December 21-30, 2011: Orchha, Jhansi and Gwalior

The morning of the 21st was cold and foggy in Khajuraho.  I had breakfast as the fog began to clear about 9:30 and it was sunny by 10.  After a quick visit to Khajuraho's museum, with some beautiful sculpture from the Chandela era, including a dancing Ganesha, the elephant headed god, I left town about 11 on a big jeep bound for Chhartarpur to the west.  Arriving about 12:30, I left on a 1:30 bus bound further west.  The bus was crowded, but I had a good seat with sufficient leg room right behind the driver.  The road was bumpy and I noticed that the chassis had a long crack between the wall and the floor in front of me which opened a bit more and then closed with each bump.  The countryside had rocky hills in places, along with fields of newly sown wheat and mustard, and lots of trees.  About 5 we reached the junction to Orchha and I got off and boarded a waiting and very full autorickshaw.  With my pack balanced precariously on my knees I headed the final five miles or so to Orchha.  I got a  hotel and looker around before dark.  Across an old stone bridge was an imposing fort filled with palaces, a wonderful sight.  I visited the bazaar and then had dinner before repairing to my rather dismal room.  I did have hot water, though, for a bucket bath.  It was very cold that night in that room.  I slept wearing my trousers, fleece, windbreaker and two pairs of socks under three thin blankets and still was cold.  What's more, all night there was an annoying man singing over a loudspeaker.  I later found out that he and at least one other are singing the Ramayana non-stop.  They have been at it for two years now and have three more to go.

Despite the dismal room, the cold at night and in the early morning, and the constant Ramayana, I really enjoyed Orchha -- one of my favorite places in India.  It was cold in my room the next morning (59 degrees), so I got out early into the cold morning and walked around the relatively quiet bazaar, with beggars and saddhus gathered in front of the Rama Raja Temple.  The story is that a rani (queen) brought a statue of Rama with her to Orchha and brought it into the palace.  The statue refused to be moved and so the palace, which is right in the bazaar area, had to be made into a temple.  Nearby is the tall, majestic temple, the Chatarbhuj Temple, where the Rama statue was supposed to be installed.  I went into it, on a hill above the bazaar and looked around.  It was deserted in the early morning and with its large cruciform hall it looks more like a church inside than a Hindu temple.  There were great views of the town and the fort and palaces across the river.

I had a long breakfast on a roof top cafe as the sun warmed the air and was down to a tee shirt by 10:30 or so.  This cafe is run by a Northern Irish woman, Didi, and her Indian husband, Loyal, and they were very interesting to talk to about life in Orchha and in India generally.  After breakfast, I walked across the 17th century stone bridge and spent several  hours exploring the fort and palaces on the other side.  Orchha (which means "hidden") was founded by the Bundela Dynasty in the early 1500's.  The fort occupies an island perhaps a mile long in the Betwa River, which flows north to the Yamuna.  The fort walls surrounding the island are mostly intact and the Betwa, with boulder strewn banks, is particularly scenic on the east side.  The west side, facing the town, has little water this time of year.  I went through several gates and first entered the oldest of the palaces, the 16th century, five or so story high Raj Mahal.  I wandered around for an hour or so, from level to level.  There were some good paintings, some restored, on the walls, including a room depicting all ten incarnations of Vishnu.  (Rama is number 8 and number 10 is yet to come.)  There were great views and a couple of small bee hives inside.  Actually, they looked more like hornets or wasps.  I then visited the even bigger and more spectacular Jehangir Mahal, just east of the Raj Mahal and built in the early 17th century for the arrival of the Mughal Emperor Jehangir.  His father Akbar had defeated the Bundelas in the late 16th century, but they then became allies.  There are fewer paintings inside but many interesting rooms and great views.  I also saw some vultures on the roofs.  It must have been a fabulous palace at one time.  On the east side are a few remaining blue tiles and a beautifully carved main entrance.  Another large building is even further east, called the camel stables, but it looks more like some sort of pleasure pavilion, with more great views from the top.  By then it was about 3:30 and I recrossed the bridge back into town and returned to the Chatarburj Temple where the attendant let me and several others up the steep steps through dark passages to the roof for some more fantastic views of the town and fort.  Two big vultures had nests up there.  By then I was hungry and had an early dinner with an interesting couple now living in Moab, Utah, but formerly from Alaska.  He was a helicopter rescue pilot and she formerly worked for the city of Wasilla.  She remembers after she moved away hearing from her friend the town librarian that the woman elected mayor after she had left was trying to ban books from the city library.

After another cold night, I was up and out before 8 the next morning and walked to the bazaar to watch the activity and visit a nearby somewhat ruined palace of a long ago prince.  I had another long breakfast at Didi's in  the sun.  I read the newspapers there, about a cold wave hitting the north of India, with a low of 2.6 C. (37 or so F.) in Kanpur, a little north.  It Orchha it warmed up about 10 and was pleasant until about 4 or 5.  About 11:30 I headed into the fort again.  A small palace north of the two big ones was built for a famous concubine/singer and I walked through its ruins and gardens.  A hamman, or bath, is nearby, and a gate leading to the small whitewashed temple where the guy is singing the Ramayana.  I spied the loudspeakers in a tree and wondered how to disable them.

I went through another gate and walked through trees and scrub past grazing cows to yet another gate through the walls leading to the rocky shore of the Betwa.  I scrambled over the wide rocky area to the fast flowing river, which was clear and looked clean. Forest was on the other side.  It was quite scenic.  I sat for a while and then continued north along the fort walls.  A group of women crossed the river, wading into it about waist high, with bundles of firewood on their heads.  I eventually reentered the fort through another gate and walked past abandoned temples and small patches of wheat to the northern end of the island.  A stairway led down to the river and the confluence of the two branches of the Betwa.  I reentered the fort and headed south past the several ruined temples and the wheat patches.  Some of the temples, or perhaps one was a palace, had people apparently living in them and cattle penned in them.  It was all very interesting.  I reached the Jehangir Mahal at last and rested for a while in the adjacent Sheesh Mahal, a more recent palace now a hotel.  The Bundelas eventually abandoned Orchha, in the late 1700's I think, and this palace was built by a subsequent ruler after the area had been deserted for years.  I had dinner that night on a rooftop restaurant that, two days before Christmas, had put up a forlorn little plastic Christmas tree decorated with bells and Santa Clauses.  Orchha now gets lots of foreign tourists.  Didi told me that in 1993 when she first came to India it rated just one line in her Lonely Planet guidebook.

I again had breakfast at Didi's the next morning and had a long talk with her.  About 11 I took an autorickshaw into Jhansi, only about ten miles away and visited the large fort there.  I spent about three hours wandering around inside.  I was the only foreigner among lots of Indians, so I had my photo taken many times and many times answered where I was from, what was my name and how I liked India.  One man, a retired army colonel, was quite interesting.  This fort is famous as the stronghold of the Rani of Jhansi, one of the leaders of the revolt in 1857.  She and her horse, with her adopted son on her back, supposedly leaped off the castle walls as the British took the fort.  The spot is marked and if the horse leaped there it could not have survived without breaking its legs and the rani could hardly have escaped injury.  There were parrots and lots of macaques in the fort, some of the macaques a little aggressive.  The views of Jhansi from the fort were very hazy, with white haze below blue sky above.

