A taster of the North

From the middle of the south, where things were beginning to hot up - 40C and counting, we decided to make a forray further north and test whether we were up to two months visiting the cities of the Ragasthan desert! We're not - not in May and June anyway - it's toooo hot! So we're back down south awaiting the monsoon and relaxing!

Our forray took us to hot and dusty Bijapur though - right at the top of Karnataka - a city once surrounded by very impressive fortifications and littered with mausoleums (is this the plural?!) which we got a very good view of from the top of the biggest one, the Golgumbaz...

Our morning tour of the sites (before retreating to the relative cool of our room) also took us through to the Jami Masjid - an enormous mosque in the middle of the town, opening onto a courtyard where local children and women were collecting water for the day and cleaning their teeth.. through the remains of the citadel and later to the combined mausoleum and mosque outside the town, the Ibrahim Rauza -

Here we met lots of visitors from around India and spent lots of time talking to them in the beauty and symmetry of the two buildings. The architecture was such a change from the temples we've visted on the way - and the detail of the painting and carving were really special, letting light into the mausoleum through the walls..

From Bijapur we made the longest bus journey ever to Auragabad in Maharastra. The landscapes changed along the way as much as the clothes and approach of the poeple we met. We were the sole foreign visitors of Bid for a stopover night and only rarely did poeple's curiosity overflow into "why are you here?!" - those we did speak to were lovely and helpful. I hope the guy I was chatting to in the bus got the job he was going for and that the man who got us on the right bus to Ellora will continue being the bus garage angel for years to come... This tempered the effects of our worst room to date (scuttler free but indescribably grim in other ways..) and helped turn our attentions back to the views and colourful turbans outside.

Aurangabad is enormous! We used it as a base to see some lovely caves and also went on a consolation trip to the mini Taj Mahal as we won't make it to the real one before we leave in June.. as you can see, it's not a bad replacement!

From Aurangabad you get a bus (eventually!) to Ellora - tiny village next to an enormous complex of caves, dug into the rocks by various religious groups over the centuries. You may think there are only so many caves one person can take in a week - but you'd be wrong here - these are soo amazing, you'd like another week to take a better look!

To give you a taster - there's this Buddhist temple with musicians gallery and church like roof..

.. there's a two storey Jain temple with communicating corridor to the one next door which has a mini temple in the courtyard..

and this one, the 'whole hindu temple and little temples round the sides, with balconies and lifesize elephant sculptures all over it' took 8 generations of craftsmen over 150 years to complete.... breath-taking.


Not yet 'caved out' and still wondering how anyone could start tapping away at the rock and think it might turn into a monastry/temple... how they got the rubble out... how they could see in there... we made our way to Ajanta, another site, this time of only Buddhist caves - temples and monastries!... all lined along the ridge of a horse-shoe shaped valley....

The temples here had windows to let the light in.. and rather intricate decorations!

Lots were painted and you could still see the forms of so many buddhas on the walls, beautiful leaves and flowers, tales and animals.. and the columns were pretty pretty too!

The caves here were forgotten for 1000 years before they were stumbled upon by a British party in the 1800s.... hard to forget though!

From the heat of Ajanta we wove our way back to the outskirts of Mumbai and raced up a mountain for a breath of cool air - we'd read about a place called Matheran where there were no cars, where the air is cool and you can roam the mountain top on foot or on horseback.... and where the nights are cold enough for a blanket...

It wasn't quite what we expected, but was a laugh anyway and we did indeed get to go for a nice walk, had afternoon tea on the verandah of a lovely colonial era bungalow... and spent a lot of time watching the crowd from Mumbai in what turned out to be a sort of Las Vegas meets Disneyworld meets the wild west...but nicer and with mango fudge on sale!

We stayed at Hope Hall with our hosts, the devout Maria and Joseph (I kid not!), home to 27 cats, numerous dogs and some lovely puppies, ate wonderful scrambled eggs and toast and felt like we were on holiday!
Quelle vie!