Badami
India 2017
We thought we’d get up early so we could walk around before the heat, but we still couldn’t get up when the alarm went off. By the time we had breakfast at our restaurant (they had shira!) it was already quite late — but what can you do, we went walking in the heat anyway.
Badami is surrounded by beautiful fiery cliffs, and caves are carved into them; this is the town’s main attraction. There are also fort ruins and temples on top of the cliff, but we never made it there, to jump ahead a bit.
But let’s take it in order. Along a narrow little street past old clay, but charming houses, we made our way to the cave entrance. Monkeys were everywhere. Some people had them sitting right on their doorstep, eating some dried grass.
On the way to the caves
There were tons of people in the caves. It turned out that today was Saturday, apparently people had come from the nearby villages.
It’s beautiful here; we climbed the stairs carved into the rocks to the farthest caves, and from there there is a magnificent view of the lake.
View of the lake
After Ellora and Ajanta, caves can’t really surprise us anymore, to be honest, but these were still very beautiful — lots of stone carving on the ceiling, on the floor, on the columns. Lots of carved statues. And also a very beautiful reddish color of the rocks.
But somehow the overall atmosphere didn’t sit well with me; I don’t know what it depends on. There were a lot of monkeys here, and I don’t like them and I’m afraid of them. And there were also a lot of people, and it was hard to appreciate the beauty when so many people were crowding around and it was as noisy and chaotic as a bazaar.
Inside the cave
Cave Decorations
One of the four caves
View from the upper caves
Ceiling
Another wall decoration
The place itself is very beautiful, but it didn’t work for us. Maybe someone thinks that travel is constant unbridled fun and joy, but of course that’s not the case. There are bad cities, or maybe your mood just somehow sours on its own and you can’t even properly explain what happened, and everything around you just stops being enjoyable for a while. That’s normal, that’s always how it is — you just have to wait it out, get through it. Not dwell on it and understand that joy simply cannot be constant. And it’s not even that things are bad or sad, it’s just somehow nothing at all. It doesn’t grab you.
But soon a new day will come. And there will be a new different city, better or worse. And in general, everything in this world is so subjective that right now it’s good for you here, but if even the slightest changes in your mood happen, then your perception changes dramatically right away too. And in the very same place it can be much worse or much better.
And there are so many factors influencing me, my mood, Wolfy’s mood. And we’re together, and I don’t know how to have fun when he isn’t in the mood. In short, there are a ton of nuances. And the conclusion is one — the caves, though good in theory, didn’t move us.
After the caves we went to the lake; people used to wash clothes here. We returned home by another little street. There were little wild boars running around there, searching for food in the trash. There was also a tied-up goat and a cute blue house with a staircase up to the roof.
A goat on a tether
Blue House
Probably it would have been possible to find a path up to the rocks, to the fort and the temples, but somehow we didn’t feel like it. We thought that perhaps wild, hungry monkeys lived there. Besides, it was very hot, and we went home.
In the evening we went out for dinner. I had read about a restaurant in some fancy hotel, and I was curious to see it. The restaurant turned out to be very luxurious by Indian standards. The waiters there were well trained, the dishes were porcelain (whereas mostly it was either stainless steel or, if it was a fancier café, plastic plates), the prices were higher than anything we had seen during our whole trip, but not by much, and we decided to stay and eat. We hoped that in such a place they would certainly understand that we wanted something not spicy.
Having dinner
And that’s exactly what happened — we ordered delicious noodles with vegetables, and they made them completely mild, what a great job! Many thanks to them for that; we really wanted to eat something tasty, but not spicy.
