Aurangabad - interesting place..

Thankfully, we arrived in aurangabad on tie, but the time was 4am. Being the classic travellers we are, we hadn't organised accommodation, so we to search for the best rates in town. This turned out to be a rather long process, as we initially found a double bed with air con for one thousand rupees (ten pounds) but we thought this was too expensive for low season, especially for the state of the room! So we went on a tour of town in a rickshaw, for what must have been 30 minutes, but everywhere was more expensive, so we settled that we go back to the first place, Tourists home.
We slept in that morning, and then ventured into aurangabad town, and see what it had to offer. Turns out it has very little indeed! In fact, its a horrible town. Dusty, dirty and very little to do. Was a bit frustrating that we had 3 days here, but we were looking forward to doing the ellora caves the next day.
We had organised a tour in which we were given a taxi to take us to the ellora caves. They were about 30 km in distance from ellora, but were well worth going to see! They were quite spectacular. These man made caves, built over 200 years, as a place of worship. There were Buddhist caves, Hindu caves, and another religion of some sort. The amount of detail that was put into these temples was incredible. There were 30 caves in total, scattered along the hillside. Quite remarkable.
After this, we went to visit this temple next door. It looked spectacular from the outside, but as soon as you got closer, it got worse and worse, until you enter, and are shoved through like cattle, in metal fencing around and into the temple, which was quite frankly disgusting. It was full of topless greasy Indian men hosing themselves down with water, and then praying to one of their many gods. It made me realise how much India is prostituting itself to tourism. This temple must have been spectacular back in the day, but now its surrounded by haglers, touts, and advertisement, with rules of what you must and must not do in the temple? Such a shame.
We headed back to the hostel, only to find out that one of the guys on our tour, who we thought was working for the company,was actually also on the tour! Very embarrassing, as we treated him as if he was working for the company all day, when he had also paid for the tour! Oh well.
Our final day consisted of nothing exciting, other than WiFi, and a big supper before catching a train to Hyderabad later that night. We were especially early for this one!

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