Leaving the fort, I walked to the nearby Rani Mahal, the former residence of the Rani, with some paintings and a durbar hall, and then took a couple of autorickshaws back to Orchha.  I shared the first, in the city itself, with three women and a girl.  One of the women apparently proposed marriage, translated by the driver.  I declined.  Back in Orchha, I sat on the terrace of my hotel looking at the fort for a while and then walked into the fort just before sundown.  I met an Australian couple who were staying at the Sheesh Mahal Hotel in the fort and they invited me to have Christmas Eve dinner at the hotel.  They were quite interesting, working around the world recording the sounds of nature in the wild and selling the recordings.  We were joined by a Czech couple and had a great dinner, to the accompaniment of three sometimes very loud and even frantic musicians.  The Czechs and I walked back to town about 11 and the streets were almost deserted, with all the shops shut.

The next morning was Christmas and I was out about 8 to walk into the fort to see the main, eastern entrance to the Jehangir Mahal in the early morning sunshine.  It was beautiful there, and deserted.  I found about twenty huge bee hives, most of them more or less two feet by two feet in size, along the eaves of the southeast corner of the Jehangir Mahal.  Lots of dead bees littered the ground below.  It was too cold yet for there to be much bee activity.  About 9:30 I walked into the Sheesh Mahal Hotel to use the bathroom.  There was a squat toilet in a little room up the stairs with a fantastic view of the fort grounds.  On the roof was a nice patio with rooms off it and great views.  I came down into the dining room and had breakfast with Sarah and Andrew, the Australian couple.  After breakfast I walked around the southern end of the fort, past derelict havelis (mansions) of court officials, up onto the walls and bastions, and eventually out the walls through a gate to the rocky banks of the river.  I walked to a temple inhabited by a couple of saddhus and then back into the fort, passing more derelict old buildings in the scrub.  Some women were tending water buffalo and cutting thin branches for firewood.

I returned to town about 3 and had lunch and then walked south to the Betwa and the royal chhatris of the Bundelas.  These are cenotaphs commemorating rajas and other family members.  They look somewhat like temples and were quite imposing in the setting sun.  There are something like ten or fifteen of them and several are maybe 50 to 100 feet high.  I climbed to the top of one.  Parrots and vultures flew around, the parrots noisily and the vultures silently except for the flap of their huge wings.  I had Christmas dinner with Sarah and Andrew at the Sheesh Mahal, a special dinner, but only about $8.

I got up and out a bit later the next morning and walked around the bazaar watching the flower sellers, the saddhus and all the other activity.  The armed guard at the Ram Raja Temple wouldn't let me in with my bag, but I could see a ceremony was taking place inside.  Afterwards, free food, a rice and vegetable dish, was distributed to people outside the temple.  I walked again into the Chatarburj Temple and then went to breakfast.  Didi's was closed for Christmas and the next day.  In the afternoon I walked a little west of town to the large Lakshmi Temple on the top of a hill.  There are interesting paintings inside, some from the Bundela  era and some more recent showing the British attacking the Rani of Jhansi and her forces.  There were great views from the top of the town and countryside.  While up there I was startled when three vultures took off at my approach.  I continued further west, with great views back towards the Lakshmi Temple and eventually reached the little village of Ganj and just beyond that an old city gate and the old city walls.  I climbed up on the walls and could see how far they went and how big the city once was.  I walked to a bastion and then climbed down to a dusty cricket pitch lined with stones, with the village boys asking if I could play cricket.  I walked through the village and back into town.  I had dinner again with Sarah and Andrew and the Czech couple,  this time at a very good restaurant in town.  It was markedly colder that day.  Indians came into the restaurant all bundled up in heavy jackets, scarves and wool caps.

It was cold the next morning.  I later found out it had been down to 3 degrees Celsius the night before, about 37 Fahrenheit.  I got out about 8 and walked down to the river for a view of the chhatris in the early morning light.  I crossed the bridge and had a male macaque race past me across the long and narrow bridge.  I walked back to the bazaar.  One guy had 64 bowls of different colors of the powder used to put  religious marks on foreheads.  He told me what some of the colors were for.  After breakfast at Didi's I walked to the nature reserve on the opposite bank of the Betwa south of town.  The forest there was very dry and I spent a couple of hours wandering around, eventually reaching the river.  I saw some deer, the larger sambar deer and some smaller deer that I think were chital, but I couldn't see their spots as the sun was in my eyes.  I spent a couple of hours at Didi's in the afternoon and about 5 wandered into the fort again until dark.  I met Andrew for dinner (Sarah was sick) and had dinner with him and a guy from Singapore I had met earlier.

It was very cold the next morning -- down to 57 degrees in my room.  I got out about 8 and walked into the fort and then to the bazaar.  This time the guard at the Ram Raja Temple, which is painted white and yellow and looks more like a palace than a temple, let me enter with my bag and I watched the 9 am ceremony when they open the doors of the sanctuary to show the Rama statue.  A crowd stood outside, sang and then pelted the sanctuary with flowers.  The statue of Ram, along with three others (his wife Sita, his brother Lakshman and the monkey general Hanuman, I think), were also shown on video screens.  After the ceremony, the crowd lined up and a Brahmin priest dispensed water with a little spoon from an urn.  The people drank the water and then passed their wet hands over their hair.

I had a final breakfast at Didi's and then left on an autorickshaw for Jhansi about 11.  I caught a 12:30 bus headed northwest to Gwalior on a very bumpy road in the middle of being converted from a two lane road to a divided highway.  We passed more wheat and mustard and quite a bit of barren land, with a few hills here and there.  About 4 we reached Gwalior, a big city with almost a million people, and I got a hotel and walked to the nearby train station to see about getting a ticket to Bhopal, my next stop.  There was a separate line for foreigners and several other categories of people, including women, MPs, ex-MPs, members of state legislative assemblies and "freedom fighters."  I got in line but it wasn't moving, so I gave up and went to one of the ticket brokers outside who will get tickets for you.  I paid a commission of a dollar and it was certainly worth avoiding a long wait in line.  You can get train tickets online now, so booking trains is much easier than it was.  It was cold in Gwalior at night, but I had two big coverlets on my bed and was quite warm, much better than in Orchha.

The next morning I left about 11 on a city tour in an open air little bus with seven Indian tourists and they were friendly and interesting.  We visited a modern Hindu temple on the outskirts of town, then the beautiful 16th century tomb of Ghaus Mohammed, with many beautiful jali screens (stone screens with designs that let in light).  Next to it is the tomb of Tansen, a renowned singer in the Moghul era, with a tamarind tree growing nearby with leaves that are eaten by aspiring singers.  Our next stop was an archeological museum in a 16th century palace at the base of the hill with Gwalior's massive fort.  Next, we headed to the Jai Vilas Palace, where I left the tour and spent almost three hours wandering around.

