The Caves of Ellora

While I avoid tourist areas and particularly avoid non-Indian tourist areas like the Taj Mahal in Agra or the world famous ghats along the Ganges in Varanasi, there is one that happens to be on my usual route north to south and makes a good place to stop, so I went to the now recognized World Heritage site called Ellora, about 40km north west from Aurangabad in Maharashtra state. So I spent the night in Ellora and then had to get some work done in the morning so it was late morning before I got to the caves and it was already starting to get busy so I headed straight way to the farthest cave to get some caves to myself.

For some background, some millions of years ago there was a major volcanic eruption and what now is Ellora was a tongue of lava flowing into a valley. Around the 6^th century some monks began carving caves out of the ‘soft’ lava stone for temples and for meditation spots during the monsoon. Over the next 800 years, what began as a small effort turned into a massive construction project of unbelievable proportions. By 1400 or so the last one of the current 33 temples or so had been completed.

So when I entered the first one, one of the earlier, cruder works it was breathtaking, literally I stopped breathing in wonderment at the level of effort, grandeur and size of it.

Over the next few hours I walked about from complex to complex in awe of the master builders to had construct such marvels.

The largest complex is not actually a cave at all but instead carved straight down some 220 feet into the stone and covers a number of acres. Just for this one complex it took some 7,000 people, 200 years to carve out of the solid rock. So maybe 15 generations of architects and because everything is carved from a single piece of rock there can not be any mistakes and the entire design has to be there from the very first.

The carving is intricate and what we see today is only the crude underlayment. When they were completed, they had a fine layer of plaster that was then intricately painted to add to and accentuate the carving. Only a very little of the original plastering remains.

This is of a small bit of a remaining ceiling  mural

  

About 30 miles to the north of Ellora there is a smaller complex within the same formation call Ajanta. 

If this were somewhere else than India, like the middle east, Europe or China it would be world famous but since it is in India no one has heard of it.

Amazing, Mind Blowing Sights

One thing India has in abundance is amazing things you can probably experience nowhere else on earth.

I have seen so many such amazing things I can not mention but just a few that stick out.

For one I was driving along the very winding roads in the Western Ghats of Kerala and I round a tight bend and I am faced with the enormous bottom of an elephant standing in the back of a tiny truck (smaller than the elephant) straining under the weight. After taking a second to process the sight, I quick took the next opportunity to pass the elephant to avoid any possibility of mishap.

Another was I was coming down from the Nilgiris (highest mountains south of the Himalaya, near the southern tip of the continent) and had hit the plains which is two large tiger preserves, and as I am moving along this little one lane road out of the forest comes a herd of elephants (these wild) one of which deposits about 75 lbs of dung and 5 gallons of urine on the road and crosses to the other side

Another, I was driving along at top speed (60 mph) on one of the very new, very fancy super highways and I see in the lane ahead of me what looks to be a pile of rags nearly the same color as the asphalt.

Now its not unusual to find a wide range of materials on roads such as rocks, bricks, flattened dogs, rags etc etc.

As I get closer I see some movement. I realize it’s a human, or actually half a human body, nothing below the waist, on a board with casters, pushing himself with his hands down the super highway. So here you have a black lump of rags maybe 16 inches high, the same color as the road itself, pushing himself down the super highway. On realizing what I was seeing my brain just shut down, I could still see and all that, so information was still coming in, but nothing was coming out, total silence, or I guess what is literally meant by stupefaction. It took me maybe 5 minutes to come out to some functional state after being submerged in that pure stupefaction.

Then the intellect started churning trying to find something to grab on to as to how this person could have thought it was a good idea to be the same color as the road, only 18” tall and be pushing himself down the super highway on his hands.

Now I don’t begrudge the fellow use of public rights of way, but this super highway had paved shoulders finer than most roads that he could have used, and yet he felt he had to use the middle of the road. To this day I have not been able to have any comprehension of the thought processes of that fellow.

Was he hoping to be run over to be finished with the reduced body he was having to function out of?

Was he stating his claim that he had as much right to the use of that super highway as anyone else?

The Indian Road

The India road is a metaphor for Indian life. All Indian life (with only one or two exceptions) takes place on the roads and streets of the subcontinent. Most readers have the concept of a road as a linear travel route for the efficient movement of wheeled vehicles from Point A to Point B.

