I discovered my love on Buddhist rock craving when I visited Longmen and Yungang Grottoes in China and this love has been cemented when I visited Ajanta Caves. I did my best to spend my weekend break during my business trip in India to see this dream destination. From Mumbai I took an early morning flight to Aurangabad, after landing, a rental car with driver welcomed and directly took me to Ajanta. It was a comfortable ride with interesting view of Indian rural lifestyles and countless cotton and sugar cane fields. I arrived the historic town of Ajanta at 10 AM and had brunch at small restaurant on the way to Ajanta, a little bit surprised, the restaurant was full with Italian and Korean tourists who clearly divided the place into two zones.

It was my guide plan to let me visit Ajanta before lunchtime as he claimed that the place will be quieter and less tourists, and his word seemed to be true as when I was at the parking gates, many tour buses were leaving for lunch. My guide also warned me about tourist scam and informed me all things I need to do to reach the caves. At first I had to buy bus ticket and took the bus from parking and souvenir shop areas to the cave zones. On the bus I met a group of very friendly Tibetan monks from Drammasala, they invited me to visit Dalai Lama if I had time next month. The bus stopped in the nice green garden area where I had to buy another ticket but this time for the caves. Then I climbed the stairs to see the caves which located on the hill next to ticket. The first view of Ajanta was stunning of beautiful horseshoe shape valley with many caves on the cliff. Ajanta was truly amazing and beautiful; each cave has its own charm. Some caves still able to preserve the ancient paintings, the colors of these paintings were unbelievable beautiful. Not only painting, the quality of rock cravings was also impressive with graceful depiction of Buddha and many small motifs. Caves 1, 4, 17, 19 and 26 turned out to be my favorite for their stunning details.

I looked around Ajanta for almost 2.5 hours; the overall experience was great similar to the time I had at Longmen and Yungang, and returned to the car park in the same time that tourist buses backed to Ajanta again. For anyone interesting on my final verdict on Ajanta vs Ellora, I would prefer Ajanta more than Ellora. While artistic and architectural merits of these two sites seemed to be equally impressive, Ajanta was better in terms of location and site protection management than Ellora. Also the single theme of Buddhism in Ajanta made it easier to contemplate Indian artistic development than multi-religious theme in Ellora, at least from my personal perspective.