Lumbini was nice. And hot, burning and unbelievably hot.
I never understood why people complain about humidity, after all, water is nice and cool no? I don’t like to have dry eyes, and so I thought some humid, moisty air is nice and refreshing. Boy was I wrong.
Even on the 10 hour lasting bus ride (instead of the more appealing 7) I started to feel the heat. When we weren’t even halfway there yet…
I felt how in every breath, there was less air than there should be, actually it was even worse than on the high mountain altitudes. And so I got welcomed by nature to hot climate for the first time.
It was insane, as I just sat in a chair, the sweat was pouring off my body, non stop.. The whole day, no break, sweating like a pig. And the whole point about the bad of humidity is, my sweat didn’t evaporate like it’s supposed to. Sweating didn’t work! And I could try to tell my body that, it just mercilessly kept going.
I had a really hard time to breathe, and started panicking a bit, not getting enough air with every breath, and knowing there is no escape or place where it’s cool or I could breathe normal, cold air. I just had to try to calm myself and slow down the breathing. I barely slept those first 2 days. I lied down, felt the sweat drops popping everywhere on my body, prickling and tickling annoyingly, felt the lack of oxygen and the warmth of the air, and ran outside in the hopes of some more air, which I didn’t get there. Then I tried to calm down, go back to bed, and repeat that whole process…
Cold showers also didn’t really help, you just became more wet with water that never dries, even towels don’t work. It’s weird and funny.
But enough ranting on the heat and humidity, let’s just say I had a little bit of a bad moment the first 2 days, it was kind of tough.
Lumbini was nice.
The place where Buddha is born, and huge it was!
The first day where I scraped my courage together and left the guest house, daring to get right under that burning sun, I visited the Maya Devi temple. This is the temple where a birth place pillar marker was placed, on the location of what supposedly would be Buddha’s birth.
It was a long walk amongst what felt to be the hugest garden I’ve ever been in my life. The temple had a straight road to it of about 20 minutes of walking, while it also had a ring road around it, which was about 40-50 minutes of walking, that road went across big water ponds surrounding the Maya Devi temple. No bicycles or rikshaws allowed on that road.
Not knowing where I was or where I was supposed to go, I took the same direction I saw 2 buddhist monk guys in orange robes go, what turned out to be the ring road. Very slowly walking in this burning heat, I enjoyed a magnificent greatness of the huge place of grass, flowers, trees and ponds, what I guess had been the palace where Buddha was raised and lived until his early twenties.
After that I turned back to the guest house, for some local Lumbini village walking and resting and sweating intermezzo’s.
The town had a nice atmosphere, which I think was the closeness to India, and the more Indian spirit present in the people, together with a slightly changing culture, but still present Nepali style in the people’s eyes.
The heat slowed everything down, the view was far and flat, with trees and green fields of rice as far as the eye can stretch. The trees reminded of Jesus depictions, the paintings where you saw the guy teaching or sitting.
…
So that was the main ‘attraction’ right there, the very place where Buddha was born, but it was way bigger than this! Apparently, a lot of countries acknowledge Buddha’s birth, importance and value to human existence, and built tribute temples in the whole, tremendously huge place that actually is the Lumbini complex.
The next day, I recommendedly rented a bike for a 100 rupees, about 60 eurocents, for a whole day, and cycled through that whole complex, visiting a ton of Buddhist temples, in tremendously different styles and architectures, built by countries all over the world. It was a nice experience, and the temples were rather beautiful. Well, most of them, some slightly felt like they ‘had’ to be placed to maybe compete with a rivaling neighbor country.
A slight disappointment I surely had, when I noticed the temples were not really meditation places of silence and rest, but more like tourist attractions to take your picture and get out of there again. It was low tourist season because of the heat, but still there were noisy and in my opinion disrespectful tourists in a few of the places. And the temples mostly had a nicely decorated altar, but just a barren floor that was not really appealing to stay on.
Nonetheless, it was a nice experience, and I returned back to the guest house after the heat became unbearable.
That same day, I took a bus to Bhairawa(ha, sometimes added), which was a one hour drive to the Nepalese city very close to the border.
Arriving there, the city was not that appealing, so I asked a rikshaw driver to get me to Sunauli, which is the city on the Indian side of things.
…
He brought me, and where I saw the sign of ‘welcome to India’, things kind of changed. Immediately I noticed the honking became more aggressive, longer, persistent, nasty honking, instead of the rather funny ‘meep meep’ Nepal tends to prefer.