This is not the primary use of Indian roads. It is not even the secondary or tertiary use of roads. Here roads are public spaces for sitting, discussing, arguing, sleeping, waiting, playing games (ranging from cards and board games to cricket) moving livestock, ejecting all kinds of bodily waste materials, drying crops, drying laundry, parking vehicles, repairing vehicles, placing piles of construction materials and rocks, in small villages the holding of weddings, protests, celebrations and festivals, the list could go on and on.

One of the most interesting use of roads I have come across is the use of them as threshing floors. In many places, the farmers will neatly pile at a thickness of 6” the dried plants containing the crop seeds across the entire road surface except the 6-12” next to the road edge to avoid any losses. So during the day the traffic drives back and forth over the plants while the farmers regularly turn over the crop and keep it in neat piles. By evening time the crop is fully threshed and they remove the plants and sweep up the seeds.

This is fine for the four-wheelers (the term for non two-wheeled vehicles) but for two-wheelers  such as myself this can be a problem as the mat of plants can be slippery. So I have learned to use the 6 or so inches left on the side of the road.

Now I will move on to the topic of road condition and the science of road archaeology. Road conditions vary wildly. A few 4 lane highways built recently that are equal to or surpass similar highways in the US and Europe. One that definitely surpasses that comes to mind is the new Yamuna Expressway that connects Delhi with Agra. It is 8 lanes of perfectly smooth tarmac with virtually no traffic. It is a toll road so all the truck traffic remains crowding the nearly parallel highway that goes between the two cities. 

On the other side of the spectrum are highways that are so bad that top speed is 5-7 MPH and most of the travel is weaving back and forth trying to find a way through the holes and remnant pavement so as to not rip off you oil pan or breaking an axle. Now at this point you may be thinking that I am exaggerating but I am not at all. In fact, I was on such a road and passed one four-wheeler (bikes are faster than four-wheelers on all but the very best roads because a four-wheeler has to find two parallel routes with the distance between them being the distance between the left and right tires, whereas the bike only has to find one single track that is passable) I digress, and just as I was about to overtake the poor fellow, some remnant pavement ripped his oil pan off spewing his precious motor oil across the road and resulting in a very bad day or two until it could be repaired.

Traveling bad roads is like seeing geology exposed. On the surface there will be the fine asphalt. But depending on the quality of the oil used to make the asphalt it will either crumble to powder, break up in chunks or if it was proper quality do its job and remain a road surface, below this you will find gravel in the 1-2” diameter range that is generally covered/held together with some other oil based material. On this material is set the surface material. Often (Virtually all roads but the big highways), there is an oil product applied to bond the two layers, here it is applied by hand instead of truck sprayer, in either a modified watering can or a bucket with holes drilled in the bottom. 

You may be thinking what does this have to do with road condition, but as you will see, very much. Because it is applied by hand with the swinging of the arm, its applied in concentric rings across the road and because it is applied by hand (and is a major expense in road building) there are areas that receive too little to do the bonding properly. So as these roads decay they develop a washboard, in the strips that received proper amounts of the tar the surface is still attached, where as the areas with insufficient tar have eroded away. The result being bone jarring rattle.

Now getting back to the archaeology, when the surface pavement washes away and the 1-2” material mentioned above has been broken up and washed away you get down to the ‘bedrock’ of the road which is generally 2-6” rocks hand laid with dirt packing.

So it is easy to get an approximate dating of road maintenance. If its just the surface inch of asphalt that is the problem its likely the road was laid/maintained in the last few years,  if you are on the rough underlayment it is likely 5-10 and if you are driving on dirt >10

Many roads are one lane, and so when two vehicle meet, one or both have to move partially off the road. The problem with this system is that the side of the road is dirt and when you combine the vehicle traffic with monsoon rains you get major erosion of the shoulders. So you can have 3-12” difference between the pavement and the shoulder. This is not a problem for busses and trucks with 36-40” diameter tires, but for cars and vans which have very small tires this can be problematic. On bike it is not so bad because  a bad case scenario you can just drive off the road and use the shoulder until you can find a place where the pavement and shoulder are close enough to drive back on. On a bike, between the two wheels is the frame so you cant do too much damage when the pavement hits the frame.