This huge palace was built in the 1870's by the Mahraja of Gwalior, one of the five Indian princes that Britain allowed a 21 gun salute.  He had remained loyal during the 1857 revolt, although 6500 of his troops mutinied.  The royal family, the Scindias, still live in part of it, but something like 35 rooms are now a museum.  It is quite an opulent palace.  A large room serves as a sort of museum and shrine to the Maharaja who died in 2001, with many photos on display, plus personal items like his golf and cricket equipment, sunglasses, lighters, ties and the like.  He was elected to the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament, several times and was a minister, for railroads and later aviation, in several Congress governments.  There were photos of him with Indian leaders, and with Clinton, Castro and Saddam Hussein.

The rooms also contained some beautiful and interesting furnishings.  There was a children's room, with a giant teddy bear and a rocking horse.  The huge bathroom, maybe 30 or 40 feet long by 15 or 20 wide, had a sink and bathtub at one end and a lone toilet at the other end.  On the bathroom wall was a painting of a naked woman on her back, with one leg strategically positioned.  In other rooms was a photo of a former maharaja and a former viceroy (Hardinge, from the 30's, I think) posing with eight freshly shot tigers, and a rather explicit painting of Leda and the swan.  Leda seem to be enjoying herself and I assume the swan did, too.

Another wing had even more fabulous furnishings.  On the ground floor was a dining room with three tables for 40 or so, the center one with the tracks of a miniature train that delivered brandy and cigars to the guests.  The miniature train was on display, too.  Next door was a billiard room with lots of stuffed tigers.  From the foyer, with a red glass chandelier,  you ascend a crystal staircase to reach the huge durbar hall, lavishly furnished.  Hanging from the ceiling are two huge chandeliers, each weighing 3.5 tons.  Supposedly, the strength of the ceiling was tested by having a two kilometer ramp built and eight elephants walked up to the roof.

The next morning about 10 I arrived at the foot of the hill containing Gwalior's magnificent fort and began the steep climb up.  The fort is one of India's finest, said to dominate central India and called by Babur the "pearl in the necklace of fortresses of India."  It's on a rocky hill almost two miles long and about 300 feet above the city.  The ramp up, past several gates, is about a half mile long.  At the top is the palace built by Man Singh, the Maharajah who built the fort around 1500.  The palace towers above the fort walls and the city below, situated on a rocky base.  There are traces of blue, green and yellow tiles on its walls and round towers, including a row of yellow ducks, and elephants and tigers and banana trees.  Inside it is less imposing, with two small courts with rooms off the courts.  Below are two stories of rooms, used for the hot months by Man Singh but subsequently used by the Moghuls after they captured the fort as dungeons.  I wandered around, and then wandered around some other, but inferior palaces to the north.  I then headed south to see three temples dating much earlier, from around the 10th century or earlier.

Massive walls appear to surround the whole hilltop, and its a very big area.  I went out the west gate down into a rocky ravine lined with Jain statues carved into the ravine walls.  There are something like twenty of them, one over 50 feet high and many others maybe twenty feet or so.  The faces and genitals were defaced by Babur's invading army, but some have been restored.  I walked back to Man Singh's Palace and sat there for a while about 4, as lots of Indians were gathering, and then made my way down the steep ramp, out the final gate and into the still bustling bazaar for a short walk before taking an autorickshaw back to my hotel.

December 15 -20, 2011: Chitrakut and Khajuraho

It was very foggy and cold in Allahabad on the morning of the 15th as I walked to the Indian Coffee House for breakfast.  Afterwards, I huddled in my not much warmer hotel room until about 10:30 and then left to catch an 11:30 bus to Chitrakut.  The sun was breaking through the fog, but still I could barely see the water in the wide Yamuna River as we crossed it on a new bridge about noon.  The countryside as we headed south and then west was flat and then increasingly hilly, with some rocky hills.  This area, in the Vindhya Hills along the borders of the states of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, is known as Bundelkhand, famous for banditry, though I am happy to say I encountered no bandits.  I did see mustard and newly sown wheat, plus some barren land and mud buildings with roofs of irregular flat tiles.  It looked like a very poor area, and the road was terrible. 

After about four hours we reached the town of Karhi and from there I took an autorickshaw, called a tempo, to Chitrakut, only about five miles away, and got a room in a hotel right on the ghats on the narrow (maybe a hundred feet wide) Mandakini River in an area called Ram Ghat.  Chitrakut is believed to be where Rama and Sita spent eleven of their fourteen years of exile from Ayodhya and is filled with riverside temples.  There are ghats on both sides of the river.  The river here is the border between Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh.  I walked along the ghats to watch all the riverside activity, with some bathers and many colorful boats to take pilgrims and others across and up and down the river.  After dark, it became quite cold and I put on my fleece at long last, along with my thin windbreaker.  Shortly after 6 there was a short aarti (religious ceremony) on the ghat, with only one priest waving a candelabra of flames. I had a not very good noodle and vegetable dinner at a friendly dhaba, a streetside restaurant, and spent an hour or so huddling on the terrace of my hotel next to a fire with several Indians.  The electricity was out.  

I got up and out before 7 the next morning and it was cold but clear.  Quite a few people were bathing in the river and others were floating little flower offerings into the river. Brahmin priests sat on little platforms to perform prayers if requested (and paid for).  There were quite a few monkeys around, both macaques and the larger, more shy langurs, and of course cows.  I walked up and down the river watching all the activity as the sun rose and began to warm things up.  I found a good restaurant and had a delicious breakfast of aloo parantha (a potato filled pancake of sorts), curd, a tomato and potato dish and very sweet pretzel shaped jalebis, all for 40 rupees (80 cents).  

I spent some time on the terrace of my hotel watching the activity below on the ghats and the river and a little later took a tempo a mile or so to a hill called Kamadgiri, supposedly an embodiment of Rama.    There are temples all around it and I took off my sandals and walked the circuit, which took me an hour or so.  There were few pilgrims, but they were friendly.  Less friendly were the aggressive macaques and even an aggressive cow that apparently was used to being fed offerings by pilgrims.  A woman vendor gave it a small melon and a carrot in an attempt to persuade me to buy some from her to feed the cow. First time I have ever been chased by a cow.  (And it was a cow and not a bull.)  I had to step behind posts and a bench, but she was persistent.  Back at Ram Ghat I sat on the terrace talking to a newly-arrived tourist from Liverpool and then we took a boat a bit up river to see another temple, more for the boat ride than for the temple.  We did see an elephant and its mahout along the way.  Back at Ram Ghat I walked along the river until dark and watched the aarti before having a very good thali dinner for 70 rupees.  They kept bringing me extra portions as I finished them. 

It was cold again the next morning and I was up early to watch the activity along the river.  About 10:30 I took a tempo with three others on a terribly potholed road to a temple maybe eight miles away honoring Anasuya along a scenic portion of the Mandakini.  We walked along the rocky banks of the river and visited the big new temple and the small older one, with part of the older one high up against the rocky cliffs backing the temples.  There were lots of pilgrims.  Back at Ram Ghat I walked along the ghats, sat on the terrace overlooking the ghats and watched the evening aarti before another good thali dinner.  The electricity was off and on in Chitrakut and the cold rooms had no hot water, but it was an interesting and friendly place.

