Hey all...we are in BOMBAY!!!!

You might not be able to read this when I post it - I can't get to the blog right now - but I wanted to say hello and tell you that we are good :)

We left Hampi in a cloud of dust taking some fantastic(ly straight :) roads and landed in Bijapur. What a GREAT town!!! Not at all touristy and it was SO refreshing!!! It was tough to get A out of the cushy bed and cushy hotel (a business hotel that was about the same price that we paid for the Hampi place but about 10 times cleaner and 20 times nicer :) Bijapur is a Muslim town - home of Adil Shah's empire right after the sacking of the Vijaynagar Hindu empire (that's Hampi :) and it's just 180kms up the road :) Adil Shah built 2 huge monuments, one at either end of town. (more on this later)

We left Bijapur early the next morning after getting up while it was still dark, checking out the second big monument and hitting the long road to Lonavala...a 440 km day!!! We had some very interesting roads for the first half, small but fun and scenic, and the second half was the same big road we ripped it down when we left Pune for Belguam 6 weeks ago. We even stopped at the same restaurant (I can't believe I remembered it :) and then hit the 4 lane north. Finding the big road to Mumbai was easier (a lot easier!!!) than I thought and then we were dicing it up with some drivers that were suffering a serious case of phallus minutia and we all the sudden arrived in Lonavala. We couldn't be less impressed...and we couldn't get a room in any of the hotels that we wanted and the others were so outrageously priced and so obviously not worth it we headed back towards Karla (where the caves are that we wanted to see) and checked out the MTDC tourist home - Maharastra Tourist Development Corporation. These can be pretty decent - we stayed in a similar place in Mandu. It was reasonably priced and it was really nice (for that price :) so we booked in for 2 nights.

We had gotten up so early the day before that we had a bit of a lie in and then went in search of the caves. The first one is Karla cave and it's the largest, oldest Buddhist cave in India (there must be older ones, but not this big?). It is similar, but we think MUCH better, than some of the ones we have seen at Ajanta and Ellora. It does have it's drawbacks - it's just the one decent cave by itself (there are a few smaller ones, too) and they have parked a massive Hindu temple right in the entryway! The walk up was very busy, but everyone was going to the temple - there were maybe 5 of us for the cave only :) Interestingly, the temple is for one of the lesser Hindu godesses (she only has 2 temples in all of India) and people go to her to pray for children...and when your wish is granted you bring up your chicken or your goat to be sacrificed in thanks. There is a chopping block at a small temple at the bottom of the hill and an abbatoir a little further down the road where the goats were queued up...

The second set of caves is Bhaja and they are across the valley from Karla...and not very easy to find as there is no Hindu temple there :) We drove where we thought it should be and just about the time we were going to give up and try another road A spotted a small blue sign (all the archiological sites have blue signs) and lo and behold it was what we were looking for. The tourist information place said you drove up to the caves but this was a bit of a climb (with signs telling you you had to pay just up ahead :) and when we got up to the booth A had to wake the guy to pay the entry fee - we were the only ones there. Wow, though, talk about spectacular!!! Nineteen caves and a smaller site than Ajanta or Ellora, also much earlier (2nd-1st century B.C.) when they did not use the image of Buddha as they did later, but they had stupas and wheels to represent the Buddha. There was one cave that had 14 massive carved stupas all grouped together. The caves here were also amazing, and except for a group of 4 Indian young men (3 of whom requested to have their photos taken with us :) we had the place to ourselves - that was really nice!!! There were also some large under rock storage tanks with water in them - this part of Maharastra gets 5-7 meters of rain during the monsoon!!!!

After the caves we went for a ride to an area where there was a third cave and a dam, but we enjoyed the ride and never found either :) We got back and almost immediately went out to the Lonavala train station to book our train tickets for the next morning's trip to Bombay. We wanted to have a full day (not ride in the dark) and not have to carry the moto kit around all day (Bombay is 110km from Lonavala) so we opted for the train. It was an experience just to get the tickets (I can't believe Paul an Jenny did this regularly!!! We were at a small station and it's a bit of a process, at a larger station it must be a nightmare!) and the train journey in this morning was...eye-opening :) We couldn't get a reservation on the train we wanted as it was leaving too soon and the list had been posted, so we bought the return and rocked up at 4:20 this morning to buy our tickets and catch the train.

More on Bombay later...we like it here, though - it's very clean!!!

Must go catch the train back!!!!