24th April, 2011
After a good breakfast we headed to Phantom Rock.
Phantom Rock
We had to pass the rubber plantation to reach the phantom rock. We admired rubber trickled down and got collected. I saw a snake free in the wild for the first time in my life. I am not sure which snake it was but it disappeared quickly.
When we reached the Phantom Rock it turned out to be a googly :-). The rock was supposed to look like Phantom's skull, but it just looked liked another rock. Still, we pictured the rock from different angles
J.
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| Rubber being collected |
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| Phantom Rock |
Wayanad heritage museum
We stopped by at the heritage museum. What struk me were the burial stones. Burial stones dated back to about 1000 years. They had three sections - bottom section told how the person died, second section showed how angels took the soul, third section shows the soul residing with either Shiva or Krishna. There were pottery pieces, weapons and other artifacts retrieved by excavations or from the tribals.
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| Burial Stone at the Muesum |
Edakkal Caves We reached the Edakkal caves at about 11 am. The Qualis couldn't go close to the caves as the road was broken in between. So we had to trek. It was sunny, unlike the previous day when the weather was pleasant and cool. The roads leading to the caves were all at 60 / 75 degrees so ascend was pretty difficult. There was a huge crowd when we reached the caves. They delayed issuing the tickets by about 30 minutes because there was a huge crowd already inside the caves. Once we got our tickets we began the ascend. There were about 300 steps and some tricky trekking stretch areas before we reached the caves.
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| Hoarding from the ASI |
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| Ascend to the caves |
Again at the entrance of the caves, we had to wait, so that some people come out of the cave.
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| People coming out of the Cave |
The caves are divided into lower and upper caves. The lower cave wasn't too huge and we didn't find any inscriptions there. The upper cave had lots of pictorial carvings and some inscriptions. They belong to Neolithic period of the Late Stone Age and date from about 1000BC. The pictorial carvings had wheels, human forms, some kind of animals, and one particular carving looked like lord Narashima. It looked very interesting and wondered what they all meant.
From here we tried to reach Thovarimala, which had rocks with inscriptions, but couldn't find our way to that place.
We headed back to Bangalore and by the time everyone reached Bangalore it was 12 am.
1 comment:
burial stones r "maastigallu" = maha sati kallu n "veeragallu" = veera kallu that u find across s.india
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