The car arrives a few minutes early and we sort ourselves out. Two minutes down the road R realises that she has left the binoculars behind. This is always a reliable indicator that there will be interesting birds to see. Our driver seems to be the calm, unruffled type and he negotiates the morning traffic with minimal horn use. Most of the roads are in decent shape apart from a few vicious speed bumps and we are soon out of the city and heading roughly northwest. We go through a couple of small towns, over some hills and we are at the car park for the Ellora caves.
As usual there is a throng of touts selling guidebook s and junk such as soapstone elephants. They are ignored as we head straight to the ticket office where we also buy a copy of the official guide book. This is pretty good but lacks a site plan so we initially get lost and go to the end point of this section rather than the beginning. On the way to where we should be we hear, then see, numerous grey hornbills in the trees. R curses her forgetfulness.
Ellora is a complex of over 30 temples dug into a 2km long rocky escarpment face. All are at least 1000 years old and the oldest ones were made in the 600s AD. There are Buddhist, Hindu and Jain temple remains, each gathered together in their oen group. We start with the Buddhist temples, which are quite austere but with some beautiful statues. The Hindu temples are much livelier in style and one of them, the Kailasa temple, involved cutting out by hand and removing 200,000 tons of rock.
Words don't do much justice to the place so there are extra photos today.
To start with it is fairly quiet but soon the school parties begin to arrive. In a couple of the bigger caves there are caretakers who are happy to point out some of the secret features. One hall has quite amazing acoustics and R cannot resist practising her Om chant. The caves are all at a very comfortable temperature but leaving the shade to progress between them is hot work.
We are by no means the only Westerners about but we get a good few requests to pose for photos. One such request is from a teacher who wants the photo for a class project.
We are by no means the only Westerners about but we get a good few requests to pose for photos. One such request is from a teacher who wants the photo for a class project. 
By the time that we get to the Kailasa the place is jumping. After experiencing a pretty hairy crush on one of the dark staircases leading to the upper levels we decide to stay in the better lit areas.
This place is quite something and would merit quiet contemplation. By now the sun is really fierce so we opt out of walking up the hillside to a vantage point overlooking the Kailasa and go in search of a cold Limca. We have finished the first section and it is now 1 p.m.
We find the car and move on to the next parking spot. Our driver suggests that only a couple of the caves at this point are worth visiting. After what we have just seen they are a bit of an anticlimax.
We move on to the group of Jain Temples. Here a caretaker is keen to show us some paintings that have survived fairly intact and with good colour preservation. He is fishing for a tip but it is worth it.
From Ellora we move on to a nearby village which contains the site of the tomb of the last great Mughal Emperor, Aurangzeb. He specified a wish to be buried simply in the open air a wish that held good for 200 years until Lord Curzon decreed that a marble surround be erected. There wasn't a lot to look at really. The things that will stick in the memory are the scorchingly hot paving slabs in the de-shoeing area and the numerous donation boxes that were pointed out, leaving us rather short of small notes.
By now R was starting to display all of the more spectacular symptoms of a cold so we decided to pass on Daulatabad with its one hour climb up a hill and pitch black, bat infested tunnels. We opted for home via the Bibi-qa-Maqbara, more usually known as the Baby Taj. This is very similar to the real thing in many ways with the triple advantages of having much cheaper ticket prices, being much less crowded and of not being in Agra.
We get back to the hotel at around 4.30 and order in black tea, forgetting to say hold the sugar. It goes down anyway. R opts for a doze and D wrestles with the technical problem that has been preventing us making blog posts. More by luck than good judgement he manages this and fires in a post for Saturday.
When R wakes we decide to try the place next door, which describes itself as a Restaurant and Bar. It is an out and out den of iniquity, full of men ordering bottles of Sprite and quarter bottles of whisky. By the time we realise this we have ordered a beer which is consumed rapidly and we move on to the Swad restaurant, much more respectable and unlicensed. We have been recommended to try the Gujrati Thali here which we do. The food just keeps coming and we have to tell them to stop. On the way home we stop off to get some cold cure tablets.
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