Faces were less smiley, people with guns at the border looked bored and serious at the same time, the street got more busy, filth on the street quadrupled.
A guy checked my passport, after which I apparently needed to go back a couple of meters, to get an immigration stamp.
At that office, I had to wait for 10 minutes, to get a form, where I basically had to fill in all the details as I did on my visa registration form.
Filling those in, a guy sat with my passport and form at a computer for 10 or 15 more minutes, scanning and filling in text fields, repeating that process for multiple times.
Then, I got a ‘departure’ stamp on my Nepalese visa, and I could cross the border. The guy had to check my passport again and told me I need a stamp a few meters further.
Arriving there, I needed to fill in all the exact data again…
He went to a computer, filling in the data again, leaving me waiting again.
Then I could continue, in the filthy street with aggressive honking that was Sunauli.
Since I disliked this place even more than Bhairawa, I hopped on a bus to Gorakhpur, the place where a train station to Varanasi was, the current goal destination.
I waited 30 or 40 minutes in the bus, until it got completely stuffed with people, standing and pushing, noone smiling, everyone Western style looking at the floor. A few discussions in the ununderstandable Hindi rambling were had between passengers and the money collector guy, some money was re-exchanged, and after what didn’t look like eternity, but definitely a very long time, the loaded, burning hot bus departed from that Sunauli hole. Well, with ‘it departed’ I mean it started honking for 5 more minutes and almost killed a few motorbike drivers, making its way on the road and out of Sunauli.
I was very tired, as I slept only a few hours for the past 2 or 3 nights, and also getting quite hungry. I hadn’t eaten that evening, and it was getting 7 or 8pm. Also, I didn’t buy water because it was pretty expensive compared to Nepal. All perfect conditions for annoyance and frustration.
The bus ride took about 4 hours, and it was completely dark and like 11.30pm on arrival in Gorakhpur.
The whole place looked like a festival. Carriages with food, shouting people, filth, trash, and cow poop on the floor, people lying between it, dirty restaurants, a ton of traffic, and a horde of people.
As I fell asleep about 30 minutes before arriving, I was really hazy and my contact lenses were dry and annoyed my eyes. Combined with the thirst and hunger, lack of sleep, carrying my heavy backpack, small backpack on the front, guitar in my hand, I now had to find a place to sleep.
I luckily saw many signs of hotels and guest houses, right at the bus stop, as my fear was that like in Nepal, everything would close around 10pm and I wouldn’t be able to find a place tonight.
Maybe fortunately, but maybe unfortunately, the place was more Western, in the sense that it wasn’t oriented purely on tourist people, just on people passing by there, Indian people. All the food and stuff wasn’t seriously overpriced, and there appeared to be more of a standard in regards to prices, less bargaining and being charged 4 times more than a local.
I entered a guest house, had to go up some stairs, and heard the message “Sorry, we’re full”.
Ok, I’ll try the next one. Same story.
Next one, ‘full’.
Next one, same.
The sixth (!) one I tried, had a room available. In retrospect, I think for some reason the earlier five just didn’t want me, for some kind of reason.
So I got a room for 300 Indian rupees, which is alot more expensive than the same amount of Nepalese rupees. It’s close to 4 euro’s. The most I payed for a room in a long while. And it was a filthy room.
The floor was brown, it smelled like poo, the ‘included tv’ was all brown and the buttons were duked in and not working, the sink was brown, the bed sheet was ripped in many places… The worst room I had on this whole travel so far.
The whole town had a feeling of dirtiness, carelessness, bad smells and hastiness to get out of there.
But what to do, it was getting close to midnight… So I took the room, at least it had a fan and some water.
I felt extremely bad, and annoyed, with all the latest occurrences and the place I was in now. I wanted to get out of there, I felt terribly lonely and missed home, and even just a friendly face.
It felt like I was the only non-Indian guy there, and all the Indian people were so dead serious and careless, it felt like Europe. I had sensations of wanting to just sit and cry… And the heat, the burning heat. No-one to talk to, or explain/express what I was experiencing, filth everywhere, no place to silently rest. The sounds of aggressive honking continuously, the unhappy faces all around, all the stories of Indian horror occurrences that people had been telling me for the last 2 months in Nepal. It was terrible.
But I could sleep a little bit, just hoping that I wouldn’t get flees or lice from the dirty bed sheet and room. I did get a very big and nice gecko on my wall, the biggest one I had seen yet.
