Bollywood Calling

As time has gone by in India, between us, we have decided to spend as little time as possible in any main cities. As Mumbai was a large and, as indicated by the guidebook, expensive city to stay in we decided to give it a miss on the whole. We had decided on a journey that would allow us a fleeting visit to this huge city and in hindsight this was a mistake as the few hours that we spent there we enjoyed very much.

We boarded the train at Nasik for a pretty uneventful 4 hour trip to Mumbai. Because of the ticket we had purchased we needed to get another train when we got to Mumbai in order to get to Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus Station (CST) (Asia’s busiest station with 2.5million people using it per day!). This part of the journey was done on a local train, which resembled something like a glorified cattle cart. After an embarrassing ten minutes in the ladies carriage and a quick shift to a common carriage we swept into CST station hanging out of the large openings like true locals.
We dumped off our bags in the large cloakroom and stepped out into the daylight. We didn’t have time to see much of the city and headed straight towards Colaba to see the Gateway of India Monument and then to Chowpatty Beach. The impression we got from the guide book is that its complete bedlam in Mumbai. The areas that we walked along and to were nothing but well ordered and it seemed like the cleanest place we have been in India by far. There was not even a hint of bedlam or chaos, but we must stress that we only saw a fraction of what the city has to offer and we know that Mumbai has the extremes of high rise modernity, glitz, glam and wealth alongside poverty and slums that house 55% of the city’s population.


We strolled along towards Colaba passing the impressive colonial reminders like the Prince of Wales Museum, St Thomas’ Cathedral and the National Gallery of Modern Art. We turned a corner to see that the Gateway to India Monument was actually undergoing some restorative work which made it tricky to get a decent shot of it!

We saw that there were boats coming and going offering short trips out into the harbour. We couldn’t resist this and boarded one of them so that we could get some snaps and look at the views.



After our little nautical outing we jumped into a cab and headed for Marine Drive and Chowpatty Beach. The causeway that runs along marine drive is popular with couples and walkers alike at sunset.

We spent a couple of hours here just chilling out....

walking....

and taking in the views.


As the light dimmed we ended up at the northern end of Chowpatty Beach which was busy and entertaining with all sorts of activities going on along with a vibrant bunch of food stalls.

We shunned these for a special treat that we felt we deserved and ended up eating in swanky place just along from there. It was expensive, especially as they added 20% tax to the drink and 10% tax to the food bill! It was quite a shock to receive but the G&T’s and the first steak I had had in months made the bill more bearable. After a bit of time killing here we jumped into a taxi and headed for the station. Our train was due to leave at midnight and we were starting to feel a little tired. We were greeted by the usual late night / early morning station scene with wallas selling chai and people asleep all over the place!

As luck would have it our train was already waiting, so we got our luggage and headed for our pre-booked seats for the overnight journey that would take us to where we had been looking forward to going for some time: Goa.

Wine and Wining

The train to Nasik from Aurangubad was a nice experience. It took us four hours to get to Nasik, in which time Dipi got talking to locals and having some fun whilst I read Shantaram.

There were many ‘wallas’ (people who sell things or provide some sort of service. You have the chai wallas, rickshaw wallas etc, etc) on the train selling all sorts from chai to weird greenery that we couldn’t work out what it was for. As with most trains we have been on during the day, at each stop there are an influx of more wallas for the time that you are at the station. These guys would either be going up and down the carriage or selling their items from the platform and through the windows of the train. It all seemed much more exciting on this type of carriage compared to the sleeper class due to the layout. It was just like being on a big bus really, but way more fun.


Nasik itself is kind of on the way to Mumbai from Ellora and it just so happens that it is also home to the country’s leading wine makers. Oh, and it has some areas of special religious significance, just for a change. Every 12 years Nasik hosts the biggest religious gathering on earth called the Kumbh Mela and the next one is due in 2019 just in case you’re interested. It is said in the Ramayana, Lord Rama and his wife Sita were exiled here and it’s where Lakshmana hacked off Ravana’s sisters nasik (nose) thus giving the city its’ name.
We were keen to get along to the vineyard, but we also had some other bits that we needed to do along with taking in the temples and the holy Godavari River shenanigans (the Godavari River is one of India’s holiest). We asked the hotel to provide us with a rickshaw for the day which they responded with a silly price, so we made our own way out to get a rickshaw. Low and behold one of the drivers that was outside the hotel followed us round the corner and we negotiated a way more reasonable price with him for the itinerary we had planned. After a painless visit to the train ticket booking office (for our tickets to Goa via Mumbai), we sped off out into wine country. Apparently the climate is very similar to Bordeux in this particular area, and that is obviously why they grow good grapes here.
We arrived at the vineyard (not before the rickshaw driver stopped at completely the wrong place of course) and headed up to the bar to get our tour and tasting sorted out. The tour didn’t last too long (no great shakes there), so it wasn’t long before we were working our way through 6 of the wines on offer at the vineyard and, we have to say, they were pretty damn good!

