The festival of Diwali gave us a 4-day break from my teaching responsibilities at KV Tirumalagiri, so we (Jessie, Evan, Eli, Erin McGraw - our travel companion from Malekpet in Hyderabad and Rodney Kleber - US Fulbrighter from the North Hampton, MA area currently assigned to A KV school in Pune, Maharashtra not far from the megacity of Mumbai) booked overnight train tickets from the Secunderabad Rail Station to Aurangabad - which is located in the northwesterly direction in the state of Maharashtra. It is named after Aurangzeb - the last of a line of great Mughal rulers who extended his reign all the way south into our region of Andhra Pradesh (he was the last conqueror of Hyderabad after seiging the main fort at Golconda in 1687).
Ellora is about 30 km from Aurangabad and is a UNESCO World Heritage site for its incredible rock cut cave-type temples and monasteries that date back to about AD 600. It was an absolutely fantastic place, with intricate Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu temples (the area was alternately inhabited by these religious groups) jutting straight out of the sheer rocky cliffs. There was an inexplicable harmony between the natural surrounding and the architecture of the temples themselves, with some of the 34 caves going inside the mountain and some of the solid rock temples, including the masterpiece Kailasa Temple, standing separately where mountain had once stood. The Kailasa Temple, built in about AD 760, required 200,000 tons of solid rock to be removed!The coolest part was that we were able to walk freely in and around the temple caves with no restrictions. I remember hiking out to the Keet Seel site in 2003, an Anasazi Native American cliff dwelling in Navajo National Monument in Arizona (it's about a 3 or 4 hour drive northeast of the Grand Canyon). We had to get a permit from a US Park Service Ranger, hike out the eight miles and meet a different ranger there who guided us through the ruins of the village. She permitted us to touch almost nothing, and significant portions of the site were off limits. I'm sure that some of it had to do with the frail sandstone in comparison to the granite at Ellora, but it was such a different experience to be able to wander around and explore at your own pace.
Evan made a game of counting all the Buddhas we found in each temple. The lighting inside the temples was very difficult to take photographs in without using the flash (both Jessie and I hate using the flash for a variety of reasons, but primarily because it's just hard to use it with good results). I opened the lens up all the way and bumped up the ISO to the maximum setting and hoped for the best. I've also decided to drop all the color and show them in black and white since most of the images are shot in extremely low light.
After visiting the caves at Ellora we quickly visited the simple marble tomb of Aurangzeb in the courtyard of Alamgir Dargah in the walled village of Khuldabad (Heavenly Abode) as well as the 14th century mountaintop fort at Daulatabad (by the way the very popular suffix "abad" means "home of" - so Daulatabad is literally the home of Daulat, etc.). It was a great day with lots of walking!
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