ceremony.  It was hot, though ocassionally a very welcome cool breeze blew. 

The program started at 8:30, with songs by choirs and individuals, interspersed with readings from Tagore's poetry.  It was all very nice.  Of course, I didn't understand the Bengali poetry, but it sounded lovely when read by the various readers.  One of the poems recited was in English and quite beautiful.  I think the songs also were Tagore poems set to music.  There was quite a crowd for the ceremony, with many men in traditional Indian dress and many women in beautiful saris.  I seemed to be the only westerner.  The ceremony ended after an hour and I hung around watching the colorful crowd disperse and talking to the Bangladeshi architect and others.  I walked back through campus, bought a ticket from the small Shantiniketan train ticket office for Calcutta in two days' time, and in the hot sun took a cycle rickshaw back to my hotel about 11.

I spent the afternoon trying to avoid the heat at an internet cafe and in the air conditioned lobby of my hotel.  Hilary Clinton had visited Calcutta the previous day and I found a Bengali newspaper with seven or eight photos of her, mostly with West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.  It didn't seem to cool down much after dark.  Sunset is just after 6 and it gets dark about 6:30.  Sunrise is very early, about 5.  India is one big time zone, despite the country covering almost 28 degrees of longitude from west to east.  Time zones ordinarily cover about 15 degrees of longitude.

It was hot and very humid when I woke up the next morning.  My thermometer registered 88 degrees in my room.  The morning newspaper said it had reached between 98 and 99 degrees the day before in Calcutta, with a low between 81 and 82.  A little before 10 I boarded a crowded train heading north to Rampurhat, about 35 miles away.  I had to stand in the crowded aisle, but the train was an express, making only two stops and reaching Rampurhat in about an hour.  I stood near the open door and enjoyed watching the scenery go by.  Rice was growing in places and being reaped by sickle here and there.  Other rice paddies were still fallow, to be planted in the coming monsoon, I guess.  A Baul singer, one of Bengal's traditional wandering minstrels, came through the car singing and beating his small drum.

Alighting at the station in Rampurhat, I hopped on a shared, large-size autorickshaw that took me about five miles south to Tarapith, a small town with a tantric Hindu temple honoring Tara, one of the many avatars of Shiva's consort Parvati/Uma/Durga/Kali.  A guy from Calcutta named Rahul had been on the train and autorickshaw and he showed me around.  It was hot and humid as we walked to the temple through a pedestrian lane full of shops catering to pilgrims.  There were some spectacularly beautiful garlands on sale.  The red hibiscus ones, he told me, were Tara's favorite, but there were also ones of yellow flowers, blue flowers, small white flowers, and giant lavender lotuses.  The temple wasn't much, but the pilgrims were interesting.  It was relatively uncrowded.  Rahul, who told me he comes here every three months or so, said it is packed on weekends.  I didn't join the line to enter the temple, but I could pick out the central idol from the outside.  I looked around while Rahul was praying and with him after he finished.  Small stones are tied with red and yellow string to a fence near the main temple.  Rahul told me you leave one when you have a prayer for Tara to grant, and if she does you come back and remove one of the hanging stones.  There were also many bells, of different sizes, hanging near the stones, donated by persons whose prayers had been granted.  Rahul showed me the spot where goats are sacrificed to Tara.  He told me a small goat costs about $100.

We next walked to the cremation area along the river near the temple.  A body on a pyre was burning, with men beating it with bamboo poles.  Rahul told me that is done to break the legs, so the body doesn't sit up while burning.  Another group had just brought the body of an old woman, with long gray hair, to the area.  Unlike at Varanasi, where the bodies are covered in cloth, this dead woman was clad only in a piece of cloth reaching from her waist to her knees.  She was rather unceremoniously lifted off the stretcher and dropped face down onto a small pile of wood, which was quickly set on fire without any of the ceremony seen at Varanasi.  Rahul told me these were poor people who couldn't afford the quantity of wood necessary for a full cremation.  He said they would be only partially burned, with the remnants buried nearby.  He pointed to the many dirt mounds nearby.  I asked if the body remnants might be washed away when the rains come, but he said they are buried six feet and more down.

While we were there, an uncovered body of a man was brought on a stretcher to be cremated, again on a small pile of wood.  Unlike at Varanasi, you are allowed to take photos and I saw some Indians taking photos with their cell phones.  People at the temple and cremation ground were quite friendly, even the sadhus.  Nobody seemed to mind having his or her photo taken, and some requested it.  I don't think they get many westerners at this place.

We found a small, hot restaurant and had a small lunch before I took an autorickshaw back to Rampurhat and caught a train back to Bolpur about 2.  I easily found a seat for the hour trip back on another express.  It was overcast and humid and I spent the rest of the afternoon at the hotel.

April 29 - May 3, 2012: Bilaspur, Raipur, Sambalpur, Rourkela, Ranchi

I was up at 5 on the morning of the 29th as we were hoping to make another safari into the Tala Zone of Bandhavgarh National Park.  We were told that we would know by 5:30, but not until 6:30 were we finally informed that we couldn't get entry.  We had breakfast at the hotel and a little before 9 the five of us, rather than chance the crowded buses, hired a jeep to take us to Umaria.  It took us a little less than an hour to get there, a much more pleasant trip than my arrival on the bus from Umaria to Tala.  When we arrived, a train for Katni was at the station about to depart and Zafer and Karen (headed for Nepal) and the two Danish women (headed for Khajuraho) jumped on it.  I was headed in the opposite direction, with a train scheduled to pass through at 10:45.  I sat and waited, talking to some of the friendly people curious about me, including a guy who bought me tea.  I expected the train to be late.  It had left Indore the previous evening at 5 or so and Umaria was its 45th scheduled stop.  The train arrived just before noon and was packed.  I jumped on and had to stand for the first half hour, until our second stop, where I got a portion of a crowded seat.  Still, when very crowded, the relatively spacious trains are much better than the cramped buses.

My seat mates were friendly and I fielded the usual questions and one unusual one, whether I liked boxing.  The young woman who asked me that had earlier asked me what my job was, and later said, "Well, you must like boxing with words," which I thought was pretty clever.  It was hot, but not unbearably so, as we headed southeast through the mostly flat, though sometimes rolling, dry countryside.  There were lots of trees.  I had thought of getting off at a station called Pendra Road and taking a bus about 25 miles up into the hills to Amarkantak, a temple city at the source of the holy Narmada River.  But I had been told that April and May are months when Indians do a lot of travel, as the schools are out.  I didn't want to face another crowded bus and in fact a lot of people got off the train at Pendra Road.  Rather than go to the relatively cool hills and the source of the holy Narmada, I decided to remain on the train to its destination, Bilaspur, a city one of my guide books says is noted for its cement factories.

