11/9 Welcome to Aurangabad

Hi all! Alexandra here to celebrate our first day in Aurangabad! We jumped head first back into our touring schedule today with a trip over to the Ajanta caves. The caves were carved into the side of a mountain some 3000 years ago and every pillar, room, and statue was originally just the rock of the mountain. Some of the caves were also covered in paintings depicting the life of Buddha and could easily have fit in with the fine art we saw in Rome many moons ago.

The bus ride to the caves took about two and a half hours and so in many ways, we spent more of today touring the Indian countryside than we did the caves. On the way to Ajanta, our tour guide, Joshi, was kind enough to point out some of the cash crops grown in this region, including cotton. While I slept for most of the ride to the caves, on the way home I saw countless small fields filled with rows of green stalks bursting with white fluff. As we drove by, I watched a man and woman harvesting their field, handpicking the cotton in the afternoon sun and slowly filling up a large sack at their feet. I also saw pigs, cows, and goats freely roaming the road that cut through the agricultural region. While traffic in the city of Aurangabad is bad because of classic congestion, a traffic jam in the countryside between Ajanta and Ellora is caused by a herd of goats who are more concerned with eating the morsels of corn on the street than our tour bus charging at them. At some points of the drive, I was reminded of home and roads we regularly traverse between urban centers and rural areas. At other points, I was struck by the uniquely Indian landscape, with fields growing spices I have never seen fresh and women hard at work in beautiful and colorful sarees.

So far this in-between place, between the city and the farmlands, has been peaceful and rejuvenating. At the end of the day, I think we were all ecstatic to be touring again, learning more about India through our guide's knowledgeable speeches and from hours of observation out the windows of a tour bus.