It was cold again the next morning as I walked along the ghats and followed pilgrims into some of the riverside temples, with big groups of macaques here and there.  After a final good paratha and curd breakfast, a French guy named Cedric (a captain on a barge hotel plying the canals of Burgundy) took a 10:30 bus south to Satna on a very bumpy road through rolling countryside with many hills.  It took less than three hours to reach Satna and after about an hour’s wait we left on a very crowded bus heading west through flatlands and then hills to Khajuraho, reaching it a little before 7.  It was warmer in Khajuraho that evening than it had been in Chitrakut and we ate outside on a rooftop restaurant.  It became very cold that night, though, and I slept in my clothes under two blankets. 

When I got out the next morning at 8 it was cold and foggy.  I finally substituted shoes for sandals.  The famous temples of Khajuraho were barely visible in the dense fog.  I had a good breakfast, an “English Breakfast” with eggs, baked beans, a fried tomato, bacon and sausage (I was a little worried about Indian sausages) and it was delicious.  I entered the complex containing the western group of temples about 10, just as the fog was clearing, and spent the day there, leaving when they closed at sunset, about 5:30.  The temples of Khajuraho were built by the Chandela dynasty in the 10^th, 11^th and early 12^th centuries and are very intricately carved.  There are five large temples in the western group and several smaller and they are covered with figures.  One temple, a hundred feet high, is said to have over 800 figures.  They are famous because many of the carvings are erotic, including depictions of group and oral sex and even a guy being overly friendly with a horse as an onlooker shields her eyes while keeping one eye on what’s going on.  Actually, only about ten per cent of the figures are erotic and they are all very well done.  The Chandelas abandoned the area under pressure from Muslim invaders about 1200, but Khajuraho was off the major routes of travel and escaped destruction by the Muslims and remained pretty much undisturbed until rediscovered by the British in the 19^th century. 

I had an excellent audio tour as I went along and into the temples and afterwards I walked around the grassy enclosure among the temples on my own.  There were lots of people in the morning, but not many in the afternoon.  With the sun out, it was warm and pleasant, with not a cloud in the sky.  In fact, I think I may not have seen a cloud since I entered India other than the fog and high fog. 

In the late afternoon flocks of green, noisy parrots flew past the temples and into the trees in the compound.  Just outside the compound were a couple of trees filled with what must have been thousands of very noisy parrots.  One guy told me 10,000, but perhaps that is for the whole town.  I had dinner with Cedric and a local guy who was quite interesting talking about dowries and other aspects of local life.  I had visited Khajuraho in 1979 and it was much less developed.  Now it has a Radisson and a Ramada hotel and attracts lots of tourists.

There was little fog the next morning, but it was cold.  After my English Breakfast I rented a bike for the day about 10 and headed to a group of three temples called the Eastern Group.  They are much less visited and right on the edge of the village.  It was quite enjoyable going from temple to temple on my bike passing villagers, water buffalo and the like.  People were friendly but constantly asking for pens or money.  One kid had his pitch distilled down to its essence.  All he uttered was "Give me."  I biked through the town to some Jain temples and they were quite interesting, with great figures, including one of a woman applying eye make-up and another of a woman tying bells around her ankles. 

I headed south of town past bright green wheat fields, with wheat less than a foot high (higher than I’d seen further north in Uttar Pradesh; Khajuraho is in Madhya Pradesh, which is further south), to the less interesting Southern Group of temples, one of which is newly discovered and in pieces around a mound being excavated.  I then biked back to the Eastern Group in the late afternoon as boys from the village played cricket in a dusty area nearby, with water buffalo around.  Finally, I headed west to an early, very different temple, from the late 9^th century, dedicated to the 64 yoginis, followers of Sati.  I stayed there until sunset, with a view of the sunset to the west and the Western Group of temples to the east.  I biked back to the hotel just after sunset.

December 5 - 14, 2011: Uttar Pradesh (Kushinagar - Ayodhya - Lucknow - Kanpur - Allahabad)

I left Varanasi by train about 8 in the morning of December 5th for a tour of some of the less visited cities of Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state with something like 200 million people.  In fact, only four nations have greater populations:  China, India itself, the United States and Indonesia.  Eight of India's fourteen prime ministers have come from Uttar Pradesh.  The morning was chilly and hazy and the train crowded, at least for the first hour and a half or so until the first stop.  But it was a relatively fast train as we traveled through the flat countryside, with some rice stubble, sugar cane, mustard and lots of just plowed or just sprouting fields, probably of newly-planted wheat.  Bound for Gorakpur, the train crossed the wide Ghaghara River, one of the great rivers flowing down from the Nepalese Himalayas to the Ganges, about halfway on our trip and arrived about 12:30.  I had a simple, but not too bad, lunch of potatoes, spinach and chapattis in a discouraging looking roadside restaurant and caught a shared jeep heading east to Kushinagar, arriving about 3.

Kushinagar is one of the four great Buddhist pilgrimage sites, the one where Buddha is believed to have died.  I had hoped to stay in one of the temples but they were all filled with pilgrims, so I had to get an expensive hotel -- about $25, by far the most I have spent in India.  I walked to the park with a temple and stupa in the center, the spot where Buddha is believed to have died.  They are both much restored, by Burmese Buddhists in the 1920's.  This site, like Bodhgaya and Sarnath, was abandoned after being destroyed by Muslims about 1200 and only rediscovered by the British in the 19th century.  Apparently, the British relied on the accounts of Chinese pilgrims from a thousand and more years earlier to find the sites.  Inside the temple is a twenty foot long reclining Buddha, much restored and now with gold leaf, with his hands under his head.  Pilgrims were kneeling all around and praying.  At dusk the temple closed after the Buddha, covered by an orange cloak, was covered by priests and pilgrims with additional red cloaks.  Afterwards I talked with a Burmese guy who told me most of the pilgrims were Burmese, and a Thai monk, who walked out with me through the ruined  brick foundations of monasteries that surround the temple and stupa.  Somewhat surprisingly, there were no other western tourists in Kushinagar, a small town, just a few thousand people, I think.  I talked to a Bengali man who moved here 17 years ago and he told me when he arrived there wasn't much here, just three shops.  Now there are dozens catering to the pilgrims.

I got up and out before 7 the next morning into a very thick fog.  You could see only about 100-150 feet.  I walked to a stupa where Buddha is supposed to have drunk his last water and then to the main temple and stupa, which I had visited the night before.  It was all very nice in the fog, though chilly.  I had switched from shorts to long trousers that morning.  There were many bands of pilgrims in the temple and around the stupa, led by monks with microphones and portable speakers.  The Buddha was again being wrapped in robes of different colors.  Walking around the stupa, I took a photo of a monk and pilgrims kneeling before the stupa and he called me over, gave me his camera and asked me to take photos of them praying.

