Rocked out.

Jalgoan June 21-24

Jalgoan was never ever part of our plan (rough as it was). After Satna we we got a train to Jabalapur, and from there we were meant to be going to a tiger reserve. But because of the rain, the reserve had shut, so we were only going to spend the night and find a train in the morning onwards (we prebooked a whole bunch of train tickets at the beginning to be organised but it ended up being a pain in the ass - couldn't stay longer in Varansi, and we had no reason to be in Jabalapur in the end.)

We got into Jabalapur at midnight and drove around in a rickshaw looking for somewhere to stay, the first place we tried was full, the second was full, the third, fourth, fifth,6,7,8,9...everywhere was full. We were pretty dejected after that and decided to just get the first train outta there.

So back to the station we went and brought a ticket to Jalgoan, it was in the direction we wanted and there were caves to check out... 3am we got on our train.

Jalgoan was....quiet, nothing special in the town more of a base to stay to check out the cave temples of Ajanta and Ellora.

It was made awesome by our wonderful hotel owner at the Palace Hotel who went out his way to make our stay comfortable, he helped us with the best places to eat, he drew us a map of the town, helped us organise all our transport, told us what time to get up to make the most of our trip to the caves and was just a nice guy.

The first caves we went to were the Ajanta caves. Where Buddhist monks from 200BC to 650 AD carved into a cliff face in a river bend 29 cave rooms, including living quarters and temples.

The caves were amazingly intricately carved and inside they were painted with scenes from Buddha's life.
The paintings were awesome, but it was to dark inside and you couldn't take flash photography without a man yelling at you with a big stick raised.























The ceiling of a temple

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We also met some very friendly Assamese guys who had snuck in some very delicious homemade Mango Liquor and shared it with us......made for a nice afternoon...........
























Ellora Caves
Ellora caves are thought to be a continuation of the Buddhist caves from Ajanta- they left the Ajanta site for some reason and began to carve at Ellora. Ellora is different again though because after the Buddhist caves came Hindu one's and Jain aswell. There are 34 caves in all.

The Buddhist one 's here were'nt nearly as good as the days before. And we never made it to the Jain temples, because we had to get a bus back to Jalgoan.

The real reason you come to Ellora is to see the Hindu Kailasa temple, carved from a single rock, it is the biggest monolith in the world. It built it from the top downwards. They dug a huge hole but left a massive rock in the middle then carved a temple out of the rock. It was pretty impressive.































All in all we were pretty templed out by the end of that day and had an on overdose of rock carvings. It was still a neat part of India to see though and not many travellers around in that part of the country, only holidaying Indians...who thought we were part of the attraction. We will be seen in many holiday snaps we thinks.....