Today's plan was to visit Aihole and Pattadakal. Since we wanted to avoid the crowds, decided to go to Aihole by 8.00 AM. Aihole is about 45 minutes drive from Badami. To save time, we had cup noodles for breakfast and started early.
Road from Badami to Aihole goes via Pattadakal. The road is in good condition and it was a pleasant drive. There wasn't much crowd in Aihole. Aihole has 125 temples in 9 complexes. The most popular one is Durga Temple complex. We went there first and took the services of a guide to explain us about the temple complex.
Aihole is dated to 6th Century CE. It was the cradle of Chalukya architecture experimentation. They kept experimenting with various styles of temple building. The chronology of architectural sites in Karnataka is Aihole - Badami - Pattadakal - Belur & Halebidu. Or as our guide explained "Aihole is elementary school where they were taught the basics. Badami is High School. Pattadakal is College. Belur & Halebidu are Universities"
The Durga Temple complex gains its name from the largest temple there - Durg Temple (Fort temple). It is a beautiful temple dated variedly between 6th to 8th centuries. It has a semicircular roudned exterior with carvings in its walls. There are amorous couple stone carvings that our guide quaintly called "happy couple" carvings.
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| Durg Temple |
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| Romantic Pose |
As we went around the other temples in the complex, crowds of school children started trickling in. We were glad that we had come a little earlier. These temples were used as living quarters by local people some 200 years back before the ASI took over. So the temples are called by the names of the local people who lived there. Like Gaudara Gudi Temple, Lad Khan Temple, Huchi Malli temple and so on.
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| Mallikarjun Temple complex |
After shooting tons of photos at Durga temple complex, we walked to Meguti Hill Jain temple. The road leading to the hill was slushy with cow dung and water. Had to step carefully. It is a short climb to Mehuti hill temple. At the first level is a Buddhist temple and at the top is a Jain temple. The top has remnants of fort walls and offers a breathtaking view of the surroundings. Not many people come up here. In fact there was only one other person who was there. He seemed to have settled there for the day with a backpack, water bottle and a lap top.
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| Steps leading to Meguti Hill |
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| Buddhist temple atop Meguti Hill |
As we came down from the hill, it was getting hot. We walked further down to Ravana Phadi, a cave temple. By this time we were overwhelmed with rock carvings. But the Dancing Shiva carving inside this temple shook us out of our tiredness. It is a human sized carving that is life like. With human size Saptakarnis looking at him.
Our last stop was Huchi Malli temple. This has a roof carving of Murugan astride his peacock. Said to be the only Murugan carvving in this area.
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| Murugan astride his peacock |
Clicking pictures in Aihole is like trying to drink up a lake's water. There is so much to see and it leaves you jaded after a while. Even after all this, we still had covered only half of Aihole. We walked back to the Durga Temple complex where we had parked our car.
The crowd had grown exponentially. There were a gazillion school buses and vans. All this crowd will be going next to Pattadakal. So we decided to keep Pattadakal visit for tomorrow. Drove back to Badami for some much needed rest. Part 2 of Day3 will continue in next post.
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