Bhimbetka Rock Shelters & Bhojpur Temple Day Trip from Bhopal — Paleolithic Rock Art and the Giant Shiva Linga

A dusty two-lane road slides south out of Bhopal and, within an hour, the noise of the city thins to a wind that moves through low sal forests and limestone outcrops. The first glimpse of Bhimbetka is not a single monument but a collection of weathered boulders—stones turned into rooms by millennia of erosion—each with ochre and charcoal marks that refuse to be modern. Standing beneath a painted overhang, the palms of early humans feel less like an exhibit and more like a raw human record: hunters, dancers, and animals pressed into rock with pigments that have survived tens of thousands of years.