Aurangabad?

Everyone is sick – pity us. First Martino was pretty spectacularly unwell and went to the doctor for all sorts of injections and illicit medication. Then the night before last, two other EWB volunteers turned up – Harry and Dave who are doing an electricity generation project out in a village near Pune. Out for dinner and a few beers and I start to ache and shiver. Now Harry has succumbed to this mysterious affliction and, in a daring act of one-upmanship, passed out when they were having dinner last night. So we’ve been sitting around in the flat and feeling generally sorry for ourselves. Good times.

Alright, so I think i’ve pretty much done caves now. It’s enough I think. Aurangabad was our last weekend off and it was pretty amazing. Ajanta and Ellora caves as well as passing by the spectacular Dalautabad fort. Ajanta was peaceful and remote. Blazing sun and then pouring rain and amazing almost 2000 year old Buddhist cave paintings. In contrast, at one of the stops on the way I met a man who I was sure was selling something but no. He just wanted to profess his deep love for the cruder aspects of Ali G. He was pretty gangster. Ellora was also beautiful, though rammed because of a Shiva festival at the nearby temple. Spent the day being shown round and then bought half our guides giftshop for about 1000 rupees. Rishi went to temple and we took a packed jeep back to his village. I counted 24 people but evidently there were one or two on the roof... A couple of hours there – making us very late for our bus and then back to Pune and a pretty inefficient day of work!

I’m off to Kerala for the week tomorrow while Martino sorts his visa in Bombay and Harry and Dave start work (possibly, somewhere). No stop off in Goa in the end as we're saving it for when all the Bombay ppls can make it. My temperature’s dropped back to normal now but this trip may be an interesting one. I'm sure you'll all enjoy the exciting blog installment when I write it up 2 or 3 weeks after the fact ; ).