I had breakfast and then walked about a  half mile out of town, a nice walk under trees in the fog, to a ruined stupa, really just an irregular pile of bricks, where Buddha is supposed to have been cremated.  A band of pilgrims was kneeling and praying on one side. I took a cycle rickshaw back to town as the fog began to lift and headed back to Gorakhpur soon after 10 in a packed jeep -- 15 of us.  We arrived about noon and I immediately got on a bus headed further west to Faizabad.  I would have liked to have gone to the fourth major Buddhist site in the area, Lumbini, where Buddha was born, about 50 miles to the north, but it is just over the Nepal border and with my visa if I leave India I have to wait two months before returning.  The afternoon was overcast and foggy, much like the Central Valley of California can be in the winter, and I suspect for much the same reason, with cold air coming down from the Himalayas (rather than the Sierra Nevada) and condensing when it hits the warmer and moister valley air.  We again crossed the wide Ghaghara just being reaching Faizabad.  It took me a while to find a hotel, but it was a good one.  On the way into town there were Shi'ites celebrating, if that is the right word, Muharram, when Hussein was killed.  They build these colorful paper replicas, called tazias, of his tomb at Karbala in Iraq.

It was foggy again the next morning.  The newspaper reported 50 meters (about 165 feet) visibility the day before.  Temperatures had dropped, too.  Highs were in the low 80's in Varanasi, but had dropped to about 70 with the fog.  Lows were in the high 40's.  About 9 I took a tempo, a shared, large version of an autorickshaw, to Ayodhya, only eight miles or so away.  Ayodhya is considered the birthplace of Rama and has become a place of great controversy over the past two decades.  In 1992 Hindus destroyed the Babri Mosque, built by the Mughal Emperor Babur in the early 1500's after first destroying the Hindu temple on the spot.  They claim the site is the birthplace of Rama, an incarnation of Vishnu and the hero of the epic Ramayana.  Arriving in town, I first climbed the stairs to the Hanuman (the monkey god and an ally of Rama in his war against the evil Ravana) temple in a walled, fortress-like enclosure.  The pilgrims there were friendly and there was lots of activity.  Two soldiers guarded the entrance and I had to run a gauntlet of beggars on the steps.

I then walked to the Rama Janam Bhumi, the site of Rama's birth in the precincts of the former Babri Mosque.  The security was amazing.  I had to deposit my bag and camera and even my pen.  I was led by a man throughout, passing the Indian worshipers at checkpoints.  I had three or four thorough pat-downs, although the soldiers were all very friendly.  There weren't many pilgrims that day.  Finally, I was led through a caged walkway, enclosed on both sides and above, for hundreds of feet in what seemed a sort of labyrinth until we reached the garish little shrine in a white canvas tent that commemorates Rama's birthplace.  I had a short look and then made another long walk through wire enclosures back to near where I had begun, passing a very large army base on the way, with steel fences and guard towers.  Nearby videos, which you could buy, were playing in the little shops showing the destruction of the mosque in 1992 set to martial music.  Young men are using hammers and sledgehammers on the dome of the mosque after they had overwhelmed the guards. This caused all sorts of Hindu-Muslim rioting in India, with thousands of lives lost.

I walked around the town some more.  People were very friendly and I saw no other westerners.  One temple had a courtyard full of cows and saddhus, until the saddhus chased out the cows. There were lots of monkeys all over town.  I walked to the palace of the former raja, and to some temples behind it.  Some painters were repainting one of the palace rooms and showed me around.  I had a good thali lunch for 35 rupees, about 70 cents.  A thali is a metal plate with sections in which they put various kinds of food, mostly cooked vegetables, along with rice and chapattis.  The sun came out about 1 and I walked around town a bit more before taking a tempo back to Faizabad.

In Faizabad I took a cycle rickshaw to the enormous, white-domed Mausoleum of Bahu Begum, a wife of a Nawab of Avadh (or Oudh, as the British spelled it).  I think it was about 150 feet high.  Both going and returning we got stuck in an enormous traffic jam at a railroad crossing.  I've now seen this several times in India.  When the guard rails go down, traffic on each side of the tracks does not stay in the left lane.  Instead, the cars and motorcycles and rickshaws and bicycles and everything else crowds into both lanes, jockeying for position.  Needless to say, after the train passes and the guard rails go up, there is a complete morass, which takes ages to untangle.  I suppose this says something about India.

It was foggy again the next morning and I left by bus about 9 heading west to Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh's capital, with more than two million people.  We traveled on a four lane divided highway, though there were mounds of cow manure patties drying on the median, something you rarely see on four lane divided highways in the United States.  The fog cleared about 11and there was sugar cane and other crops, and lots of trees, to be seen on the way.  Coming into town, we passed a huge new plaza with a statue of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, the dalit, or untouchable, who was independent India's first Law Minister and principal author of its constitution.  Uttar Pradesh is now governed by a predominately dalit party, although it is also supported by what are called OBCs ("other backward castes"), Muslims (also often poor) and others.  The Chief Minister is a woman named Mayawati, often called the Queen of the Dalits, known for building monuments, often with elephants, her party symbol, and for corruption.  There are billboards and posters of her all over Lucknow.

We passed through the old British cantonment on the city outskirts, with the Indian military now in their place, and reached the bus station about noon.  It took me an hour to find a hotel, across from the huge train station, and then I headed downtown after lunch.  I walked by several British era buildings, the huge early 20th century legislative building, the GPO, Christchurch (closed and crumbling) and the yellow buildings on the city's main street, Hazratganj, with newly installed Victorian style street lamps.  I walked and then took a rickshaw to the Shah Najaf Imambara, where that Nawab of Avadh is buried.  Later I visited a bookshop run by a 91 year old man named Ram Advani and spoke with that very friendly and interesting man for about an hour.  He was born in Lahore, educated at Cambridge, taught in Simla during World War II, and opened a bookstore in Lahore after the war.  He moved to Lucknow after partition and his bookstore has been in the same location since 1950. His children and grandchildren all live in Britain.  We were talking about the traffic and he told me that in 1950 you could park your car right in the middle of what is now the hopelessly clogged street in front of his store.  Further down the street I stopped at a place and had one of Lucknow's most famous foods, called a basket chat. The basket is a web of fried potatoes, with aloo tiki (a fried potato patty) inside with other chunks of potato.  This is all covered with sugar sweetened yoghurt, a chutney made from green mangos and lots of other tasty treats, including pomegranate seeds.  It was delicious.  While eating it on a bench on the street, I talked to two medical students, one of whom warned me against speaking to "shabbily dressed" people on the street.

I had a fairly good hotel in Lucknow, the only real problem a Hindu temple nearby which about 5 each morning went into a frenzy of bell ringing for about 20 minutes.  A few minutes after that ended, the Muslim call to prayer would begin.  It was foggy again the next morning and I headed to the Residency.  This is where the British endured a difficult siege during the 1857 Indian Mutiny, as they called it, or the First War of Independence, as the Indians call it. It is an extensive area, something squarish, about a thousand feet by a thousand feet.  During British rule, a good part of India, maybe 40%, was not ruled directly by Britain, but by native princes with a British Resident in each principality as a sort of power behind the throne.  The siege lasted about four and a half months and the many buildings of the Residency area were much damaged or destroyed by cannon fire.  The British left it as was as a memorial and it is quite interesting to wander around the ruin buildings and memorials.  One memorial honors the "Devoted Native Officers and Sepoys" (sepoys are soldiers) who fought on the British side.  It seems that about half of the 3000 people under siege were Indians and about half the 3000 were non-combatants, including women and children.  When a relief column reached Lucknow after three months, only about 1000 had survived, and then it took another two and a half months before another relief column finally ended the siege.  Again, I was the only westerner wandering around.  Lots of Indians, mostly couples enjoying the park, were there.

