Photo Travelogue :
Read first part - Here!
When going to Sanjay Gandhi National Park, a visit to these ancient buddhist caves are highly recommended. Its amazing to see how the monks lived in the past, carving out the caves from the rocks ( a single rock in this case ) with the various Viharas and Chaityas. Maharashtra has plenty of other buddhist sites too, but those are far away - mostly in the western ghat hills - dotted all over the Syhadris. Hence, if one wants to visit caves nearer the city, Kanheri is the perfect spot.
I took a bus from right inside the national park...
driving through the dense forest to the middle...
dense means really dense...
this road is supposedly very haunted too...
after twenty minutes, we reach the caves site in middle of the national park...
from the base...
lots of stairs to climb to reach the caves...
ticket-ghar and some info about the caves...
approaching the caves...climbing those stairs can get tiring...duh!
the caves carved from a single basalt rock formation...incredible, haan?
some interesting carvings here...
moi, trying to touch it...
there's a central meditation/conference hall too with lots of pillars on either side...
time to explore the outsides...
I go around the site... come across many tourists that day...
all viewing the national park views ahead and chatting animatedly...
one can get 360 degree views of the entire national park from up here...its all green...
time to go down...
there's a cafeteria at the mid-base, I see people making a bee-line for it...
all coming to quench their thirst, so did I...as I admired the caves from that spot...
it was amusing how the guards whistled, ushering everyone out of the site since it was closing...
finally, it was time for me to leave the site as well, I had other spooky plans in the park that day...
The Kanheri Caves are a group of caves and rock-cut monuments cut into a massive basalt outcrop in the forests of the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, on the island of Salsette in the western outskirts of Mumbai, India. The Kanheri Caves in the centre of the park were an important Buddhist learning centre and pilgrimage site sculpted by Buddhist monks between the 9th and the 1st centuries BCE ( wiki ).
Address : Sanjay Gandhi National Park, Borivali ( east ), Maharashtra
Read next part - Here! Stay tuned for all my road, rail, flight, cruise & walk trips.
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