Amarkantak is in the hills, which we could see from the train, that separate Madhya Pradesh from the newly formed state of Chhattisgarh, part of Madhya Pradesh until 2000.  Chhattisgarh (which means "36 Forts") is 40% forested.  About 30 % of its people are tribal, mostly in the far north and south.  We had risen to over 2000 feet elevation around Pendra Road (the hills along the border rise to over 3500 feet) and soon after descended through hills covered with beautiful forest, including sal trees.  We passed through one long tunnel but mostly had some great views of the forest out the windows.  The number of passengers on the train had thinned out and I enjoyed the scenery.  The landscape became flatter and the elevation lower further south.  The sun set into the haze above the horizon about 6:20 and maybe twenty minutes later, just as it got dark, we arrived in Bilaspur, a city of 300,000 at about 1000 feet elevation.  I took an autorickshaw to what turned out to be a very nice hotel and got a room with a cooler for 500 rupees, about $10.  I was very hungry and had a very good dinner (chicken tandoori, nan and two lassis) at the hotel's restaurant and then washed my incredibly dusty and dirty clothes and day pack before going to bed soon after 10.

I got up the next morning soon after 6 and relaxed most of the morning, with a good breakfast at the hotel and a trip to an internet cafe to check train schedules.  I decided to forego inquiring about opportunities to visit Bilaspur's cement factories and about noon caught a train south to Raipur, Chhattigarh's capital.  The train was relatively uncrowded and I got a seat.  The train made no stops as it sped south through the flat, dry countryside.  A lot of cropland was in view, all fallow in this the hot season.  It did look very hot outside.  It took only a little more than an hour and a half to get to Raipur, a city of over 700,000 people, where I checked into an okay hotel and had a late lunch before checking bus schedules and spending most of the rest of the afternoon at an internet cafe.  Not much of touristic interest in Raipur, noted for the huge steel mill built by the Soviets in Bhilai, east of Raipur.

I was up early the next morning and bought my bus ticket for Sambalpur, to the east.  I had wanted to leave on a morning bus, but almost all the buses left at night and the earliest bus I could find left at 1 in the afternoon.  (I could have taken a direct overnight train to Calcutta from Raipur, or from Bilaspur or Umaria for that matter, but I wanted to travel in the day time and see the scenery on the way.)  I spent most of the morning in my hotel room (the morning newspaper reported that the high the day before was 105 and it was already hot in the morning), except for breakfast, and at 1 left on a big pink bus for Sambalpur.  It was a fairly comfortable, though well-worn, bus, with reclining seats and plenty of leg room.  However, it was not air conditioned and very hot.  I had a window seat with a window that wouldn't open fully, but I noticed almost every window was closed to prevent the blasts of hot air from coming in.  Mine was stuck partially open and I could feel the very hot air rushing in from outside on the back of my neck.

The bus initially made good time through the mostly flat, dry countryside, though there were, to my surprise, a few green rice paddies.  We did go through a hilly, rocky, forested area.  About 4:30 we reached the small  town of Sarai Pali, more than half way to Sambalpur.  We made a half hour stop there and thereafter made much slower time.  The bus had filled up with lots of people in the aisles and began to make lots of stops for people to get on and off.  We crossed the Chhattisgarh-Odisha (formerly Orissa, until just last year) state line, with lots of trucks lined up waiting to cross, and reached the city of Bargarh just before 7 as it was getting dark.  After another half hour stop there, we drove in the dark to Sambalpur, arriving after 9.  I found a hotel and a Chinese restaurant run by an actual ethnic Chinese guy and got to bed after 11.  It was warm in Sambalpur, at about 500 feet elevation, but I had a room with a cooler.

I had thought I might do some sightseeing around Sambalpur, but the sites, mostly temples, didn't seem that worthwhile and getting to them entailed a bus trip in the heat.  I spent most of the morning in the lobby of a nicer hotel than mine, and a little after 1 left on an uncrowded train heading to Rourkela to the northeast.  One of my guidebooks had said that the route from Sambalpur to Rourkela was particularly scenic, but it must have been talking about some route other than the one I took.  The train route passed through mostly dry, flat countryside, with some rice paddies.  We passed a huge factory near the city of Jharsuguda.  The factory had four of those huge cement cooling towers that you see at nuclear plants, plus two even taller smokestacks and a big squarish building.  As we passed, I noticed almost naked men fishing with nets in a dirty little pond in the foreground of the factory.  We passed through a somewhat more scenic hilly area just before arriving at Rourkela a little before 4.  I saw a few oil palms, maybe the first I've seen in India, as we neared the city.  I got a hotel and took a short walk before sunset.  Rourkela is a steel and mining city, at about 700 feet elevation.  Just north of the train station is a long brown hill with a temple about two thirds of the way up.  I asked the hotel manager if there was anything of touristic interest in town and he said no.

I again spent most of the next morning in my hotel room and after 11 left on another uncrowded train heading north to Ranchi, the capital of Jharkhand state.  I was hoping this would be a scenic route as Jharkhand is quite a hilly state, and the scenery was fairly nice in places, especially just after we entered Jharkhand, with forested hills and one rocky river bed.  However, most of the terrain was dry, fallow farmland, with some hills here and there.  It seemed a very sparsely populated area.  The train was actually heading all the way to Jammu and a guy I was sitting near was going to Delhi.  He said the train would fill up in Ranchi and it did.  It arrived in Ranchi about 3:30 and I got off and got a hotel.  Ranchi is at about 2100 feet elevation and was noticeably cooler, especially at night, than the places I'd stayed in the previous days.  Not much of touristic interest in Ranchi, though.  

April 24-28, 2012: More Tigers! Bandhavgarh National Park

On the 24th I traveled from Jabalpur to the little village of Tala on the edge of Bandhavgarh National Park, a hellish journey of less than 120 miles that took me more than ten hours.  I left Jabalpur before 9 on a bus with no one standing in the aisles other than the conductor.  But while still in the city and probably not five minutes from the bus station, it stopped and filled up with what seemed like dozens of additional passengers.  The three hour bus ride northeast to Katni was not a pleasant one, with standees pressed close against me in my aisle seat on a hot morning.

In Katni I drank a liter of water and got a window seat on a bus I was told was going to Umaria, to the southeast.  After an hour wait, it left about 1 and as I bought my ticket from the conductor soon after we started off, he told me that the bus was going only as far as Chandia Road, on the way to Umaria.  It took us about an hour and a half to head down the road 25 or so miles to Chandia Road through dry, flat country.  At Chandia Road the bus emptied and I was told to catch the train to Umaria, which is about 12 miles away.  I arrived at the station just as the train was pulling away.  The next train was scheduled to arrive at 3:30, in less than an hour, but was several hours late.  An Indian couple was also heading to Umaria and had also just missed the train.  I followed them as they tried to get trucks to give us a lift.  While waiting, I drank another liter of water.  Finally, we got a lift (for 20 rupees each) in an fairly nice automobile for the last 12 miles, which delivered us right to the Umaria bus station.