Afterwards, I walked around some, visiting some huge, early 19th century mausoleums of the Nawabs of Avadh.  They were pretty run down, with boys playing cricket on the dusty grass nearby.  I passed another plaza with a statue of Ambedkar and them took a cycle rickshaw to a famous Lucknow restaurant called Tunday Kebab and ordered a plate of their famous mutton kebabs.  These kebabs are not chunks of meat on skewers, but very mushy patties tenderized by papaya and cooked in oil.  They are served with a sort of spongy round bread and are delicious.  I watched them being cooked in a big wok-like pan in front of the restaurant.  After lunch I walked through the streets and narrow alleys of the neighborhood, called Aminabad.  A woman was ironing in one alley with a huge iron filled with charcoal.  Eventually I took a cycle rickshaw to Lucknow's huge train station to look around.  It is quite attractive, built by the British in that style called Indo-Saracenic.

The next morning the sun was trying to break through the fog soon after 8.  I took a vikram, a shared, large autorickshaw, to the huge Bara Imambara, a tomb built by the Nawabs of Avadh about two hundred years ago. The main hall is 500 feet long and 50 feet high, with no columns. In front is a huge courtyard with a mosque on one side and a five story step well on the other.  When I arrived, fog was swirling through the huge courtyard, but it dissipated about 9:30 as the sun came out.  Above the great hall is a labyrinth of passages that take you to walkways that look down on the two halls and lead to the roof.  It is a lot of fun to wander through the narrow passageways and the views from the roof are great.  I finally met some other western tourists there.  After about three hours I walked further west past other sites.  It had warmed up a bit and I could take off my jacket.  (I hadn't needed a jacket in Varanasi.  I'm still wearing sandals rather than shoes, though, mainly because they are easier to take off at temples and mosques.)  I passed a huge gate, a British built clocktower, and a museum with paintings of the Nawabs of Oudh, or Avadh.  They were Persian, and therefore Shi'ites, and were able to establish their independence from the Mughals in the 1700's.  They were quite cultured, devoted to poetry and the good life.  In the paintings, as time goes by, the nawabs become increasingly corpulent and bejeweled.  The last one, deposed by the British in 1856 for bad governance (one of the causes of the revolt the next year) is painted in a luxurious gown with one of his nipples exposed.  Quite odd.

I continued to the Chotta Imambra, with black and white calligraphy on the exterior and two mini-Taj Mahal tombs in the courtyard.  Black flags and banners were everywhere.  The tenth day of Muharrum, the day Hussein, Mohammed's grandson, was slain at Karbala, had occurred a few days before and there were bloody photos of Shi'as parading in Lucknow and cutting themselves to show their solidarity with Hussein.  Most Indian Muslims are Sunni, and Ram Advani told me most Muslims in Lucknow are Sunni, but the nawabs apparently converted many to their faith.  I took a cycle rickshaw to a neighborhood of narrow streets and alleys called Chowk and wandered around.  There was lots of activity and some women in black chadors.  I took another cycle rickshaw to the Residency again, as I wanted to see the museum, which had been closed the day I had first visited.  I sat on a bench as the sun set behind the trees and watched the boys flying kites on the wide lawn in front of the main residency building.

The sun was out soon after 8 the next morning.  It had felt colder the night before.  I took a vikram, then a cycle rickshaw to La Martiniere, a boys school in the palatial former home of Claude Martin, a Frenchmen who made a fortune working for the Nawabs and the British East India Company in the late 1700's and early 1800's.  It is a huge Indo-Classical building with many classical statues on the roof.  Lots of statues of lions, too.  It was closed on that Sunday morning, but a guy let me in to see the library and the chapel.  Three friendly boys, 13 years old or so, showed me around.  They showed me their dormitory, above the library in a room with beautiful blue and white molding, with classical designs, but in need of conservation.  The many beds in the rooms had mosquito netting.  They told me there were 200 boarders and 3500 day students.  Boys were playing cricket and two were playing ping pong on a cement bench with bricks serving as the net.  One boy had on his school jacket, with the school crest.  On the way, I had seen protestors at a Gandhi statue showing their solidarity with a man named Anna Hazare who was staging a one day hunger strike in Delhi that day to get the government to agree to his anti-corruption reforms.

I left Lucknow about 1 that afternoon on a train from its huge station.  The train was about an hour late, but I spent the time talking to a medical student on his way back to medical school in Mangalore in southern India.  The train was crowded, with five on a seat supposed to seat three.  Lots of people buys unreserved tickets and then squeeze in among those with reserved seats.  I was traveling second class sleeper, with berths that are made into seats in the daytime.  There are also AC class seats, but the windows are smaller and can't be opened, so I prefer traveling second class, although it is dirty and dusty and often crowded.  Beggars and sellers of food and drink and other things came through almost constantly.  One guy was selling belts, another perfume.  The sun was out, though it was hazy, as we passed mustard, some rice harvesting, lots of trees and lots of newly sprouting wheat.  We crossed the very dry Ganges and reached Kanpur after about an  hour and a half.

I found a good hotel and then took a cycle rickshaw to All Souls' Church in the Cantonment, surrounded by Indian Army buildings.  The 150 year old church was closed, with barking dogs guarding it, but a guy let me in and showed me around.  The were lots of plaques inside and memorials outside about the 1857 Siege of Cawnpore (as the British spelled it).  The small party of besieged British were told by the insurgents that they could board boats and sail down the Ganges to Allahabad, but as they were boarding the boats the insurgents raked them with cannon fire and charged them with cavalry.  Only one boat escaped and those that didn't escape were killed.  Outside the church is a statue of an angel and a stone screen, apparently moved to the church from downtown Kanpur after independence.  Posts nearby mark the site of trenches from the fighting.  I walked along the wide streets of the cantonment and eventually made my way by rickshw to the spot on the Ganges where the massacre took place, but there wasn't anything to see but a small temple and the mostly dry bed of the Ganges.

Back in the city center, I watched some friendly boys and young men playing cricket in the dusk in the dusty yard of the former King Emperor Memorial Hall.  In the dark near my hotel I found a big new mall, very clean and modern inside with four levels inside a big atrium.  There was a Christmas tree maybe 40 feet high, with presents nearby and snowflakes above.  There was a food court on the top level, with McDonalds, Pizza Hut, KFC and Indian and Chinese food places.  I had a not very good Chicken Maharajah, India's version of the Big Mac with two chicken patties, and some not very good Baskin Robbins ice cream.  There were lots and lots of people inside and I seemed to be the only westerner.  I had my photo taken.  In fact, I've had my photo taken everywhere.  Many people have cell phones with cameras.

