Ajanta Caves are a two-hour drive from Aurangabad (unlike the 15-minutes-away Ellora Caves.) So I took the suggestion to leave an hour earlier. The driver and guide were still punctual, yay.

As we drove, I noticed we passed many mosques. And at least as many cell phone towers. I learned that Aurangabad started out as a predominantly Muslim town, though with the industrial boom of the last two decades, the percentage of Muslims is down to just over a third, behind the Hindus. I saw a woman in the full black outfit – only her eyes showing – driving a scooter. We passed the time talking about travel in Jammu & Kashmir, which is something we both want to do in the coming months. A fun conversation! We kept passing booths offering Fresh Ice Gola. I thought, that many people can’t be misspelling Cola. I was correct.

At one point, we had to come to a full stop because a goat was stopped in the middle of the road. Honk. Bleat. Goat moved on. I’ve been reading everywhere how diverse India is both geographically and culturally. And I’m sure it is. But, from my foreigner’s eyes, all I can see is a city that looks pretty much like a hilly version of Delhi except that there are goats instead of cows and the autorickshaws are black instead of green. I’m sure people from Aurangabad would shake their heads wondering how I could think these completely different cities are similar. They even speak an entirely different language here (Marathi) even though they use the same script.

Aurangabad: Feel the Difference

As we drove (past one of the historical city “gates”) out of the city, the guide commented that the scenery was often compared to California. And I could kind of see it! Dry hills and mesas with little trees.

Aurangabad, CA?

Apparently, Aurangabad had been experiencing a drought over the last few years. That could explain the actions of these monkeys, hanging out near the market where we caught the 20-rupee shuttle bus to the caves.

Clever primates, you

The bus took us up a curvy road to the entrance of Ajanta. All us foreigners soon gathered at the ticket office (the guy did not want to break my 1000 for a 250-rupee ticket, but I made him anyway) next to a restaurant and a juice bar. Up a bit and you could see, at a glance, almost all of the horseshoe-shaped Ajanta complex. Pretty amazing. Apparently, each cave was originally separate, with a stairwell leading up to it from the valley below. It was only in more recent years that they were all connected with a concrete walkway.

Ajanta is famous for its paintings more than its sculptures and structures. What I liked most about it was its location. But the architecture and carvings were still impressive, even if they didn’t touch Ellora’s Cave 16 in pure enigmaticness.

Also, need I add. These are not caves.

Ajanta Caves of Awesome

My tour guide was knowledgeable and a fantastic storyteller. He is the one that explained how significant these paintings were. For being extremely old works of art – the newest were completed in 500 A.D. but some were from the 2nd century B.C. – they showed an astonishing understanding of perspective and foreshortening. (Foreshortening meaning – since I had to ask for a definition – the way a head looks when its turned.) Egyptian paintings, for example, don’t have these features.

The detail was also marvelous because, unlike frescoes, the paint did not seep into the stone, so the lines were very fine. When I pointed out the variety of skin color of the subjects of many paintings, he said it was mainly for contrast, nothing to do with actual race, as the figures were often couples or close together.

My tour guide called the paintings at Ajanta “The oldest modern paintings”

My tour guide really brought the paintings to life for me. I could have just stared, intrigued but baffled. But he told me how the parasol (like the halo in Christian paintings) represents someone important, usually the Buddha. (Sometimes, you even see three parasols.) He explained, for example, how the huddled people in the house in one painting were conspiring to kill the Buddha and that they set a rampaging drunk elephant loose on the town. You could see a shopkeeper hastily pulling down his shutters but a little ways over in the building, the shopkeepers were opening up again because the elephant, upon seeing the Buddha, bowed instead of attacked. How the story was told in the same painting (like comic book panels without the panels) was fascinating.

My favorite story in a painting he related was about monkeys. He pointed the flashlight across the wall mural, which took up about two-thirds of the space from floor to ceiling, and told me the story.

“Once upon a time, Buddha monkey, the strongest of them all, told the other monkeys in the tree not to let any of the fruit overhanging the river to fall in the water. But the monkeys were careless. A fruit fell in, floated downstream and was found by the King and Queen. They tasted the fruit and thought it was so delicious, they walked up the river to track the tree down.”

“When they found the tree, the declared it a royal tree and ordered that the monkeys be shot out of it with bow and arrow. So his brothers and sisters could escape, Buddha, being the largest monkey, reached across from an overhanging branch all the way to a ledge on the other side of the river.”

“The monkeys crossed and were saved. But Buddha’s jealous cousin decided to stamp on Buddha until he fell out of the tree. Buddha crashed to the ground, very injured, but held no ill will against his cousin. The king and queen were so overwhelmed by his forgiveness of the cruel monkey that they nursed him back to health.”