Now moving on to vehicles. Only a very few vehicles have break lights. Newer vehicles generally have some functional break lights but even that is not guaranteed. I was close behind a very new car maybe two years old and he threw on the breaks but no lights. Why this is the case is unknown as in the US its quite rare to have a tail light bulb burn out. I have had vehicles well over 20 year old and the lights had never burned out.

All but new cars you have to assume there are no lights. When passing truck and buses you often have to follow behind them at 1-3’ in order to be able to pass. You have to become very attuned to the distance between you and the truck as you get no other feedback that he has slammed on the breaks to avoid a pothole or the like.

Now you may be thinking that there must be a lot of accidents and deaths and dismemberments and yes there are, but that will have to be another post.

Another amazing thing is that drivers of all sorts of vehicles think nothing about stopping in the middle of the road. These stops can be as short as a few minute to as long as a week. Trucks and buses in particular when they break down they don’t even think to pull to the side of the road, they merely stop wherever they notice the problem. Then what happens is a temporary garage/workshop gets set up while the vehicle is disassembled, the offending parts removed, taken to be worked on and then replaced.

Why the thought does not cross the mind that it would be a good idea to move off the road to do this is unknown and probably unknowable.

Money

One may ask, is it not expensive traveling to the other side of the planet.

There are many ways to travel, some expensive, some cheap.

Given a lack of assets sitting around, I have developed a method that is quite cheap.

The first step is getting one of the frequent flyer miles credit cards such as AA, United or the general one Sapphire.

On signing up for one of these card you automatically get 30,000 miles or more. And with a year's average expenses the airfare is almost free.

Once there, wonderful food averages me between $2.50 and $4.00 per day. And while hotel costs have dramatically increased over the last 15 years, my range is from $8 to a very high of $28. And these are not budget accommodations. One could go much cheaper if one was a bit more flexible.

I met one retired American fellow living in the small village of Jageshwar up in the Himalayas living in this wonderful home and living comfortably on $125 per month total expenses.

Moral of the story is you can get out and explore the world without spending much.

Why? That Is The Question!

Why?

One, if rational, may ask the question,  why India. 

I don’t have a simple answer, or much of an answer at all to that question. I will feebly attempt some response.

The question is one I ask myself on many occasions both before returning as well as on occasion while here. So it is not a question that is foreign to me at all.

And I get asked it all the time.....

From a rational perspective it makes no sense whatsoever. I am living in one of the most beautiful locations on the planet. I live in a clean, quiet, orderly, functional and efficient place where, despite power outages more than many locations  in India, everything basically works properly. So why?

Firstly, it is good to get out of our comfortable cocoon from time to time and experience some of the alternate means of living that the world has to offer. This is most important for Americans as we live so insulated at the center of the empire.

There is something so unique about India. It is amazing, terrible, terribly amazing, overwhelming, where life has not been sanitized, hermetically sealed, polished. It is organic (not in the sense of free from pollutants), raw, uncensored (not in the sense of totally free expression in film and literature and the like) in the sense that aspects of life that may not be that delightful, are not varnished over or relegated to some locked off area so as to be unseen.

All in all, it is sort of polar opposite to America culture (while also being 12 time zones on the very opposite side of the planet).

It is full on sensory assault, overload, load. By way of example, yesterday I had to go to town to get some things, and just walking through the market area you are at time overwhelmed with the odor of rotting refuse and overwhelmed with the heavenly, intoxicating fragrance of the heaps of jasmine flowers for sale in the stalls.

India is definitely not some ‘vacation’ destination in any usual sense (even though there probably are a few insulated resorts that provide that)

But I have found something addictive in the chaos that is India.

And then of course there is the food. In my view there are a handful of truly great mother cuisines on the planet, them being Italian, Chinese (including Thai etc) and Indian. It is pretty hard to find food here that is not delicious and most meals are truly excellent. Even simple fare has a delightful mix of flavors that makes it very satisfying.

For those of you who have been here most likely understand everything I have said. For those who have not this has provided only poor vision of the full reality. For those, I strongly suggest, if you can pull together the courage, mindset, strength and fortitude to take the plunge to do so. I can not promise you that you will not regret it but I can promise you a good education and expansion of perspective.

Go for it!

Here is another take on the question:

http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20150901-indias-chaotic-lesson-in-letting-go 

NOTE: I was very bad at posting stories last trip so this was written back in January. 

Right now I am about to return and as with every time, I am asking myself WHY???