Ajanta Caves
Trip Start
Apr 22, 2011
1
19
60
Trip End
Jul 08, 2011
What I did
Ajanta, Maharashtra, India
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Day 32
I woke up in Aurangabad. Found a hotel right away. Then went off to the Ajanta Caves. The Ajanta Caves were 100 km away, so it took about 3 hours to get there. At first, I was going to take a private tour for 400 rupee, but it was overbooked, so I booked my ticket for tomorrow night for going to Mumbai and this guy tried to add 50 rupee for commission and again I lost my cool and after a few minutes, I got my 50 rupee back. At the start of Ajanta, I followed the cars and went through the parking lot when a man flagged me down and asked me to pay. I asked him if I had to pay to park my feet? He said yes and I told him there was no problem because I was not going to park my feet and was only going to walk through the parking lot and if he wanted to charge me for walking on the parking lot that i would walk around, but somehow he said that was not right and still tried to get money out of me. Ajanta was incredible. I haven't normally seen things like this. It was a series of caves found over a hundred years ago, however they are between 500 and 2000 years old and still pretty well preserved. I think there were 26 caves that were both Buddhist and Hindu caves. There was a Buddha statue in just a bout every cave of the first six and outside every cave was decorated with different statues and carvings. Each pole inside the caves also had statues and designs on them. The caves also had paintings and they basically described Buddhas life and previous lives from when he was an elephant or whatever else he was in his previous livers. I met some Canadian girls and those were the only white people I talked to the whole day. It's not really tourist season here. I was the only person on the bus that was not Indian and a few people wanted to take pictures with me again. When I was with the Canadian girls for my short 30 minutes, a young Indian boy wanted a picture with the girls. While they were posing, he tried to get the girls to kiss him while doing it and then tried to get them to hug him and they backed off. It was pretty funny. He was totally shut down. I went back to Aurangabad, used the intenet and then went to bed.