It was sunny the next morning and I walked around Kanpur unsuccessfully looking for some other 1857 sites.  I did find the colonial Christchurch and some other colonial buildings.  I left Kanpur about 11:30 on a three hour train trip east to Allahabad.  The train wasn't too crowded and we passed lots of mustard, trees and newly planted wheat.  I also some some tall red-headed Sarus cranes from the train at small pools of water.  They are the tallest of the cranes.  In Allahabad I got a room with 20 foot ceilings in a dirty hotel near the train station that apparently originally was a stable.  Actually, it turned out to be fairly comfortable except for a hard bed, and I think it is cleaner now than it was when it was a stable.  In the late afternoon I walked over the walkways crossing the tracks and platforms of the train station and walked to Khusru Bagh, with four Mogul tombs.  One is that of Khusru, who rebelled against his father Jahangir and as punishment was blinded and imprisoned in Allahabad.  Later his brother, who became Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal, had him killed to ensure his own succession as Emperor.  Another tomb is that of his mother who is said to have committed suicide with an overdose of opium as she was so distraught with the feuding between her husband and son.  The garden surrounding the tombs was filled with friendly people.  One man from Indore took a photo of me and his two very friendly little children.

There was thick fog again the next morning.  And it was cold.  The newspaper said the low was about 44, the high 68.  I had a good breakfast, with good coffee, at the Indian Coffee House, similar to the one in Simla.  I went back to the hotel waiting for the fog to lift some, and then walked to All Saints' Cathedral nearby.  It was closed, but the Presbyter-in-Charge, the Reverend Gabriel Daud, offered me tea and then let me in and showed me around.  He told me it the largest church in Asia and it is very big.  It's not in the best condition, with broken windows, including some of the stained glass ones. It was decorated for Christmas inside, by his wife, he told me.  He told me on the 24th they set up a creche and thousands come to see it.  His congregation numbers 268.  I also walked to the High Court and talked to some of the black robed, white collared lawyers.  I had down the same at the High Court in Lucknow, and noticed many of the motorcycles were marked "Advocate."

I walked a bit, then took a cycle rickshaw to Anand Bhavan, the Nehru family home.  Actually, there are two homes, one purchased by Motilal Nehru in 1899, a huge place with 52 rooms.  In 1930 he gave it to Congress and it was renamed Swaraj (for "self-government") Bhavan.  In 1927 he built next door a very elegant new Anand Bhavan.  Motilal died in 1931 and his son Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, lived in both.  Indira, his daughter, was born in 1917 in Swaraj Bhavan.  They are both now museums, with many rooms left as they were and many very good photos.  My favorites, I think, were those of both Motilal and Jawaharlal as young lawyers, each sporting white wigs. I spent about three hours there.  There were lots of visitors, including a very big group in white gowns.  I was the only westerner.  A bookstore had some of the books written by Nehru and they looked very interesting.  Afterwards, I walked to the British built Muir College, a beautiful building with a 200 foot tower, now part of Allahabad University.  A kid was practicing bowling cricket balls to his father.  The ball is quite hard and he was bowling with both arms. I then walked to a British era library, another very nice building, and the Queen Victoria Memorial, now lacking any plaque whatsoever. I sat in the park and watched the sun go down through the trees.  Back at my hotel there was a Tibetan Market until 9.  Tibetans come every November and stay until January, selling warm clothing.  I guess people figure Tibetans must know about warm clothing.  One Tibetan woman told me she lives in Delhi.

It was sunny the next morning and I took a vikram to the Sangam, the point at the eastern end of Allahabad where the Yamuna and the Ganges meet.  Actually, Hindus believe that another, underground river, the mythical Saraswati, also meets at this point.  It is very auspicious to bathe here, and in January 2013 it will be particularly auspicious to bathe here, and tens of millions are expected to arrive at what is the world's biggest religious event. I walked along the dusty shoreline.  Lots of poles and electrical wires run through the area, in preparation for when tents are set up for the big gatherings.  People were engaging in puja (religious ceremonies) on the shoreline and getting rowed out to the meeting of the waters.  I joined a group of about twelve in a boat.  Went out to a line of boats where the somewhat greenish Yamuna meets the brown Ganges.  We tied up to a boat that was attached to another boat with a submerged platform between them.  All the members of our party except me, and people from other boats, took turns submerging in the waters standing on the platform..  Men undressed to their shorts while women went in fully clothed.  A priest on the boat conducts pujas, with coconuts.  I saw one guy pouring what looked like milk into the water.  It took over an hour for our group to finish, but it was all interesting.  On the way back, they threw some sort of food to the many birds, hundreds of them, on the water.

Right next to the Sangam (which means "confluence") is a huge, but not particularly photogenic, fort built by Akbar.  The military still uses it and you can go into just a small part of it, with an underground temple and a banyan tree.  I did so and then walked along the walls of the fort along the Yamuna until I reached a garbage filled park with a pillar marking the spot where authority was transferred from the East India Company to the British Crown in 1858.  After that, I headed back to the city center for a late lunch and an internet cafe.

November 28 - December 4, 2011: Varanasi and Sarnath

On the 28th I left Patna on a train bound for Varanasi that left shortly before noon.  We headed west, passing through flat, agricultural land just south of the Ganges River.  There was lots of rice growing and being harvested, but also other crops, under India's constantly hazy sky.  I saw farmers plowing with both oxen and mechanized plows.  I was in a second class compartment, as from Calcutta to Gaya, but it was comfortable enough, though dirty and dusty.

After a while, two girls, one a teenager and one a little younger, sat together  in the seat in front of me.  I could hear their companions encouraging them to speak to me, and eventually the older one did, and I talked off and on with both during the rest of the trip.  They were on their way to Varanasi for their uncle's wedding, and he and about 20 other relatives were also traveling in the carriage.  They were very nice, and spoke fairly good English.  They gave me what they told me was some wedding food:  some sort of dry pastry, a round sweet ball, and some nuts and other tasty goodies, all served to me in a little plate made of dry leaves.  The train made good time for the first three hours, but then we stayed in and around the station in Mughalsarai, just acoss the river from Varanasi, for an hour or so.  Eventually, the train got going again, crossed the Ganges just downriver from Varanasi, and arrived about a quarter to 5.  I took and autorickshaw (basically a three wheeled motorcycle with a chasis built around it, in which Indians can stuff ten or more people) from the station to the old city, found a hotel on one of its narrow lanes, and had dinner.  After dinner, I walked through the old city's narrow lanes to the ghats (the sets of stairs that lead to the river -- there are supposed to be more than 100 ghats lining the Ganges in Varanasi) on the river and walked about in the night.

The next morning I walked to the ghats again and spent a couple of hours or more walking up and down the riverfront.  There was all sorts of activity, though not as much bathing in the river as I expected.  Maybe it is because it is getting colder as winter approaches.  It must be about 60 degrees in the early morning, perhaps even a little colder.  Varanasi is the holiest place on the Ganges, and in fact the holiest place in India, I think.  I'm not quite sure why.  There was a ford here in ancient times, and fords are important in Hinduism as symbolic entries to other worlds.  The principal ghat, Dashashwamedh, celebrates Brahma sacrificing (medh) ten (dash) horses (ashwa).