We felt a little hungry and tipsy after the tasting so we decided to have a proper glass each along with, wait for it: Olives and a selection of cheeses!! This was such a great little treat. We were served the little lot and enjoyed every bit of it.

A bit wobbly and quite happy, we wandered back to the waiting Rickshaw. He wasn’t too happy with us and started bleating on about the time we had spent tasting the wine and that others only take one hour to do what we did, which was impossible. Along with him taking us to the wrong place before, our suspicion of him never having taken tourists there before was pretty much now complete. Typical. Anyway, after a short exchange we decided to ignore him as we talked (quickly so he wouldn’t understand us) about how we were going to argue it out with him when it came to payment (as you know the demand for more money is inevitable). He was still grumbling when we got back into the city and stopped outside one of the temples in the area. This temple was a little strange as you literally had to crawl on your hands and knees to get through tiny little tunnels to get to a couple of rooms housing effigies of one God or another. After checking out a couple more temples of a slightly different nature we decided to part company with our rickshaw walla when he drove us through a market which looked interesting. We gave him the amount we had agreed to pay him at the beginning of the day, ignored his wining about wanting more money and stepped out onto the busy street. We were in the middle of a local market that was vibrant in every way. Wanding past a Chai walla we decided to get a cup.

We were the subject of instant attention (as per usual) and it wasn’t long before were drinking chai surrounded by a number of men!

It was all in good spirits and everyone was very smiley and friendly.


The market was big enough to spend an hour wandering around just looking at all the stalls.

This place had a great feel to it and we were the only tourists around. If you go somewhere very touristy, you can get constantly hassled for your business by someone or another.

If you go somewhere that is not a tourist spot in the slightest it seems that you can end up having a much more pleasant experience taking in the surroundings, taking photos of people and stalls and smiling and communicating with the people around you.

We found this to be a very authentic Indian experience and wished each market we ended up in was like this. Everyone we came into contact with enjoyed it as much as we did if not more!


We wandered back to where we thought the hotel was. After a while mind you, we realised that we couldn’t find our hotel and didn’t know where it was either! The hotel was a great place, it wasn’t in the lonely planet, and the food and staff there were good. The lad that served us our food was probably the politest fella you could deal with and he even refused a tip at first! Anyway, we couldn’t find the hotel and struggled to remember what it was called, so we jumped into an auto as the driver seemed to know where we wanted to go. It was no real surprise that we ended up at the wrong place. With recruited help of a passerby and by means of comical sign and sound language it dawned on the driver where we needed to be and with lots of head waggling he drove us to where we needed to be, which incidentally was well away from where we thought we should have been!! We were well off target! On arrival I over paid the driver (gave him what he asked for) and we both looked at each other with a wry smile as I handed over the money. He drove off happy as Larry and, as we were happy to be at the hotel, I thought it was all worth the mammoth amount of 30 rupees for the giggle it provided.
We had a great meal served in our room and got a relatively early night as we were due to catch the train to Mumbai the following day......

The Ancient, Holy and Simply Amazing!

Until now we have only ever been on semi sleepers (reclining seats) or on trains for overnight journeys. This ‘sleeper bus’ was a new one for us and we had heard a few things about them. In the main the stories of how hard it is to get to sleep on them, especially if you are near the forever bouncy back end. After wedging our luggage in a random outside compartment, we shuffled down the thin walkway between the sleeping compartments. The coach itself has two levels on either side. One side houses double beds (the bottom ones are formed out of the seats when slid down into position and the top ones are permanent beds), and the other side has single beds, again one above and one below, sliding seats below and permanent above). The double bed side is broken in the middle by about 4 or 5 rows of semi sleeper seats. You can imagine the look we gave each other when we arrived at our seats which were right over the back wheels! The bouncing effect is of course accentuated by the lunacy of the driving antics up front! (No surprise there). Poor Matt was also too tall to stretch out so between us we managed to sneak a few moments sleep in between rolling and bouncing around like a peas in a whistle!

