Ajanta caves and Jalgaon
Trip Start
Nov 04, 2007
1
43
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Trip End
May 03, 2008
Jalgaon,
India
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Jalgaon was a bit of a detour, but it is the most convenient base for viewing the ancient caves at Ajanta, which date back as far as the 5th century AD (I'm not much of an archaeologist, so I'm not sure if that is ancient strictly speaking, but it sounds pretty old to me!).
We arrived in Jalgaon early in the morning off the overnight train, and walked the couple of hundred metres to the Hotel Plaza, which came highly recommended in the guide book. And for once the guidebook was right! The manager was extremely polite and friendly and was very concerned that we should enjoy our stay. In fact everytime we saw him he would ask us "are you satisfied with the room?". The room was in fact perfectly clean and comfortable and very good value for money - but it was nice to find someone who was taking pride in his hotel.
A day of rest and recovery followed, and the next day we got up early to get the bus to the caves. After getting off the bus at Ajanta, we each had to pay a 7 rupee "community" fee (for keeping the area clean), then walk through a car park, then a small shopping arcade, before getting on a different bus which cost 12 rupees each to take us to the caves. Once we got to the caves we each had to pay a 250 rupee entrance fee. They seem to like having lots of fees to pay rather than bundling it all together!
To get to the caves we then had to climb up quite a lot of steps. Some people were being carried up on chairs, and although we were tempted, we decided it would be a good bit of exercise.
Ajanta cave
There are 30 caves in total, set around a horse-shoe shaped gorge. The caves are mostly buddhist, and vary in size - some were like being inside a big temple and others were like being in a cave. There were various styles too, although we noticed there was rather a lot of repetition in the layout and styles used - there seemed to be 3-in-a-row of square-shaped cave with pillars around the edge and a buddha at the back, then 3-in-a-row of longer, thinner cave with a giant carved sphere on a plinth (which I thought would have made a great water feature if they put some plumbing in!). We're not sure why they needed so many caves, and some appeared to have been started, but the workers must have got bored and left them unfinished to go and start on new caves. Many of the caves were decorated inside by paintings, and although there were big chunks missing, the bits that were there were bright and in tact. We couldn't help but imagine what it must have been like for the workers to carve out these huge caverns armed only with hand-tools, in the dark. In the unfinished caves you could get a real sense of the work in progress, seeing all the individual chisel marks that had been left in the stone.We're glad we got there early because as we started walking away from the caves there seemed to be several school trips and various coach tours arriving, so we headed back to our hotel in Jalgaon.
Jalgaon is a funny little town. When we checked-in to the hotel the manager said to us "there wil probably be a power-cut at midday for three hours and then again from 6 until 9. Tomorrow the power will probably go off at 6am for three hours and then from 3 until 6 in the afternoon." - this happens everyday at various times! Apparently the power company has trouble generating electricity fr 24 hours a day. The hotel was well-prepared though and handed out candles to all the guests.
