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| should be called Monkey Island |
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| Gateway to India with the Taj behind |
Today we visited Elephanta Caves on Gharapuri Island (another World Heritage Site.) This island is one of many in Mumbai’s harbour. It is 10K across the harbour and takes about an hour each way by boat. We get the boat from the “Gateway of India” which is an arch built as a monument visitors arriving by boat would have first seen in the city of Bombay years ago. Right next to this is also the Taj hotel that was bombed a few years ago.
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| shows the scale of the caves |
These caves are a collection of huge shrines with stone sculptures and reliefs of Hindu Gods and Goddesses. The size of the carvings is hard to tell from the photos because there are very few people in any of them. The caves have nothing to do with elephants; there are none on the island, but when explorers first arrived on the island they found a carving of an elephant. Many of the sculptures were damaged by the explorers who found them, but they are still wonderful to see.
Once we get to the island we have to walk about half way up the island to get to the caves. The walk was relatively strenuous up the 120 steps – it was so humid here that by the time we got to the top I was DRENCHED! The entire way up the stairs are lined with tiny shops and stalls – big surprise! There are also a ton of monkeys on the island which pay little attention to visitors. Monkeys I hate to say it have become so commonplace in India that I don’t pay them much attention anymore.
The afternoon was filled with little other than laundry and the royal wedding. I’m not a royal watcher in the least, but I probably watched most of it. Fortunately it was on in the afternoon India-time and I didn’t have to get up in the middle of the night like I vaguely remember doing with my mom for the last royal wedding. The wedding was a pretty big deal on the ship. They were serving canapés and dinner menu items that were on the wedding menu and showed the CNN feed on a huge screen in the ship’s theatre. They even planned a ‘disco’ night in one of the lounges based on the wedding playlist.
These caves are a collection of huge shrines with stone sculptures and reliefs of Hindu Gods and Goddesses. The size of the carvings is hard to tell from the photos because there are very few people in any of them. The caves have nothing to do with elephants; there are none on the island, but when explorers first arrived on the island they found a carving of an elephant. Many of the sculptures were damaged by the explorers who found them, but they are still wonderful to see.
Once we get to the island we have to walk about half way up the island to get to the caves. The walk was relatively strenuous up the 120 steps – it was so humid here that by the time we got to the top I was DRENCHED! The entire way up the stairs are lined with tiny shops and stalls – big surprise! There are also a ton of monkeys on the island which pay little attention to visitors. Monkeys I hate to say it have become so commonplace in 
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