The next day, I tried to get up really early to catch a train, but I didn’t understand the system very well. There was the train station itself, and a ticket reservation system about 10 minutes walking from the train station. I went there first, only to find out I could just get a ticket in the train station.
It was like 6 ‘o clock in the morning, and already burning hot, a tremendous mass of people, the festival crowded feeling continued.
I entered the train station and saw 7 rows of about 30-40 people… Boards were in Hindi language, no-one seemed to speak English, the ‘tourist information’ booth was empty, … so I decided to just pick the seemingly shortest row and go for it. I waited in the row for about 20 minutes, got pretty annoyed by this guy sporadically touching my back, and the heat, and the emotions in general. I got to the front of the queue, and the guy in the booth barely spoke English, I refused to go away before understanding though, so people behind me got annoyed as well. After a minute or 2 he left the chair to go ask someone something, and he came back to tell me I needed to pick another queue… Really?
So another 20 minutes of waiting in another queue. There was a guy in front of me, who started talking to me, and spoke English. And he was actually quite helpful. Not wanting to sell or gain anything, he just was in the queue himself, and was a student who was genuinely interested in me. He explained me a thing or two, and his friend went to ask for more information about the train I needed.
When I got to the front of the queue, it was too late to take the train to Varanasi, it departed 5 minutes earlier. I could not get a last minute ticket, because they are valid for 3 hours only, and the next Varanasi train was at 4pm, while it was about 7.30am at the time.
I had to come back at around 2pm, to go in the queue again and get my ticket, which would be a mysterious ‘general class’, not the classes I heard of exist, and then I could get on the train the same day.
I don’t remember who gave me the tip or idea, but I went back to the reservation place, and got a ticket for the train the same day, AC class. I needed that AC, I was looking forward so badly to a bit of relief from this continuous heat. How I managed, I don’t know, I had to queue again multiple times, not as long, to get to someone who spoke a bit of English, made me fill in some train ticket reservation form, had me queue again, had me correct the form, had me queue again… And then said something about a ‘waiting list’ or whatever… But I had a piece of paper in my hand, and paid money for it, so I supposed I was holding my ticket, out of this dump.
But the checkout time in the hotel was 12 ‘o clock at noon, so that means I had to kill 4 hours in this terrible place I didn’t want to be in at all…
And that’s where the universe heard my cries of helplessness. A guy from Chili, South America, had exactly the same problem, and was checking out at 12 ‘o clock, in await for his train 5 hours later, just like me. The first non-Indian guy I saw, that spoke a bit of English. We had lunch together, and he had previously traveled India for 6 months, so he gave me alot of information, confirmed my feelings in the midst of that chaos, confirmed that this place was pretty terrible, and it’s all normal and the way it goes.
Before meeting him though, I did receive a bunch of support after mailing home to a few deer people, they managed to calm me a bit, and get a bit of hearings for my issues and emotional state. That was a big deal and relief, and dampened the intensity of these negative states quite a bit, however they were still quite present.
So I had lunch with this guy, and we sat down in the train station for all the time we needed to kill. It was such a relief that I could drop my attention, just focus on this conversation, and let go of all this tension for a bit.
He guided me quite a bit in the process of finding and getting on the train, and explained me some more things about how it works.
I found out where and when I needed to go, felt so much better and more confident, and continued alone in the crazy mass of people.
People sleeping between the trash, some guy starts urinating on the railways, some other guy is singing Hindi mantras out loud, a guy is drumming on a cooking pan, a guy with one arm is looking at me for money…
This crazy place, this madness, this filth and business, this way of living… What feels like lawlessness, where the poor literally sleep on the street, passed by by belly business men, where chaos and people as far as the eye can stretch are your normal, everyday way of being, where the nonchalance and carelessness is as Western as back home – this way is just the way it is, where money spins the bottle like anywhere, where something special still is going on, where I wanted to run away from as far as possible, where I start to get used to, and maybe like, this way of madness, this game of bargain and discussion, this clash of wills and personality, this allowance of close to anything, this acceptance of whatever will happen, this street cow poo avoiding game, the ugly, the things you don’t want to see but will see, the things that are the way they are…
The stories come together quite a bit,
I think that, truly I arrived, indubitably so, convinced and unturnaroundably so, in the crazy, famous and infamous place they usually refer to as ‘India’.
Writting from a computer on an internet cafe, happy reading!