In Umaria we had a wait of about an hour before a bus arrived for Tala (where I was headed) and Manpur, beyond Tala (where they were headed).  There was a terrific scrum as people fought their way onto the bus while others tried to get off.  The guy I was with must have fought his way on early as he got two seats near the front.  His wife was too slight to lift up their heavy bag, so I lifted it up to the window and he tucked it under his seat.  The bus conductor had me put my bag in the back of the bus.  I was one of the last to squeeze onto the little bus.  The couple from Manpur slid over and gave me a very small portion (he was quite a large man) of their seat.  We started off, a packed bus, and made several stops picking up even more passengers.  My seat was very uncomfortable and I was happy to give it up to a woman carrying a baby when she boarded.  Then, packed to the gills or rafters or whatever is the appropriate term for buses, we stopped at a gas station for several minutes to fill up.

Wedged in with all the other standees, I could barely move.  And the trip was excruciatingly slow.  It is only 20 miles from Umaria to Tala, but it took about two hours and twenty minutes.  Probably the second most uncomfortable bus journey I've ever been on.  (The first was in 1979 through Baluchistan in Pakistan from the Iranian border to Quetta, about 26 hours in another jam packed bus, but I did have half a seat in that one.)  The bus seemed to proceed at about five miles per hour at times, if that, on a poor road through the hills with many long stops while departing passengers got their things off the roof.  Everybody seemed to be in about as good a humor as they could be, though.  The last few miles were through the national park on a particularly bad road.  One guy in a seat informed me that he was seeing deer and peacocks.  A little after 7 we arrived in Tala just as it was getting dark.  I got off and wanted to kiss the ground like the Pope.  I bought a liter of water, drank it, walked in the dark about five minutes to a hotel and thankfully checked in, exhausted but relieved to be there.  Three other westerners were at the hotel and I had dinner with them.  After dinner I took a very welcome bucket bath and went to bed about 11.  I was later told that the reason the buses were so packed is that there are fewer of them running now than is normal.  It is wedding season in this area and wedding parties rent out the buses, leaving fewer on their normal routes.  I am very much missing the old, rickety, but relatively spacious and regular state buses of Maharashtra and Gujarat.  In Madhya Pradesh the buses are all private.

The other three had booked a safari the next morning, which I couldn't join, and so I slept in until 8.  After getting up, I relaxed on the veranda of my room.  It was already quite hot.  They returned from their safari about 9 or 9:30, having seen a tiger, and went off to a special breakfast they had booked the night before.  I had my own breakfast, relaxed and went to an internet cafe (quite a surprise in this little village and in fact there appear to be three of them).  There were no afternoon safaris that day (none on Wednesday afternoons, for unknown reasons), so about 4 Neel, one of the westerners (from Britain and with parents who emigrated from Gujarat 40 years ago), and I took a walk through the dry countryside just outside of Tala.  We saw quite a few blue Indian rollers, a beautiful bird, and came upon a brick works in the open countryside.  In one area men were arranging firewood in a circle.  Nearby, we could see firewood similarly arranged under a new made kiln consisting of new made bricks stacked together and then plastered over with mud.  One man was plastering with mud the last bit of the stack of bricks.  A woman was digging up dirt and carrying it in a basket on her head to a guy on top of the kiln, who used the dirt to cover the top of the kiln.  We came back into the village about six and sat on the lawn of one of the nicer hotels and drank lime soda as in the dusk before the four of us (Neel, two Swedes and me) had dinner.  I got to bed about 10.   It is quite pleasant at night, with the sounds of the forest outside.  The elevation is about 1500 feet, though the hills in the park rise to well over 2500 feet.  There is a very old fort on one of them, though you have to pay the normal safari fees (even higher than those at Kanha) to visit it.

I was up the next morning at 4:45 and our jeep arrived about 5:30.  The central Tala Zone of the park was completely booked, so we headed into the Magdhi Zone over the terrible road I had come on two days before.  We entered the zone and drove on dirt roads through mostly flat terrain, with lots of trees, including sal.  It was very dusty, as we were often right behind other jeeps.  We saw sambar, chital, langurs, a jackal, peacocks and lots of other birds, including Indian rollers, of which there seem to be many in this area.  Early on we followed the pug marks of a very large male tiger, by far the largest pug marks I have seen.  We saw a large deposit of tiger scat and heard a chital warning cry, but saw no tiger.

We drove around some more, getting dustier and dustier and soon after 8 came across about eight jeeps parked alongside the road near a water hole.  We drove up and a big tiger was standing on a bank above the water hole, about 300 or 400 feet from us.  He lay down and roared several times, very impressive roars.  The guide said he was calling to his females and that he was the tiger whose tracks we had seen, a male about five years old.  He is the dominant tiger in the area, having killed the previous dominant male, who just happened to be his father, less than a year ago.  He lay there about ten minutes, as a few other jeeps arrived.  Then he got up and walked down the sandy incline to the water hole, full of reddish water colored by algae, where he crouched and drank for what must have been two minutes.  He then began walking past the water hole through the grass towards us.  We could see him clearly all the way.  We were perfectly positioned as he crossed the road right between us and another jeep, turning to growl once at us just before he crossed the road and disappeared into the forest.  What a great sighting!  We made our dusty way back, seeing deer and a wild boar on the way, and arrived at the hotel about 9:30, where we had breakfast.

The two Swedes left that afternoon and about 3:30 Neel and I set off on an afternoon safari (expensive with only two of us, with each of us paying about $40) into the Magdhi Zone again.  We followed a different route than in the morning, a very pretty route through rocky, hilly terrain, with higher hills than in the distance.  It was much less dusty than in the morning as fewer jeeps went this route.  We could see the hill upon which rests the fort, though we couldn't make out the fort itself.  Bandhavgarh (which means "Brother's Fort") has a long history and is supposed to have been given by Rama to his brother Lakshman.  An ancestor of the current Maharaja of Rewa (the city of Rewa is to the north) abandoned it in the early 17th century when he moved his capital to Rewa.  Bandhavgarh became his hunting preserve.

About 5 we came to a water hole with about ten jeeps waiting.  A tiger had been spotted here in the morning.  We waited a while, but no tiger showed up.  We drove around some more and saw deer and peacocks and langur monkeys.  About 6 we heard the warning cry of a chital, but couldn't remain long as we had to leave the zone by 6:30.  I got to bed about 9:30 that night, tired after the early mornings.

The next morning Neel and I set off into Magdhi Zone again, though our jeep driver was 40 minutes late and we didn't go through the gate until almost 6:30.  We had a beautiful drive, seeing deer and langurs and peacocks and even a long snake (a black cobra, the guide thought) slithering around a termite mound.  About 7:30 we arrived at a very small pond with ten or fifteen jeeps parked nearby.  A tiger and her cub had been spotted nearby earlier in the morning and all were hoping they would approach the water hole.  We waited an hour or so without success, with only a few birds to watch.  We drove back, very hot in the sun.  We spotted a red-headed king vulture in a tree and stopped right beside an unusually unconcerned chital buck right by the side of the road.  Usually, they flee or at least move off a little at the approach of a jeep.  We got back about 10 and had a very good breakfast prepared by an Indian woman living near the park whom Neel has befriended over his seven trips to the park.

