Aurangabad for four days. Flew in on a Friday.
The caves are both necessary and not enough. You need more than two days to really absorb them. Ajanta especially - the Buddhist murals in some of the caves have survived 2000 years and are still recognizable as paintings of real people, real animals, real cloth. Cave 1 and Cave 17 are the ones to linger in.
Ellora is more varied. Buddhist, Hindu, Jain caves across five kilometres of rock face. The Kailasa temple in Cave 16 is the kind of thing that makes you recalibrate what “ambitious” means. One monolithic temple, carved downward from a single piece of rock. Top-down. No scaffolding possible. The Rashtrakutas wanted something impossible and then built it anyway.
Going back with more time.