At the end (in the corner of the painting), Buddha monkey is seen giving a sermon.

All the elements of the story were in one large painting that looked like a single, elaborate scene, but were actually scenes within scenes. The large tree, the king and queen, the men with bows and arrows, the Buddha monkey stretching across the river. But I’m not sure I would have put it all together had I just studied it.

The jealous cousin is a standard villain in the stories, but Buddha’s self-sacrificing nature always overcomes. There is often a sermon following the happy ending.

As we reached as far as we could walk along the path (before running into the caves that were under maintenance) I chatted with a group of college students who were, to my astonishment, all finishing up engineering degrees focused on web development! So I asked if they were learning jQuery and they were like, “of course, of course.” I chatted with them for a bit and, thanks to the tour guide, finally got to have one of the many pictures I pose in taken on my own camera. This one was a particularly large group.

(I’m the one in the middle)

I had some noodles and a banana lassi (yum, and yum) at the official Maharashtra Tourism Restaurant while cricket played on the TV. My tour guide met me half an hour later to walk me back through the gift market to the car. He had warned that the touts were more aggressive here than at other places, but they did not seem so bad, even though one did start this whole conversation when I first arrived, claiming his name was “John.” Notably, the man who rediscovered Ajanta in the early 1800s, as it had been lost to the world for centuries, was a Brit named John Smith. As I exited, a dude said “Remember me, I’m John,” but I think it was a different guy. They both wanted to sell me the official “Ellora & Ajanta” book.

Leaving Ajanta
(Taken from the one place I saw beggars.)

The following morning didn’t start off great and kept on more-or-less in that fashion. Nothing horrible, just crankiness-inducing. First was the 8:30am “wake-up” call just to check one more time about that massage. I spent a good portion of my free time that morning (as the tour guide agreed that there really was not much else nearby worth checking out) writing feedback for the hotel – along with my cash tip for the maid – indicating how creepy the massage requests were and why.

At my last breakfast at the hotel, one of the waiters offered me an omelette for the first time. D’oh. So I had one. I also determined, after sitting at the pool under a tree reading for another thirty minutes or so after breakfast, that I am the only guest here. I’ve eaten the complimentary breakfast now at 7:15am, 8:15am and 9:45am. Never once have I seen another guest. In the accounting room the other night when I was online, I saw a whiteboard that indicated 18 of the 48 cottages were occupied. My only guess is that they are occupied by the myriad of workers I see everywhere – gardeners, housekeepers, waitstaff, poolboys, receptionists, etc. Because otherwise, these guests really keep to themselves.

I had a bit of sticker shock when I got the bill for all the tour guides. I only ever heard two numbers quoted to me. 2800 ($50) first for the guide. Then 800 ($15) later for my spontaneous excursion into Aurangabad. The grand total with all the guides / drivers / taxes for both days actually came to about $170. Although that is a reasonable price for the services I received – my tour guides were experienced professionals – it was still higher than I had been expecting.

(Just breaking up the monotony down here)

Trying to be safe and arrive early for my 4:20pm flight, I actually got there before the airport opened the airline check-in and security for the day! (For a city half the size of Denver, I kind of expected something bigger.) So I ended up hanging out in the lobby with the other tourists until 3:00pm, when I finally got my boarding pass but not the stamped, blank luggage tags that are apparently required for carry-ons so I got turned away at security and had to go back to the counter. Good thing it wasn’t crowded. Once the waiting room opened up, at least the snack booth guy in the corner opened as well, though he told me my cup o’ noodles would take 10 minutes. (It didn’t, but I gaped at him in disbelief at the time. It’s a cup of noodles. Just add hot water.)

Then someone turned on the TV and the same annoying commercial repeated over and over for a solid 10-15 minutes until I actually walked up to the television, intent on taking that chair from the unmanned “Public Grievance Counter” and standing on it to reach a button – any button. Maybe someone saw my expression of Doom. Because suddenly the channel changed to cricket.

The plane boarded on time, but a dude stole my window seat and I said aloud, pretty sure no one understood my accent anyway, “You’re stealing my window seat now, huh? I guess that’s how my day is going. Forget it, I’m just going to roll with it.” Then he sat there against the window, blasting his headphones the whole flight (even during take off and landing) while the kids behind me remained quite active. After a smooth landing (at least) I found the airport Delhi metro station and discovered that my Metro SmartCard doesn’t work. It is a special metro. That you pay extra for. Luckily no line. I did get to talk for a while to a British backpacker who had just come from Sri Lanka, which was kind of fun.

That evening, I felt the third finger of my left hand. I had taken off the ring at the sink to wash my hands at the hotel, though somehow failed to notice the gold sparkle during my walkthrough. Yep. I left my invisible husband in Aurangabad.