Neel left that afternoon to catch a train to Bombay, but two other tourists, Zafer and Karen (he was from Turkey and she from India, a Goanese raised in Bombay), had arrived.  The three of us headed into Magdhi Zone about 3:30.  The afternoon was hot and sunny with no clouds, much hotter than the previous cloudy afternoon.  Near a large water hole fairly close to the entrance gate a huge herd of chital and sambar had gathered to drink.  I would guess there were about 200 of them.  Usually, you see them in groups of 20 at most, usually less.  We headed back to the water hole where I had spent an hour in the morning, passing a few deer, langurs and peacocks on the way.  After another unsuccessful wait, along with about 15 other jeeps, for 40 minutes or so, we drove back slowly towards the exit.  Near the exit we heard chital warning calls, but saw no tiger.  Just past the exit, on the main road back to Tala village, several jeeps were parked in hopes of seeing a tiger.  Chital warning cries had been heard, but again we saw no tiger.  We drove back to the village and spotted three jackals running alongside the road.  First time I 've seen three together.  About a mile from the village (the village is maybe four or five miles from Magdhi Gate, a fifteen minute drive by jeep on a terrible road) a tiger had just crossed the main road.  We had just missed him and spotted only his tracks in the soft sand along the road.  We got back to Tala about 7, just at dark, and had dinner before I went to bed about 9:30.  There is a fairly good restaurant in the village and the nights are very pleasant, though it was hotter that night than the night before.

Two Danes had arrived the next morning about 2 and at 5:30 the five of us crammed into a jeep for another trip to Magdi.  With five of us and a cheaper jeep than I had with Neel, it worked out to only about $14 each.  Again we saw deer and langurs and peacocks.  We also saw a large group of wild boar, maybe ten or so together.  We startled them and they bolted across the road behind us and into the underbrush.  We spent a long time looking for a tiger in the forest near the water hole where we had spent so much time during the previous two safaris  We heard him growl several times, and our guide and Zafer briefly spotted him as he moved through the grass, but that was it.  On the drive back we spotted a mongoose, the first one I've seen, scampering along the forest ground.  As we left the exit gate we saw several jeeps parked along the main road.  We hurriedly joined them, but had just missed, by about a minute, a tiger crossing the road.  We had to content ourselves with seeing his tracks before getting back to the hotel about 10.

That afternoon we finally got the coveted entry into the central Tala Zone.  It cost us about $110, thankfully divided by five for each of us.  The entrance is less than a mile from our hotel.  Entering about 4, we were all impressed by how beautiful the area was, with lots of greenery, hills and a little stream along the road.  About five or ten minutes after entry we saw jeeps parked along the road and heard a sambar's repeated loud warning calls.  We stopped and soon a tiger cub was spotted.  There was a sort of jeep scrum as they all (maybe ten or fifteen of them) tried to get into the best position, with one scraping another.  Eventually, we could see him, only nine months old but still looking large, standing in the green grass near the stream.  He is one of three cubs, but the mother and the other two cubs were not to be seen.  He soon lay down in the ferns right next to the stream along the road, perhaps fifty or sixty feet from us.  He looked very relaxed, but he wasn't drinking, I suspect because of all the jeeps.   We had a great view of him for perhaps ten or fifteen minutes as he lay in the ferns next to the stream, a beautiful spot.  He moved his head back and forth, but that was about that.  Our guide said there is a ten minute rule for viewing tigers, so we moved on, though others didn't.  The tiger got up and stood in the grass.  We could still see him standing there as we pulled away.

We drove through beautiful hilly, wooded scenery and saw sambar and chital in the forest and in the meadows.  At a water hole, two peacocks were displaying, shaking their beautiful tails and their brown rumps.  Two peahens appeared and walked up to the winner.  We came in view of the fort atop a flat topped hill, with a temple on top and gates on the approach to the top.  Pilgrims by the thousands come to the temple once or twice a year, which must be disturbing for the tigers.  Near the fort we drove through rocky terrain and then into more forest.  We passed a parrot nest in the hollow of a tree and could see the parrot feeding her chick, with the chick just barely visible poking out from the hollow.  We hoped to see another tiger and her cubs in this area, but had no such luck.

We drove back through the dusk as the sun set and reached our hotel about 6:30.  I walked over to the nearby interpretation center, which had pretty good exhibits, and spent an hour there before dinner with Karen and Zafer.  I got to bed after 10, later than I wanted, but happy to have made it into the Tala Zone.  In all I took six safaris (seeing a tiger on two of them) at Bandhavgarh, five in Magdhi and one in Tala, for a total cost of about $160 in entrance fees and jeep rentals.  At Kanha and Bandhavgarh together, I went on fifteen safaris, seeing tigers on seven of them (eight tigers altogether), for a total cost of about $500.  I guess that works out to a little over $60 a tiger!

April 16-23, 2012: Tigers! Kanha National Park and Jabalpur

On the morning of the 16th I left Nagpur about 9 on a bus bound for the city of Seoni, to the north in Madhya Pradesh.  The bus was slow and crowded, taking a long time just to get out of Nagpur and its suburbs and satellite towns.  About 11:30 we reached the Maharashtra-Madhya Pradesh state border and passed the turn off for Pench National Park, just over the border.  I had thought about going to Pench, but I had read it is difficult to find others to share jeeps there and I knew I had somebody at Kanha National Park with whom I could share a jeep.

The first part of the road in Madhya Pradesh was terrible, full of potholes as we went through hilly terrain through a teak forest full of almost leafless trees.  The road eventually got better and we arrived in Seoni about 1:30.  At 2 I left Seoni on an even more crowded bus heading northeast to the little junction town of Chiraidongri.  People were packed into that bus.  I was the third person on a seat made for two people and had standing passengers constantly leaning against me.  Not a pleasant trip, and very slow, stopping, it seemed, every mile or so to pick up or drop off passengers.  The terrain was fairly flat, with lots of cropland, at about 1500 feet elevation.

Arriving in Chiraidongri about 5:30, I almost immediately jumped on a bus for the final leg southeast to Khatiya on the edge of Kanha National Park.  Fortunately, this bus wasn't crowded.  We passed through hilly, forested terrain and reached Khatiya, at about 1500 feet elevation, about 6:30.  It had taken me nine and a half hours to travel about 150 miles.  I checked into a hotel right across from the bus stop and talked with a Yale Ph.D. student staying there while she spends a year doing field work for her thesis on tiger predation on livestock in the buffer zone surrounding the park.  I then had dinner and tried, without success, to contact Nick, the guy I had planned to share jeeps with on safaris into the park.  As it turned out, he had gone to bed early and didn't answer his phone.  He is staying in the home of an English guy who spends six months of the year here, but who left in late March.  I had been put in touch with him by a couple from Utah I met in Orchha in December, and he put me in touch with Nick.

