Caves, Mokeys and Sugar Cane with Notes on Driving in India

Thursday, January 10 - Saturday January 12

On Thursday we drove to Aurangabad, a scary five hour journey by car from Pune. We saw the remnants of at least five accidents along the way. Mostly overloaded trucks tipped over, but one car was upside down and pretty well crushed and another car was squished front and back. It is amazing that there aren’t many more of these with the wild driving/passing that takes place on country roads. It is even scarier than the city streets which are downright terrifying. Shawne gets through it by sleeping but I have trouble falling asleep in a car, especially when it is headed down the wrong side of the road straight at a giant truck trying to pass a three wheel scooter passing a bicycle passing pedestrians herding goats while a motorcycle carrying a family of four slips by on the shoulder. Maybe there is something wrong with me.

Part of my unease comes from the fact that driving conventions are much different than I am used to. People in the USA get upset when another driver "cuts them off" while the primary driving technique in India is cutting people off skillfully. It is always, "first come, first served" and "if you can get out of the way, then do it". You can be driving on the wrong side of the road passing another vehicle and the oncoming traffic is expected to move out of the way if they can. If they can't, then you had better duck back onto your side. In the city, traffic from little side streets crosses big, busy streets by inching forward, blocking one lane at a time when they can. Vehicles on the larger, busier street has no right of way if the other guy got there first. Your initial impression is that it is all very chaotic but it is less so after getting used to it a bit.





Somehow we managed to get to Aurangabad safe and sound and proceeded directly to the “poor man’s Taj” which was built by the son of the guy who built the real one. It is much smaller, more vertical, much more run down, with faded painted decorations instead of inlaid stone. It makes you appreciate the Taj Mahal all the more. Even the ‘baby Taj’ in Agra was much more impressive. The baby Taj was smaller still but had incredible inlaid stone work that was even more intricate that the decorations on the Taj Mahal.



After the Poor Man’s Taj we went to Panchakki which has an ancient water wheel driven by water coming from four miles away. There was a 500 year old banyan tree, lots of vendors, some very hungry fish in a couple of ponds and a Sufi holy site with the graves of two ancient holy men. Shawne and Nalini weren't allowed in the building with the graves but I went in anyway. The incense was so thick I thought I would join the two saints right on the spot.










Our hotel was about 20 miles further at the Ellora caves. It was very nice, serene, good food and a great view of the caves from our room. In the morning, our driver, Manoj, knocked at our door and told us that there were monkeys in a nearby tree. I have always loved monkeys. When I was a kid I wanted one for a pet, not that it would have been very practical to have one. Anyway, there they were, a tree full of monkeys jumping around, playing, grooming, eating leaves and having fun. There were a couple of very cute little baby monkeys too.

After breakfast we drove to the caves at Ajanta, about 50 miles away north of Aurangabad. These caves would be remarkable if they had been built from the bottom up but they were not. Instead they were carved out of the sheer rock walls of a river valley. It is very difficult to imagine how they could have done this. They created Buddhist temples, and monestaries with carved decorations and both small and large statues, all by chisel and hammer, digging out the rocks. It was started in the second century BC and they worked on it until the fifth century AD. Ajanta was covered, unmolested for hundreds of years so it was better preserved than the larger caves at Ellora. There are many beautiful wall and ceiling paintings at Ajunta. A very, very impressive site.

Even more impressive than the caves of Ajanta are the caves at Ellora near our hotel. We visited these caves on Saturday. They were done by Buddhists, Jains and Hindus in the sixth and seventh centuries AD. They are much larger and more elaborate than the Ajanta caves but with many fewer well preserved paintings. The three story structure on the left was a monestary, dug out from the cliff walls. The most famous "cave" is cave 10, a huge temple complex about 90 yards deep by 55 yards wide, about the size of a football field. Simply incredible.

After visiting the caves Manoj fed garbanzo bean plants to the monkeys in the parking area. They loved them, swarming him so that he had to be careful that they didn't take a few fingers with the greens.

We drove back to Pune Saturday afternoon and evening. On the way we passed many road side stands selling the juice of freshly sqeezed sugar canes. The canes are pressed using a huge press powered by an ox. They add a bit of lime and ginger to it and it is very frothy. I took a tiny sip. It tasted a bit like a lime flavored Orange Julius.

Nalini had talked to Manoj about our terror on the way out so the trip back to Pune was a bit more sedate. I was sure that I was going to die only four or five times the whole way home.