We were relieved when we made it off in one piece at 4am, even it was the middle of the night and we had no real idea of where. After some haggling with a bunch of rickshaw drivers we took what ended up to be a ridiculously short ride to the train station. That gave us a little bit of a giggle.

We were in Ahmedabad, in Gujarat which is a wealthy, resourceful state that the locals always think I am from. Gujaratis are renowned for their entrepreneurial skills both here and abroad and they say that most Non-Resident Indians, NRI, you encounter will most likely be from here. In order to get to Jalgaon (our stop for the Ajanta caves) we had to get the train at 6am, so we had a couple of hours to kill.

The wait at the train station was quite pleasant as it was clean and organised with food stalls, chai wallas and hardly anybody even gave us a second look. We were pretty tired though and were looking forward to lying down on the train. Once we boarded the train we stuck our earplugs in and covered our faces with sarongs and had a few hours kip. It was to be a long train journey so there was little to do except eat, sleep and read. The scenery started to become more green and made a welcome change to the desert of Rajasthan. Matt managed to get a couple of good photos of the hard working locals (with their kids in tow) on the train lines.


Almost 20 hours and 850km after we left Udaipur we arrived in Jalgaon and booked into a hotel near the train station. It is a fairly random town with virtually nothing in it apart from a fantastic restaurant where we had a great Chinese meal. This was a lovely surprise and Matt was adamant that the spring rolls were the best he has ever tasted! After a good nights sleep and an early rise, we set off on the local bus to the Ajanta Caves.

It was a weekend so we arrived at the caves with everyone else and their cousin.

A World Heritage Site, the Buddhist caves of Ajanta are said to be the Louvre of central India and date from around 200 BC to AD 650. As Buddhism waned the beautiful caves were abandoned and forgotten until 1819 when a British hunting party stumbled upon them.

The 30 caves are cut into the steep face of a horseshoe-shaped rock gorge on the Waghore River and makes for a spectacular setting.



The isolation of the caves contributed to the fine state of preservation in which some of the paintings are today along with the seemingly impressive work that the State is doing to keep this site as spiritual and special as it was intended. We were both very impressed with what we saw....


The superb lighting in the caves provided a beautiful setting in which to see the amazing architecture and sculptures that were carved thousands of years ago.


There were some stunning pieces of art painted on the ceilings and walls of the caves (known as tempera as the artists used animal glue and vegetable gum to bind them to the dry surface).



Each cave represented something different and although it was interesting I can’t remember much so I think the pictures are enough for now...






There is a viewpoint across the river and up a hill so while Matt sat at the bottom of the stairs (lazy sod) and chatted to the jewellery-wallahs and crystal rock-wallahs, I climbed the small hill for the views.


After some lunch we had to catch another bus down to Aurangabad which was to be our base from which to explore the Ellora Caves from. These were supposed to be similar to the Ajanta caves but better according to our book (‘the pinnacle of Deccan rock-cut architecture’) and showed a variety of Hindu, Buddhist and Jain architecture. We had to wait for our bus at the side of the road in the blazing heat and flag the right one down.

A couple of hours later we were checked into a very basic hotel in Aurangabad and set about planning our next day which also happened to be New Year’s Eve. We had previously agreed that we weren’t going to worry about doing anything on NYE as we didn’t know where we would be so that took the pressure of us to be somewhere in particular and we thought to ourselves that we would just ‘be where we would be’ on NYE. So we started looking at the limited options available to us. Aurangabad itself is a Muslim city and we realised that there wouldn’t be anything to do unless we went for a fancy package deal at the one of the fancy and very pricey hotels. We slept on the idea and the thought of spending a lot of money. In the morning I had a brain wave and found out about hotels near the Ellora caves. There were a couple that sounded pretty good so I promptly called. It turned out that the better sounding one had a cottage overlooking the caves for a reasonable price so we booked in and packed a small bag for the night.

We set off in a rickshaw (that we had hired for the day at a reasonable price) and combined the sightseeing along with getting to Ellora and the hotel. We hadn’t actually given the other sights in the area a second thought but decided to visit them based on the suggestion of the hotel owner and we were glad we did.