I emailed Nick that night telling him where I was and the next morning shortly after 5, just after I had gotten up, he came by my room.  I had hoped to go on a safari with him that morning, but since my name wasn't on the list I couldn't go.  I did go to see the queue of jeeps (actually they are called "gypsies") waiting to enter the park.  (The park entrance is less than a five minute walk from the hotel.)  There must have been forty to fifty of them lined up.

After they all entered at 5:45 when the gate opened, I decided to take a walk, going along a dirt road that parallels the park border.  I passed a few huts of the local tribal people and absent mindedly came across a bare assed old woman taking her morning dump just off the road.  When I noticed her, I turned around and looked elsewhere.  When I finally resumed walking, she was coming towards me and, I think, gave me a dirty look.  Soon I turned off the road and followed trails into the sal forest, the tall, straight sal trees newly adorned with bright green leaves.  I passed a few more huts and then went deeper into the forest.  The sunlight began to filter through as the sun rose.  I saw lots of langur monkeys, including a group of about fifty together.  About thirty were sitting clustered on the ground and I think there must have been twenty or so in the trees above.  I found the park's nature trail, followed that, and then headed back, stopping here and there to watch the langurs.  It was getting hot in the sun after 8, but was pleasant under the trees.  I didn't get back to the hotel until more than three hours after starting my walk.

I had breakfast, and then a second breakfast about 11 with Nick after he came out of the park.  We decided to take an afternoon safari.  You pay for these trips into the park by the jeepload and the charges are considerably higher if your jeep has foreigners in it.  The charge is also higher if you go into the center of the reserve, where there are more tigers.  The afternoon safaris are only two and a half hours compared to more than four hours, even five sometimes, for the morning ones, so we decided to go into the peripheral zone closest to the gate (the Kisli Zone) rather than the central Kanha Zone.  It cost us about $76, split two ways.   Kanha is said to be India's premier tiger reserve, with 40 to 70 tigers.  April, May and June, when it is hot and dry before the monsoon and they need to be nearby the water holes, is the easiest time to see them.  They claim this is the area Kipling was writing about in The Jungle Book, which is apparently based in part on a report in 1831 of a boy raised by wolves near Seoni.  I had been humming "The Bear Necessities" on the buses from Nagpur the day before.

Kanha is mostly sal forest, with many meadows (I've been told "kanha" means "meadow") and lots of thin bamboo stands.   We saw chital (spotted dear) and langurs and soon spotted several gaur by the side of the road.  Gaur are Indian bison and the world's largest cattle, with the huge males weighing 2000 pounds.  They are dark brown or black, with all four of their legs white on the lower half (so that they look like they are wearing white stockings), and the males are indeed huge.  We also saw one albino calf.   Like cows, they seem very placid.  We saw a couple of small owlets in a hole in a tree, wild boar, sambar deer, barking deer (muntjacs) and lots of birds, including a jungle fowl, very much like a chicken but much more colorful.

We traversed a hilly, bamboo filled area into sal forest and eventually reached a little grassy meadow backed by the forest where we spotted two tigers in the bamboo.  They were well camouflaged in the grass and about 150 feet away, but we could see them fairly well.  We watched them for about half an hour as they walked through the high grass and into the bamboo.  One headed towards us before turning around.  The other was stalking some wild boar and using a clump of bamboo to hide himself or herself from them. The boar must have scampered off.  The guide thought the two tigers were close to a year old, though they looked pretty big to me.  They were fascinating to watch.  I had great views with my binoculars and got a few okay photos with my new camera.  Nick has a 500 mm telephoto lens that is about two feet long.  He got some spectacular photos.  Ours was the second jeep there.  By the time the tigers disappeared and we left, there were maybe ten jeeps there.   We drove back on a now cloudy late afternoon, passing more gaur and wild boar in a wide meadow.  We got back to the gate at 6:30, when it closes.  It gets dark about 7 and we had dinner in the open air hotel restaurant. It rained, quite a surprise, about 7:30 for ten minutes.

I was tired and overslept the next morning.  Nick knocked on my door and woke me up at 5:25 and I hurriedly dressed and got to our jeep at the gate before we entered at 5:45.  We headed towards the central Kanha Zone, which cost us about $94, split equally.  A thin windbreaker was enough to keep me warm as we drove in the early morning.  I took it off after a couple of hours when it warmed up.  At the gate a sign indicated it was 24 degrees Celsius, or about 75 Fahrenheit.  We saw a jackal, gaur, deer, wild boar and a jungle cat, the last the size of a very large domestic cat and colored brown.  We drove along a dirt road through lovely sal forest and spotted mahouts on elephants to our left.  There were three of them following a tiger and almost before we knew it a pregnant female crossed the road about 70 feet behind us.  We got a great view, though a short one (Nick's camera indicated six seconds), before she disappeared into the forest cover on the other side of the road.  The elephants and mahouts followed her.  Soon she lay down somewhere beyond our vision.  We waited for a while, but apparently she wasn't stirring.  We had had quite a good view of her, though, and that was an exciting six seconds.  She had turned her head to look at us as she crossed the road.

We drove on, spotting deer and lots of birds, many with wonderful calls.  The guide, the driver and Nick were all very good at spotting them.  We saw, among many others, hornbills, brilliant blue rollers and several peacocks displaying their fan tail of feathers.  They circle slowly as they do so, trying to attract peahens.  About 9 it was getting hot in the sun and we got back to the hotel for breakfast about 10:30.  We sat around until about noon and then I spent most of the afternoon in my room, cooled fairly well by a cooler like the one I had in Nagpur.  The electricity went out about 4 and I walked around a bit and read in the shade until dinner with Nick about 7.

The next morning I woke up soon after 4 (after going to bed before 10 the night before) and got up about 4:30.  I had tea about 5 with Nick.  He makes sure he arrives early with our jeep and driver so he can be the first in the queue at the gate.  The sky was a little cloudy as we enterred at 5:45, heading for the Kanha Zone. We passed gaur, chital, wild boar, and a rare, large deer called barasingha.  In a meadow we spotted two red-headed vultures on the ground, eating at the remains of a kill, though we couldn't see the kill in the high grass.  Vultures are apparently being killed off by a medicine given to cattle that is fatal to vultures.  We didn't see any tigers, but we did see an impressively large tiger scat, with remnants of the fur of one of his or her recent meals.  On the way out we passed a big tree with a hole in a branch with a tiny owlet in it.  Another owlet was on a nearby branch.

We came out about 10:30 and had breakfast in the hotel's open air restaurant and then I spent most of the early afternoon in my room until we left for our afternoon safari at 4.  It was cloudy as we headed into the Kisli Zone.  We saw gaur, chital, sambar, wild boar and barasingha.  We followed some tiger pugs in the dust of the road, probably from the morning, the guide said.  About 6 we saw a tiger, maybe a couple of hundred feet from us, sitting lazily on a little ridge just above a small pond.  Three other jeeps showed up as we watched him and he got up and disappeared into the high grass around the pond.  He reappeared on the side of the pond closest to us and then disappeared again.  We drove down the road a bit and he reappeared, walking straight towards us.  He was an enormous tiger and I couldn't believe he was coming right towards us, less than a hundred feet away.  We pulled forward, leaving a gap between our jeep and the next jeep and he sauntered onto the road between the two jeeps and disappeared into the forest on the other side.  A very exciting sighting.  The guide said he was a male about five or six years old.  It was really something to see him coming right towards us.  We sped off, as we had to be out by 6:30, and on the way out spotted a very large sloth bear behind some bamboo right next to the road.  I wish we could have had some more time to watch the bear, but our guide insisted we proceed and we did get out of the park before 6:30.

