A Batty trip to Elephanta

Last Sunday I visited Elephanta Caves. We were a group of 30. Our prime purpose was to observe bats.

There are added advantages of a trip to Elephanta. One of them is this unique perspective of The Gateway of India from the steps leading to the ferry.

Elephanta Caves is mandatory for every visitor to Mumbai. And it was a Sunday! But the crowd management was efficient, the way Mumbai is wont to do. Where would these water bottles end up, I wondered.  

For an extra ten Rupees, the ferry operator allowed us to go on the upper deck. It was a hot summer day, but the breeze blew away the heat as soon as the ferry started moving.

It is difficult not to get excited by the vast expanse of the sea. And when the ships come into view, the delight becomes childlike. I remembered my first visit to Elephanta Caves, as part of the school picnic. It was a long time ago, decades before it got the World Heritage status.

The ships came in various shapes, sizes and colours. And there were gulls, black-headed and brown-headed. The gulls, our bird expert informed us, are migratory coming as far as from Central Asia and Europe. We speculated about the ships, their country of origin, their cargo, their purpose etc.

It takes an hour to reach Elephanta island. And it is close to Butcher Island, which has crude oil tanks. The power plant and the nuclear reactor on the mainland were shrouded in haze, an indicator of the air quality.

Once on the Elephanta island, we marched towards the caves, pausing often to look at birds, insects and trees.

Finally, the caves! But overrun by tourists. Tourists touting selfie-sticks in the dim light. I captured the heritage sculptures, rather mechanically, on my phone camera.

My mind was on the bats, which were hard to come by. People had probably scared them away. We managed to see a clutch and these photos show how advanced phone cameras have got.

On the ferry back to the mainland, I resolved to come again, probably on a cooler and less crowded day, to have a closer and longer look at the sculptures.

The DSLR pictures on this post have dirt from the sensor. It is a reminder to get the camera serviced.

This post is dedicated to my soulmate who loves my idiosyncratic writing and the photos, notwithstanding the tiny specks of dirt. But for her goading, this post would not have seen daylight.

Postscript: At the point where we assembled to begin this trip, there stood a tall Peepul tree. And on top the tree roosted a colony of shy bats. They were vegetarian bats, living only on fruits. The ones that we went in search of were a bit more sinister.