Our first stop was the ‘Poor Man’s Taj’, known as the Bibi-Qa-Maqbara. It was built in 1679 for Aurangzeb’s wife and the comparison to the Taj is ironic considering it was Aurangzeb’s father who built the Taj Mahal shortly before being overthrown and imprisoned by his son on account of his extravagance! We thought it was actually quite beautiful and had a lot of charm! There was hardly anybody there which was a bonus, unlike the Taj Mahal.

Next was the Daulatabad Fort, a giant imposing fort built on an isolated pyramid-shaped natural mountain peak 200m above sea level. Now we don’t usually go for forts but our hotel man claimed that this fort was truly magnificent and it had never been conquered (apart from the one when time the gatekeeper was bribed) because of its’ ingenious series of defences. We were curious and it was on the way.

The fort is a combination of a ground fort and hill fort (quite rare in India) and the rock around the fort is chiselled so skilfully that climbing the fort was almost impossible. The arrangements of the gates at the entrance also worked as a defence strategy as they were not opposite each other and thus the practice of using elephants to break down the doors was impossible here.

Although the fort is in ruins it is actually quite interesting.

Along with that, the setting is peaceful and the 45 minute walk up to the summit of the hilltop fortress rewarded us with some very fine views of the surrounding countryside.


On the way up we crossed the bridge over the 20m deep wet moat which had two dams constructed in it to control the water. In this way, the water level could be increased above the level of the bridge thus ‘sinking’ the bridge. There are two bridges over the moat and in earlier times one of the bridges was made of leather so it could also be rolled up if needed. Oh, and the moat was also teeming with crocodiles!

After crossing the bridge we were guided by a man with a flame into an elaborate ascending zig-zag underground passage. It was pitch black apart from the flame and it was about 50 metres long. As we carefully zig-zagged through our guide explained that there were a couple of tunnels that attackers could get lost in and disorientate themselves and hopefully kill each other in their confusion as they ended up going head long into each other. There was a small opening for light and air which could mislead the enemy and cause him to fall straight into the moat. This opening was also used to pelt stones at the attackers from above and last but not least, there was a large hot pan kept on the exit of the passage, just in case they were to get through! Quite amazing really.

After reaching the summit we had a short stop then made our way down and out for a thali at the local cafes opposite the fort which was delicious. I bought a coconut to drink from and some fruit to munch on for the rest of our journey and we jumped in to our auto for the ride to the Ellora Caves.

Upon reaching the caves and the hotel, we thanked our auto man and checked into our cottage (which we were really pleased with!) and walked down to the Ellora caves. It was a lot busier than we expected and much more touristy than the Ajanta caves and is set up differently. Ellora has 34 caves (Buddhist, Hindu and Jain). Over five centuries; generations of monks have carved monasteries, chapels and temples from a 2km stretch of escarpment. As the escarpment is on a gentle slope, opposed to the sheer drop at Ajanta, many caves have elaborate courtyards in front of the main shrines. The masterpiece is the spectacular Kailasa Temple, dedicated to Shiva and is the world’s largest monolithic sculpture built into the rock by over 7000 workers over a 150 year period! It didn't look like much from the outside..

So it was even more impressive when you entered and realised what was behind. Three trenches were cut into the cliff face and the shape was ‘released’ with tools and entailed removing 200,000 tonnes of rock!



Around the temple there are carved panels depicting scenes from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the adventures of Krishna and many people come to pray in the main shrine as it is a functioning temple.


The caves at Ellora are more spread out and involve either a very long walk, or (seeing as there is a road built right next to it which is a shame) a few rides in autos. So seeing as it was NYE (we wanted a drink at sunset for sure) and we were a bit caved out we went for the second option. The rest of the caves were still pretty amazing but not, we felt, as spiritual or as beautiful as the ones at Ajanta. It was, however, still interesting to see the different styles of Hindu, Buddhist and Jain architecture.





We managed to make it back to our cottage in time for sunset (not before being begged to buy something from a very persistent young boy who was selling little stone boxes and elephants) and got some beers in to have in our very own patio. And a bottle of bubbly. Very nice.

The evening was quiet and we had a lovely evening on the patio watching the impressive flames of some scrub burning on the side of the hill before heading off to bed way before midnight (the first in a long time). We awoke the next day refreshed and happy after a great night’s sleep and ready for breakfast on the patio!

Happy New Year to one and all.