The next morning we headed into the park at 5:45, into the Kisli Zone again.  As usual, we saw gaur, barasingha, chital, wild boar and sambar.  There are also lots of termite mounds, with many thin ridges somewhat like flying buttresses.  I haven't seen termite mounds with those ridges elsewhere.  We followed tiger tracks in the dust of the road and heard the warning calls of deer, signifying the presence of a predator.  The tiger was in an area beyond the reach of roads, and elephants were sent in to search of him.  We drove around some and then returned to this area and saw the elephants moving towards the road.  Eventually, we could see through the brush that a big tiger was near the elephants and they were directing him towards the road.  The elephants emerged onto the road a few hundred feet in front of us, and eventually one of the mahouts motioned us to come forward where we saw a big tiger, which turned out to be the same one we had seen the previous evening, lying placidly just along the side of the road.   We got a great view of him as he rested for quite a while (maybe ten or fifteen minutes), until we were motioned to move on.  I'd guess he was maybe 50 or 60 feet away.  We drove around some more and saw sloth bear footprints, but no sloth bear.  It gets warm after 9, and butterflies appear as the birds get quieter.  We got back to the hotel for breakfast about 10:30.

For our afternoon safari, we wanted to go to Kisli again, but its quota was filled because of all the tiger sightings there, so we went to Kanha.   We saw deer, wild boar, gaur and lots of birds and monkeys on the beautiful route we were on, but no tigers that afternoon.  We did see three peacocks displaying their fan tails in a meadow, but nary a pea hen around.

The next morning we headed to the Mukki sector.  As usual, we saw deer, wild boar and gaur, and we followed the pug marks of a female tiger and her four cubs.  We heard alarm calls, but saw no tigers.  They apparently had  gone into the forest before we could reach them on the road.  They like walking on the soft dust of the road, which makes it easier to track them.  On our safaris we almost always came across long lines of tiger tracks.  We had another beautiful drive and came upon quite a few, maybe twenty, gaur together.  Two of the males fought, butting their wide horned heads together and raising quite a bit of dust.  Later we came across two langur monkeys in the hollows of a dead tree eating the wood of the tree inside the hollow, or perhaps eating something on the wood.  That was quite interesting.  They kept darting us glances between nibbles to make sure we meant them no harm.  Near the end of the morning we came upon two elephants and their mahouts, along with several jeeps.  A tiger was in the bamboo along the road, but it apparently was resting or sleeping and didn't appear.

In the afternoon we entered the Kisli Zone again, where we had had the most luck.  Two other Europeans who had arrived the day before joined us on a cloudy afternoon so the safari cost each of us only about $19.  Again, we saw lots of deer, gaur and monkeys, along with some wild boar and a jackal.  Three birds tried to drive the jackal away by diving towards it.  Nick thought they had eggs nearby in a nest on the ground.  We drove around looking for tigers and late in the afternoon saw another jeep whose guide motioned us forward.  Along the road a big tiger was sitting in a little pool of water.  The pool was lined with concrete and wasn't much larger than the length of the tiger, so it looked more like something in a zoo.  Still, it was another great close up view of a tiger in the wild and it was fun to watch him drink, yawn and rest his head in the water.  Afterwards, the four of us had dinner at the hotel restaurant.

The next morning I left on my last safari at Kanha.  Nick and I were joined by an Indian couple and we ventured into the Sarhi Zone.  We saw a couple of jackals early on, along with deer and lots of birds.  The area was beautiful, very hilly with views down into the valleys between the hills as we traversed dirt roads on steep hillsides.  Most of the trees along the way were nearly leafless.  At one point we came across a commotion of birds, which I didn't fully appreciate until the more observant Nick explained to me what had happened.  A shikra was chasing a small red headed woodpecker, caught him and took him to the ground.  Immediately, a dozen or more babblers attacked the shikra on the ground (this part I saw), freeing the woodpecker and driving the shikra off.  The apparently somewhat stunned little woodpecker then flew off.  Nick said he'd never seen birds defend a bird of a different species.

We circled through the Sarhi Zone and came back to the green sal forest nearer the park center and found a big herd of barasingha in a meadow.  We also spotted two vultures in barren tree.  They flew off and we noticed about five or six of them circling in the sky, so there must have been a fresh kill nearby.  We didn't see any tigers, though.  It was hot in the late morning and we got back to the hotel for breakfast about 10:30.

All together, I went on nine safaris at a total cost of about $340 for the entrance fees, jeeps and tips, and saw tigers on five of them, six tigers in total, a much better rate of success than I had expected.

That afternoon Nick had hired a car to take him to Jabalpur (he had a flight to Delhi the next morning) and graciously invited me to go along with him.  We left about 2:30 on the hundred mile trip northeast, passing small towns and villages and the large town on Mandla on the holy Narmada River.  We came through some wooded hills south of Jabalpur, rising to over 2000 feet in elevation and passing maybe fifty carts pulled by oxen and full of colorful tribal people and their possessions.  I wonder where they were going.  It was quite a sight to see all those heavily laden carts strung out along the paved two lane highway.  We arrived in Jabalpur, at about 1500 feet elevation, about 6, checked into a hotel and went to dinner.  I was very tired and went to bed about 9:30.

I slept well, all the way until 6 (after so many mornings getting up before 5), and saw Nick off at 7 when he took a taxi to the airport.  Extremely knowledgeable about wildlife, and much else, he was a great traveling companion.  He's headed back to London, where he teaches at a university.  Tired, I spent most of the morning in the hotel, with breakfast in my room, before venturing out to an internet cafe about 11.

About 3 I took a tempo (a large shared autorickshaw) about 12 miles west to Bhedaghat on the Narmada River.  Arriving about 4, I boarded one of the tourist boats that take you up the river through the Marble Rocks, mostly white, rocky cliffs that line the river below a waterfall.  About twenty of us were on a boat rowed up the river into the narrow gorge between the rocks and back, a trip of about 30 to 40 minutes.  It was fairly scenic, with rocky white pinnacles rising about 100 feet above the water.  The two guys rowing had to strain in the narrowest part of the river where the current was strong. 

