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Nepal into India, on foot…

November 28th, 2009
posted by Ryan Rowe

On Thursday morning I left the Pokhara Valley on a tourist bus (so-called only because most of the passengers were tourists but which was in fact a ‘local’ bus - see below!) and headed south to Lumbini - the birthplace of the Buddha. The bus took the Siddhartha Highway (note: Gautam Siddhartha was Buddha’s name prior to achieving his enlightenment at Bodhgaya in India) which is a 160km stretch of narrow road through the mountains located south of the city of Pokhara. The scenery was breaktaking - at 7am the sun was just rising and the valley below was covered in fog with the lush green mountainscape rising up out of it like cliffs out of the ocean. I have a beautiful picture which I will upload when I’m back. If you read about bus crashes in the mountains of Nepal in the newspapers, I would imagine this is the place! Places I’ll add to an itinerary for a future visit are Tansen and Sirubari (two mountain villages) and Tashiling (a Tibetan refugee camp).

After seven hours of winding roads on an uncomfortable seat, I arrived in the dusty town of Bhairawa, where I looked for transport to Lumbini. An excited local approached me and urged me to go with him for the trip.

“How much?” I asked.
“30 rupees sir”, he said, spitting a long stream of sweet-smelling tobacco juice into the ground beside him.
“How long until you leave?”
“5 minutes sir!”
“Really? 5 minutes?” I said with a wry smile.
“Yes sir!”

Thinking it would be more like 20 (in fact it turned out to be 40) I climbed on board. The resulting trip turned out to be even more uncomfortable than the preceding ride through the mountains. Picking up new passengers every five minutes, idling in heavy traffic with fumes filling the bus through the open windows, dodging the myraid of obstacles on the single-lane road (cows, pigs, chickens, goats, donkeys, and dogs). Not to mention bicycles with 2 or 3 people on them, cycle-rickshaws, auto-rickshaws, tractors, trucks, cars and buses. Of course the sensible driver will use his horn liberally to indicate he is approaching from behind and is also willing to drive on the wrong side of the road (which is the right side, not the left side) in order to avoid oncoming traffic and consequently lift his foot from the accelerator. Bring your ear plugs! Oh, and if you ever wondered how many people you can fit on a bus in Nepal, the answer is as many as you want!

Anyway it isn’t anything I didn’t sign up for. Bring it on! :)

Lumbini, as I mentioned, is known as the birthplace of the Buddha. Almost immediately upon arriving, I met a Buddhist monk named Choki from Karnataka, India. He had travelled by bus for over three days to Nepal to visit Kathmandu and then come to Lumbini for the Golden Jubilee Ceremony of the 41st Throne Holder of Sakya Order His Holiness The Sakya Trizin. Lol… I wasn’t able to communicate clearly enough with Choki to understand the significance of the event so further research needed. :) He did tell me that the festival would last for six more days.

Choke told me he had been born in India and his parents were originally from Tibet. He had taken a vow of celibacy. He had no desire to get married and seemed a very pious man. Curious, I asked how old he was.

“37″, he said, and to me, “what is your age?”

“31″, I answered, and he said with a twinkle in his eye, “So I am your elder!” :)

It turned out that there were several thousand monks attending while I was there so the timing of my arrival to Lumbini was very serendipitous!

The whole area is very peaceful and there are people everywhere, praying and chanting. These include monks and tourists, many from China, India and Japan. Did you know that there are an estimated 350 million Buddhists worldwide? It is the world’s fourth-largest religion after Christianity, Islam and Hinduism.

Anyway, Choki took me around Lumbini, introducing me to various Buddhist holy sites in the area. The ones that interested me most were the following:

1) Maya Devi Mandir: an archaeological site with brickwork from 300 BC and which is thought to be Nepal’s oldest known man-made structure. The site is enclosed by a building, and to enter it you must take off your shoes. Inside you get to see the excavated site (not impressively detailed/explained) but the centrepiece is the spot where the Buddha is thought to have been born. It is presumed so based on a stome that the Indian Buddhist emperor Ashoka placed there. At the spot there is a sculpture where you can see pilgrims placing prayers on a slip of paper and tucking it with money into little cracks (you are allowed to touch it).

Lana - where did you come up with the name Devi for your charity? (Lana is a friend from my days at Concordia University in Montreal - she started a group in Canada called Devi to collect beauty products, toiletries, and over-the-counter pharmaceuticals and donate them to people in need, since so much goes to waste (think of airlines and hotels for example). Great initiative! Please check out her project here:

Devi - Conscious Giving

Devi on Facebook

2) Eternal Peace Lamp: a flame that burns brightly 24 hours a day and has the following inscription oin a plaque next to it: “This Eternal Lamp was set aflame on November 1st, 1986 by then His Royal Highness Prince Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev to commemorate the International Year of Peace. The flame was brought from United Nations (New York, U.S.A.) to integrate peace and harmony among the global community.”

I don’t know what is meant by the flame was ‘brought’ and I don’t know if it has really been burning non-stop for the last 23 years - am curious to know. But one interesting fact - the prince mentioned is suspected by conspiracy theorists to have arranged the massacre of his family including the presiding king, leading to his ascension to the throne in 2001. Some of you may be familiar with Nepal’s political troubles over the last decade or so. Gyanendra was deposed as king in 2008 and stripped of his royal privileges for reasons unrelated to the death of his family (in which he has never been implicated).

3) the beautiful garden and temple prior to entering the area known as the Sacred Garden: a very tranquil place that was donated to Lumbini by a Tibetan monk who was a teacher of the Dalai Lama (according to Choki) - he died two years ago. Not sure of his name but I am keen to look it up.

Interesting factbite which I didn’t know - the Dalai Lama was presented with honourary Canadian citizenship in 2006. Only four other individuals have ever been granted such an award: Raoul Wallenberg (Holocaust hero), Nelson Mandela, Aun San Suu Kyi, HH Aga Khan. The honourary citizenship does not entitle them to rights of a normal Canadian so it is merely symbolic. The Dalai Lama also won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.

4) Morning Puja with the monks: This was a meditation session attended by over a thousand monks at least, of ages from 7 or 8 years old to 80 at least. All had their heads closely shaved and some carried books with writing in Sanskrit in them (I think). They all wore robes that wrapped around one shoulder, some were red and others were orange. What I found interesting was that you could not tell who was rich or poor from the clothes they wore. I took a peek inside the temple where a ceremony was underway. Choki was obliged to participate so he couldn’t provide me with much background information.

Yesterday morning I left Lumbini and headed to Sunauli, where I crossed the Nepal-India border on foot and caught a three-hour local bus to the town of Gorakhpur. This time I bought myself two seats so that I could have a bit of leg room! At 55 rupees each I decided to splurge for the comfort! Gorakhpur is where I intended to arrange my onward journey to Varanasi and then Kolkata, hopefully via the Indian train system. I had been trying for days to arrange this online / through tourist agents (marking everything up for fee of course) in Nepal but had had no luck. As a last resort I decided I would be willing to cough up USD 200 for a flight to Kolkata if I had to. After my experience on the buses I was not going to go through it again especially on a 20hr journey to Kolkata! But then something told me I should leave my fate with the gods and maybe I would have more luck going directly to the train station in Gorakhpur, in India itself. And I did! I got lucky and managed to get Second Class A/C tickets for both destinations. :)

So that’s it! I’m on the train now to Varanasi and getting tired of typing on my blackberry… More stories later! :)

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