we took a night train from mumbai to aurangabad...the town is named for aurangzeb, one of the formal mughal rulers...there are three reasons to go to aurangabad...one, bibi qa maqbara is located there...(otherwise known as the poor man's taj)...two, the caves at ellora are only an hour away...and three, the caves at ajanta are only 2-3 hours away...our first day we arrived in the early morning, so the three of us (ben joined us) slept in our hotel room for a few hours...nothing is open at 6am anywho...in the afternoon we walked to bibi qa maqbara...apparently no one else walks in this town, because we got a lot of strange looks...then again, we are three foreigners, two with long hair...(ben's got long blond hair...i'd kill to have his hair)...the poor man's taj is quite a lot like the better known taj mahal in agra...but it's cheaper, and smaller...as has happened several times previously, many of the indian tourists there asked to take pictures with us...
the second day we arranged to go to ellora to see the caves...since the caves at elephanta island were my idea (i'm the one of the three of us that always reads the guidebook) and those weren't all that great, ben and layna weren't super keen to see these caves...i myself wasn't too confident...but these caves were AWESOME...there are 34 of them at ellora...the first 12 are buddhist, the next bunch hindu, and the last 5 are jain...i should explain that none of these are actual caves...they're all man made excavations generally in a line...the entrance ticket booth is perpendicular to cave 16, you have to walk to one end to see the buddhist ones, then come back to the middle and walk all the way to the other end to see the jain caves...cave 16 receives the most attention of all of them...it's HUGE...according to lonely planet, it's twice the space of the parthenon in athens, and 1.5 times as high...the temple in the middle is still an active temple...there were a LOT of people there, and it was by far the loudest cave...yet again, we took pictures with more random people...ben and i were invited to take a picture with a school group that had arranged itself on some steps...after a while of feeling like celebrities, we finally had to just walk out...we ended up spending 3.5 hours at the caves, and even skipped a number of them...maybe it sounds rude, but after a while, all buddhas look the same...so do shivas, and every other god...we were caved out...
the third city to which we traveled with ben is called hyderabad...layna and i hadn't originally planned to go that far south...but back in the states, ben worked with a guy who had lived in india for 3 yrs (is that right?) and had a lot of friends, and he passed on a lot of contact info to ben...ben convinced us to go to hyderabad with the promise of meeting upper class indians...hyderabad is also sometimes called cyberabad...together, hyderabad and bengaluru make up the IT center of india...hyderabad definitely doesn't have a lot of tourist sights, and there weren't any touts in front of the train station...the first night there ben called up one of his contacts, he and layna went out and joined a birthday party...i'm not going to repeat their stories...hee hee...
the second day those two slept in...when we left the hotel room to do our normal walking around the city, i aimed toward the one landmark that sounded slightly worth seeing...charminar...it's not all that exciting, but oh well...along the way, an indian guy fell in with us, and kept trying to talk to us...he hardly spoke any english, and after a while, we tried to lose him...but as soon as one of us would get away, he'd fall in with one of the other two...as we walked into the charminar area, he tried to walk in with us...but the security guys stopped him...then he tried to get layna to pay for him...but she didn't...charminar is a big tower of sorts, and as we got up, we looked down and saw the guy waiting for us!!! he waited for quite a while...so we hatched a plan...whoeva went down first was going to take him on a wild goose chase, and we'd all meet up on the steps of a mosque (men's only mosque, said to be able to hold 10,000 people)...but the guy didn't follow ben when he went down first!!! when layna and i walked out, i walked in one direction, she walked in the other...he followed her...it took her half an hour to get rid of him...and even so, she had to tell him directly to go away...which he did, finally...or so we thought...after finding each other on the steps, we started walking back...and the guy showed up again!!! we told him again that he needed to go away, and he said that he would, or at least indicated that, but he wanted to shake the hands of layna and i first...fine...after shaking my hand he poked me in the boob, hard!!! he knew he had done wrong, because he took off, fast...argh...
hyderabad is known for one other thing besides it's IT world...a food called biryani...biryani is steamed, spiced, fragrant rice...apparently hyderabad has the best in india...from both ben's friend and another random indian we met in mumbai, we were told about a certain restaurant...our last evening in hyderabad, we decided to see what it was all about...after trying three different rickshaw drivers (one of whom thought we wanted to go somewhere else then couldn't even get us back to where he picked us up) we finally found the restaurant...HUGE portions...and good...but it's rice, and i've never gotten that excited about rice...tasty, but rice...
one more thing to see in hyderabad is a buddha statue in the middle of the lake...i've again forgotten the specifics of the story, but after it was carved, as it was being transported, the boat sank, along with the buddha..."miraculously" when it was raised a number of years later, there was reputedly no damage...so a small island was built in the middle of the lake, and that's where it has stayed...you can take a boat out to get a little closer...
the tourist quota on the night train from hyderabad to bengaluru is 2...only 2 tourists per class on the entire train!! which was a bit of a problem, since there were three of us...howeva, ben wanted to go out again, and volunteered to stay in hyderabad an extra evening, and meet up with us later...
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