Afterward I walked to a nearby 10th century Durga temple on a hilltop reached by 108 stairs with statues of the Chausath (64) Yogini in an arcade circling the temple.  They were quite interesting, though almost all had been damaged by Muslims.  Heads, breasts, arms and legs were often missing, but the parts that survived were very well done.  Two or three of them were almost complete.  From the hilltop temple there was a good view of the gorge of the Marble Rocks below.  From there I walked about a mile upstream to the Dhaundhar Falls, a mini-Niagara perhaps 40 or 50 feet high.  A lot of water was crashing over the very scenic falls, which I thought more impressive than the Marble Rocks.  The narrow chasm of the gorge starts just below the falls.  Lots of Indian tourists were there for the sunset.  I got there after six and stayed there until almost dark, with sunset about 6:30, before taking a tempo back to Jabalpur about 7.

April 9-15, 2012: Ajanta, Lonar, Wardha and Nagpur

I left Aurangabad about 3 in the afternoon on the 9th on a bus heading to Fardapur, about 65 miles northeast.  Before that, I had spent the day in Aurangabad trying to avoid the hot sun.  At the hotel I had a leisurely breakfast and read a couple of newspapers before spending time at an internet cafe before lunch.  It was a hot, but not too long, walk back to the hotel from the internet cafe about noon.  I had lunch on their roof top cafe, which has an awning, but was still very hot in the middle of the day.  I relaxed and read in the relativley cool lobby before leaving for the bus station.

The bus trip took about two hours, passing mostly through flat areas, but with hills just north of Aurangabad and just south of Fardapur.  Just before Fardapur we came down a ravine, passing the turn off for the Ajanta Caves, and reached Fardapur on the plains, only about five miles from the caves.  Fardapur is a small town, but with several hotels.  I checked into a nice room and walked along the highway through town just at sunset, with dinner at the hotel afterward.  I think I was the only guest at the hotel.

The next morning I watched the sun rise over a small hill from my one of my windows and made it to the Ajanta Caves about 9, when they opened to the public.  These Buddhist caves, dating from the 2nd century BC to the 6th century AD, are located in the 250 foot high cliffs of a ravine formed by a horseshoe bend of the Waghora River.  It is a very scenic site, though very dry this time of year without a drop of water in the riverbed.  The pictures of it in the wet season, with everything green and waterfalls falling off the cliffs, are spectacular.  The caves were cut into the cliffs to provide wet season accommodation for wandering Buddhist monks, about 200 of them, but were abandoned about the time the caves at Ellora were started.  They were forgotten for over a thousand years before being rediscovered by a group of British officers hunting tigers in 1819.  Thus, they managed to avoid damage by Muslims.

There are thirty caves (though about a third of them are closed) strung along the horseshoe bend, with the earliest (from the 2nd century BC) in the center.  These have stupas representing Buddha.  The later caves, from the 5th and 6th centuries AD, are on both ends.  The most extraordinary thing about these caves is that they are filled with paintings, temperas painted on plaster applied to the rock cut walls.  There is, of course, considerable concern about the deterioration of the paintings with so many people entering the caves to see them (though there were considerably fewer people at Ajanta than at Ellora).  Many of the caves have low intensity lights, dehumidifiers and barriers before the paintings.  Unfortunately, the barriers inside the caves, especially at the best paintings, keep you as much as thirty feet away from the paintings, which means you really can't make out the intricate details, and often can't see much at all.  That was a real disappointment.

Cave 1 has a spectacular large painting of the bodhisattva Padmapani, and you can see that very well, but, as I said, the smaller details are almost impossible to pick out.  The walls of that cave and the next one are covered with paintings, but the thirty foot barriers made viewing them very frustrating.  As I went from cave to cave, there were some without barriers where you could get close to fragments of paintings and those were very interesting.  There is also excellent sculpture, similar to that at Ellora.  I spent more than six hours walking from cave to cave.  In Cave 16 is the famous painting of the "Dying Princess," actually the wife of Buddha's brother, who is not dying but fainting on being told that her husband is leaving her to become a monk.  It is very hard to see in the dark.  Another cave is unfinished, but it is very interesting to see how they were cutting into the rock.  It was very hot in the sun outside the caves, but, as at Ellora, cool inside.  Fortunately, the caves are closer together than at Ellora.  The last cave you can visit, Cave 26, has a large sculpted reclining Buddha, actually Buddha on his deathbed, and several other beautiful sculptures.

About 3:30 I climbed up steps from the riverbed to a look out point opposite the caves about 200 feet above the riverbead, and from there made a further climb, rising about 300 feet in elevation, to the point where the caves were first seen by the tiger hunters in 1819.  (Their leader was named John Smith and you can see his name carved onto a painted pillar in the Cave 10, the one he first spotted and the oldest cave at Ajanta.)  That was a hot climb (my thermometer read 106), but the view was worth it.  When I reached the top I drank the very warm last remaining gulps from my bottle of water.  Hot water never tasted so good.  I walked down  to the dry riverbed, and then along it, reaching the entrance about 5:30, when the caves close.  I drank two liters of cold water upon arrival there.

Back at the hotel that evening, I watched cricket on television.  India's professional cricket league season has just started.  The league games have different rules and take only something like four hours to play, rather than the five days needed for "test" cricket, the original game.  I watched the Bangalore Royal Challengers versus the Kolkata Knight Riders.  There were cheer leaders, all of them western women.

I left Fardapur shortly after 9 the next morning, taking a bus heading back towards Aurangabad, passing the turn off to the caves and heading up the ravine into the hills.  I took it only as far as the town of Ajanta, about seven miles from Fardapur and on the higher flatlands reached by the ravine.  From there I caught a bus headed east to Buldana through an area with very rich looking black soil.  Much of it was ploughed, waiting for planting with the coming of the monsoon, I guess.  There were remnants of crops of wheat and cotton.  From Buldana I caught another bus headed southeast to Mehkar, and from Mekhar a final bus south to Lonar, arriving about 2.  I took an autorickshaw to a hotel on the outskirts of town on the edge of the Lonar Crater, formed 50,000 years ago when a meteorite hit.  The crater is more than a mile in diameter and about 450 feet deep.  It is said to be the world's third largest, after one in Arizona and one in Ghana.

I checked into the hotel, had lunch there, and about 3 started down the trail right across the road from the hotel into the crater.  A green, alkaline lake fills much of the crater, bordered by a green forest.  The sloping walls of the crater are mostly grassy and yellow at this time of year, with some trees.  It didn't take long to walk down, less than twenty minutes, and I descended only a little more than 300 feet by my altimeter.  I passed an old, deserted temple just before reaching the floor.  It was relatively cool in the shade of the trees on the crater floor, and I began a walk around the lake, going clockwise.

There was a good trail at first, passing several old, deserted temples, one filled with bats and another with langur monkeys.  There were lots of birds, too, in the trees and on the lake.  Further on, I came across a huge band of langurs, maybe thirty or forty of them.  They are incredible leapers and fun to watch.  A little further on, I came to an active temple on the edge of the lake, with a few pilgrims and even more monkeys.  The trail got rougher after that and I reached a nice spot, a deserted temple just across the lake from where I had come down the crater wall.  The trail continued, but with quite a few briers, scratching my legs.  I saw some peafowl, mostly peahens, I think.  They flew off before I could get too close.  They are very ungainly fliers.

