Today I hired a man and an Auto-Rickshaw to take me to see some sights: Daulatabad Fort and Ellora Caves. I was supposed to get up at 6.30am and meet him at 7am…but I slept through the alarm so woke at 7am and literally ran out of the door! The cool air and the bracing rickshaw ride over the bumpy old roads soon woke me up and I was off on my way to see some geekery!
I begun the day at Daulatabad Fort which is like something straight out of a Tolkien novel or from ’Game of Thrones’! I only had an hour because I was off to the Elora caves afterwards, but it was pretty impressive!
The fort is located about 15km from Aurangabad, en route to Ellora. It is now in ruins, but the citadel was originally conceived as an impregnable fort by the Yavada kings. It was, in 1328, christened the city of fortune by an eccentric Delhi sultan: Mohammed Tughlaq and then made the capital. He even marched the whole population of Delhi 1100km south to populate it. Soon after there was an acute water crisis and he forced the whole population back again! So now it is a ghost town that is ripe for the photographical taking.
It sits very high on the top of a huge hill known as Devagiri (Hill of the Gods).
I found it quite a trek to get up, unfortunately I didn’t make it all the way to the top, I did get a good way up, so I was happy! Part of the ascent has you stomping through the darkest part of the fort, originally used to confuse and deter enemy soldiers in the pitch black. I used the newly built steps. They only have 20 steps in the dark.
There are three sets of caves at Ellora
– 12 Buddhist caves which were created between AD 600-800
– 17 Hindu caves which were created between AD 600-900
– 5 Jain temples which were created between AD 800-1000
I liked that there were lots of different designs and layouts, some temples had only one room and some had many, others had more than one floor etc. It really was very interesting.
In all of the guidebooks it says that the best cave is the 12th one: The Kailasa Temple in the Hindu series. It is the worlds largest monolithic sculpture and took 7000 workers over 150 years to create…epic!
Powered By Fondant Fancy 