This post (like the rest of them) won't do these places justice but I just want to give a little update on our last whirlwind of a week in India. We basically slept on a train every night and saw a new town each day... it was tiring but well worth it!
After traveling by train, then bus, then another bus, we stopped for an afternoon in Khajuro, a world Unesco heritage sight and the location of the famous Kamasutra temples. They were definitely interesting and well worth visitng but nothing like you'd expect. More entertaining was the "light show" at night that we are glad we didn't pay the extra 250 rupees for... we're convinced someone's kid was holding a flashlight with colored cellophane over the light to illuminate the temples :)
A lovely and peaceful town, Bodhgaya is home to the place where Buddha sat under the bodhi tree until he reached enlightenment. We've been super excited to visit this town and hoped it would yield more than our visit to Lumbini, Nepal where Buddha was born. The town is absolultey lovely, small and walkable, flowers everywhere and as many Buddist monastaries as houses. We visited the Japanese monastery where we watched in on a meditation class (taught in Thai) and the Thailand monastery that had some of the craziest wall murals- sharks, rainbows, drowning people all included... The Bodhi tree and surrounding parks were wonderfully and expectedly peaceful.
And here is just a picture of an adorable little trouble maker we met along the way, too cute :)
Kolkata, our last Indian city, was a hot blur of too much food and lots of walking around. Once we reached the city we immediately caught on to how different it is from the rest of India. Nowhere is the disparity of income so obvious as it is in Kolkata. The extremes of poverty and wealth are casually juxtaposed with people sleeping on the streets outside of houses with Mercedes. That being said, we were surprised as to how clean, metropolitan and well developed it was compared to the rest of India. But then again we had been spending most of our time in small towns in the desert. We saw some wonderful sights and ate entirely too much food- a truly great send off from India and onto Thailand!
Here's a picture from the palace's garden in Bundi, a tiny town packed full of blue houses and mangoes. This is one sight that isn't too well looked after so you can walk around freely (minus the "guard" following you, trying to convince you to buy another ticket in addition to the one you bought at the entrance) and into any part of the building- areas that will surely be restricted when someone gets wise to its degradation. But this is the lovely ladies garden from way back when.
After traveling by train, then bus, then another bus, we stopped for an afternoon in Khajuro, a world Unesco heritage sight and the location of the famous Kamasutra temples. They were definitely interesting and well worth visitng but nothing like you'd expect. More entertaining was the "light show" at night that we are glad we didn't pay the extra 250 rupees for... we're convinced someone's kid was holding a flashlight with colored cellophane over the light to illuminate the temples :)
Varanasi! It has been on my life to-do list to visit this holy city and take a boat ride on the Ganges River for years so I was thrilled when we got there. Many people had warned us about how intense Varanasi is so we were expecting something awful when we got there but we luckily never came across it. Now that I write this I realize this might sound awful but it really isn't; its fascinating and its just India. People from all over India come to Varanasi as its one of the holiest cities in the world due to its proximity to the Ganges river. Buddhists believe that if you die and are cleansed in the waters of the Ganges, the cycle of birth and death is broken so many people come here to bathe in the ghats and die in order to be cremated by the river. A very unfortunate reality is that while the river is respected in theory, it is not respected in practice. Along the 7 km stretch of river in Varanasi there are about 30 sewage pipes running into it. That amounts to some seriously polluted water. Its an amazing scene to see people bathing, washing their clothes and hair, going for a swim, etc. with rotting trash floating next to them. Also amazing and very intense were the burning ghats. Families perform funeral ceremonies on the river where the bodies of their loved ones are cleansed in the river and then burned next to it. No words or description will ever explain this scene, it truly is one of those things you just have to see for yourself.
A lovely and peaceful town, Bodhgaya is home to the place where Buddha sat under the bodhi tree until he reached enlightenment. We've been super excited to visit this town and hoped it would yield more than our visit to Lumbini, Nepal where Buddha was born. The town is absolultey lovely, small and walkable, flowers everywhere and as many Buddist monastaries as houses. We visited the Japanese monastery where we watched in on a meditation class (taught in Thai) and the Thailand monastery that had some of the craziest wall murals- sharks, rainbows, drowning people all included... The Bodhi tree and surrounding parks were wonderfully and expectedly peaceful.
And here is just a picture of an adorable little trouble maker we met along the way, too cute :)
Kolkata, our last Indian city, was a hot blur of too much food and lots of walking around. Once we reached the city we immediately caught on to how different it is from the rest of India. Nowhere is the disparity of income so obvious as it is in Kolkata. The extremes of poverty and wealth are casually juxtaposed with people sleeping on the streets outside of houses with Mercedes. That being said, we were surprised as to how clean, metropolitan and well developed it was compared to the rest of India. But then again we had been spending most of our time in small towns in the desert. We saw some wonderful sights and ate entirely too much food- a truly great send off from India and onto Thailand!
No comments:
Post a Comment