Coming almost full circle around the lake, I lost the trail in an agricultural area, mostly bananas, but finally made my way to just below the path I had come down, about three hours after starting.  It had clouded up a bit.  I have seen so very few clouds during this very dry five months of traveling in India.  The sun set and I watched a group of peafowl gathered in a clearing.  One beautiful male was with several hens.  The hens, once they realized I was nearby, fluttered off into the trees, but the peacock lingered a little longer.  A little stream is nearby, and langurs were gathered there to drink.  I climbed up out of the crater and got back to the hotel just as it got dark, about 7.  I had dinner out on the terrace of the almost empty hotel restaurant, overlooking the crater and facing a very nice evening breeze.  

I got up about 6:30 the next morning and sat on the terrace just outside my room, where it was much cooler than in my room.  There were birds and squirrels in the nearby trees and it was very pleasant out there. I decided to spend another day in Lonar rather than face more hot bus travel across the Deccan.  After breakfast overlooking the crater, I walked down into the crater about 9 and walked along the path under the trees to the active temple on the lake's southern shore, passing lots of langurs and birds.  (The hotel is just east of the crater.)   I turned around and came back and was back at the hotel about noon.  It was a little cloudy by then, but still a hot climb up.  I had lunch and spent the hot part of the afternoon at the hotel.  I tried to take a nap but it was too hot in my room.  It was nicer on the restaurant terrace facing the breeze.

I walked down again about 5, again heading to the active temple on the southern side of the lake and seeing lots of langurs.  I came back to the lake's eastern shore and watched the sun, reflected in the lake, set over the crater walls.  I spotted two peacocks (India's national bird) in the clearing before I climbed up the crater walls just before dark and again enjoyed the cool breeze from the west during dinner.

The electricity failed the next morning at 6 and I was awakened as my fan stopped revolving.  I got up soon after and sat out in the cool air of my terrace.  Thirty people from Bombay were scheduled to arrive at the hotel that day (I had been about the only guest), but  I left before they arrived.  After breakfast at the hotel, I caught a bus north back to Mehkar about 9, and at 10 another bus from Mehkar heading east all the way to Wardha, in fact all the way to Nagpur.

The trip to Wardha, though only about 170 miles, was a long one, seven hours on two lane country roads, passing lots of agricultural land and through several towns.  There wasn't much traffic and fortunately the bus never was too full.  The terrain was mostly flat, with some hills and rolling countryside.  All was very dry.  There was a lot of black, rich looking soil at the beginning, though the soil became browner the further east we came.  There were lots of plowed fields, ready for planting, and lots of browns and yellows, but with plenty of green leafed trees.  We did come through one forest of almost leafless trees, teak perhaps.  Soon after noon the cool wind of the morning coming in the bus windows had turned into an unpleasant blast of hot air coming in the windows.  It was hot in that bus in the afternoon.  Through the day we descended from about 2000 feet elevation to about 1000 in Wardha, which we reached about 5.  I got a room in a hotel right next to the bus station and the room was delightfully cool, though I'm not sure why.  I sat in my room, drank lots of water, and recovered from the bus trip before dinner.

When I got up the next morning my thermometer registered 82 in my room, wonderfully cool.  I had come to Wardha to visit the Sevagram Ashram, where Gandhi lived from 1936 to 1942.  It's only about five miles outside of the city, but it took me over an hour to find the right bus.  By the time I got there, after the short bus trip and about a half mile walk from the bus stop, it was about 11 and hot.  I looked around the simple mud walled, stick roofed huts of the ashram.  Gandhi's hut had a bathroom with a porcelain toilet bowl set above a septic tank.  Another hut, the first used by Gandhi and the ashramites, when they were all living in the same hut, had a bathroom with a porcelain bathtub.  The Indian man behind me said, "Gandhi had a bathtub?"  Judging from the sign in book at the entrance, I think I may have been the only westerner to visit in a while.  There were only a few tourists there.  Gandhi move there because he wanted to be in a small village, and Wardha is a railroad junction almost right in the middle of India.

A photo gallery was across the road and next to that a simple restaurant where I had a thali lunch, with what Indians call "buttermilk" to drink.  I think it is whey, as in "curds and whey."  One guy told me it is what is left over when curd (what Indians call yogurt) is produced from milk.

I took a shared autorickshaw back to my hotel.  It was the birthday of the untouchable (untouchables are now called dalits) leader B. R. Ambedkar, who was born in 1891 and died in 1956.  There were posters of him all over town.  Near the end of his life, fed up with Hinduism's treatment of untouchables, he converted to Buddhism, and I have read there are something like 500,000 Ambedkar Buddhists, mostly around Nagpur.  Many of the posters had Ambedkar in suit and tie with horn-rimmed glasses on one side and Buddha on the other.

I got back to my hotel room about 2 and rested in that nice cool room until about 3:30, when I caught an express bus heading northeast to Nagpur, 45 miles and two hours away.  We reached a four lane divided highway about 15 miles south of the city.  Nagpur has over two million people and was the capital of the Central Provinces during British rule.  It is now in the northeast corner of Maharashtra.  I got a room in a hotel with a cooler, a device that has a fan blowing over straw saturated with water and produces a cool wind.  I remember a friend of mine used to have something similar in his house as a kid in the '60's.  It worked very well and kept the room cool.  In the lobby is a photo of the hotel when it opened in 1980, with only two or three cars parked in the street in front of it.  There is hardly any traffic on the street, one scooter and several bicycles, quite different from the congested, noisy street in front of the hotel today.   At dinner I read a newspaper, reporting that the temperature had reached 105 the day before, down from 108 two days before that.

My thermometer registered 77 the next morning and in fact I had used my blanket during the night for the first time since I was in Mahabaleshwar in the Western Ghats.  That cooler worked very well.  About 9 I caught a bus heading northeast to Ramtek, only about 25 miles away, but a very hot and crowded hour and a half bus trip.  In Ramtek I took an autorickshaw up to the top of the hill rising about 400 or 500 feet above town with a fort and temples on top.  Rama, his wife Sita, and his brother Lakshman are supposed to have stopped here on their way back to Ayodhya from Lanka.  On the way up we passed a lake between hills are bordered with small temples.

The 18th century fort looks much restored and the temples, originally 5th century, look restored, too.  Not many pilgrims were there.  I think they were outnumbered by the langur monkeys, the tamest ones I've come across.  They were a lot of fun to watch.  The temples weren't much, but the views of the town and countryside were great.  I stayed up on one high spot for quite a while, being visited occasionally by pilgrims and monkeys.  Langurs are incredible leapers and I watch them jump from one part of the temple to another.

I walked down the 700 steps from the hilltop to the town, in the midday heat through a grove of leafless trees, but with good views up of the fort and temples.  Some of the trees were in flower, with tiny, white flowers with lots of bees prowling around them.  My thermometer registered 108.  I caught a 1 o'clock bus back to Nagpur and was glad to reach my cool hotel room after another crowded bus trip.

April 3-8,2012: Aurangabad, Ellora and Daulatabad

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.