The river water is extremely dirty, but men strip down (women stay clothed for the most part) and bathe, brush their teeth, drink, and so on.  Saddhus (holy men) bizarrely dressed, usually in yellow or orange, with ash and other markings on their skin, roam around seeking alms.  Priests perform puja (religious ceremonies on the steps for shaven head celebrants.  Nearby on the steps are barbers using razors to shave the heads of men.  Some are also shaving faces.  The pujas are quite interesting to watch.  The priest will place all sorts of stuff on plates in front of the celebrants, including a mound of flour, which the celebrants knead into little balls with Ganges water and perhaps a little milk.  Other stuff, like mashed bananas and little black seeds, might also be added.  And there are flowers, usually orange marigolds, and other stuff on the plates.  The priest leads them in chants.  After finishing, I saw one group board a boat with their offering plates and go out onto the river.  Lots of birds hovered around them as they headed downriver, so I supposed their were tossing food into the river.  Eventually, I made my way north along the river (while the Ganges is generally flowing west to east, it makes a curve in Varanasi and flows south to north along the city) to Manikarnika Ghat, the principal burning ghat.  There were three or four cremation pyres burning, and untouchables, who handle all the burning, scooping up ashes from previous cremations, for deposit in the Ganges, I imagine.  There are huge piles of wood stacked all around, and boats full of wood just offshore.  To die in Varanasi is a good thing:  you instantly attain moksha (I think it's called), or heaven.  Lots of old people come here to die.

Later in the day, after breakfast, some internet time and lunch, I walked through the narrow dirty alleys of the old city.  They can be quite crowded, with cows, and cow shit, and speeding, honking motorcyclists adding to the congestion.  I made my way through the narrow alleys (usually about 6 feet wide, but sometimes maybe only 3-4 feet) to the burning ghat again.  There was much more activity.  It is a very dirty, smoky place, and 10 to 15 pyres were burning.  It takes about three hours for a corpse to burn.  Bodies wrapped in white cloth and covered with bright orange or yellow cloth are brought through the old city's narrow alleys on bamboo stretchers, accompanied by male family members.  The body is first brought down to the Ganges and either immersed in the river or river water is poured over it.  It is then taken to a stack of wood built by the untouchables, the orange or yellow cloth removed, and the white wrapped body placed on top of the woodpile.  More wood is placed on top and the family members, led by one family member with a shaved head and wearing a white dhoti and shawl (so dressed like Gandhi), parade around it.  Eventually, the guy in the dhoti uses a bunch of straw to set it alight.  The fire comes from a sacred flame of Shiva kept nearby.  The family members all stand around and watch.  Usually, there seem to be about 20 of them.

The untouchables tending the fires usually eventually need to use bamboo poles to push the charred, partially burned corpses into positions where they will burn more readily, and they do this skillfully but without much care.  It is a little disconcerting to see a charred torso and head, the arms and legs already burned off, being pushed and shoved by the bamboo poles into a hotter part of the fire.  One of the untouchables told me everything burns but the chest of men and the hips of women, because men's chests are so powerful from work and women's hips from childbirth.  Near the end, an untouchable will pick out the unburned bone with two pieces of wood and give it to the guy in the dhoti, who will take it down to the river and toss it in.  He will then fill an urn with Ganges water, take it to the smoldering remains of the fire, and toss the urn over his head, with his back to the fire, onto the ashes.  Then all disperse rather rapidly.  Cows and dogs and goats hover nearby.  I saw one dog cautiously pawing at something in the burning embers.  Perhaps searching for a bit of the person cremated?  The cows eat the straw used to light the fires and seem to find something to eat on the bright orange and yellow cloth that had covered the bodies on the stretchers.  One of the untouchables told me the oldest son leads the formalities for fathers and the youngest son for mothers.  I was told by various of the untouchables that it takes 200 to 300 kilos of wood for the pyre, so about 440 to 660 pounds, and that the cheapest wood can cost 200 rupees (about $4) a kilo.  The most precious wood, sandalwood, costs much more.  I think they said 2000 rupees a kilo.

I watched until past nightfall and them made my way to the ceremony, the ganga aarti, held each night at the principal ghat.  Actually, there are two different ganga aartis at adjacent ghats and they attract big crowds, about 90% or more Indian, I would say.  They are quite interesting and colorful. Seven guys clad in white robes waved brass censors of incense and large candelabras of fire to music and the incessant clamor of bells.  They blew conch shells before and after the ceremony.  It lasts more than half an hour and I enjoyed it, as did the crowd.  Afterward, I had dinner with a Canadian microbiologist in India for two weeks for the wedding of a colleague and she told me the Ganges has 1.5 million micro-organisms per 10 milliliters of water (so an ounce or so) and that you shouldn't bathe in water with more than 500 micro-organisms.  I thought I had read that the Ganges is so polluted from upstream industrial chemical pollution that nothing can live in it.

I got up early again the next morning to watch all the activity on the ghats and slowly made my way south along the river over about two hours to the southernmost ghat, Assi Ghat.  (Varanasi gets its name because it is located between two tributaries of the Ganges, the Varuna to the north and the Assi to the south.)  On the way, I passed the ghat where washermen and women beat cloths on wooden planks at the river edge to clean them.  They don't appear to use soap, just the force of whipping the clothes against the wood.  One guy was using a pole to beat the dirt out of the clothes.  Big white, or rather whitish, sheets, lined the nearby steps, drying in the sun.  These steps are not very clean.  Water buffalo were wandering on the steps nearby.

At Assi Ghat I had breakfast and then took a cycle rickshaw (basically a three wheeled bicycle with a wider seat behind the pedaler for passengers) to the red  Durga Temple, with a sign requesting that "non-Hindu gentlemen" not enter, then to the museum at the almost century old Banaras Hindu University, and finally to the pontoon bridge that crosses the Ganges during the dry season to Ramnagar.  I walked over the rickety bridge to the riverside fort and palace of the Maharajah of Benares (another name for Varanasi).  The Ganges, at this time of year, is not that wide, maybe between a quarter and a half mile.  At the center of town, there is a very wide sandbank, or more like a dirt bank, on the other side.  During the monsoon the river must be miles wide.  On the buildings along the ghats are markings from a particularly high flood in1978 and they must be 40 or 50 feet above the present river level.  I visited the maharajah's palace and fort in Ramnagar, with a dusty museum inside with lots of weapons, old cars, palanquins and howdahs (the latter for riding elephants), before taking an autorickshaw back to Assi Ghat and having a late lunch.

On the way back to the center along the river, I stopped at another of the city's burning ghats to watch the activity.  Three or four cremations were going on when I arrived about 4, but by the time I left maybe an hour and a half later, there must have been about ten going.  It was fascinating to watch.  Just below me, I watched an touchable build a funeral pyre, and then guide family members as they poured sandalwood powder and little blocks of sandalwood on the pyre.  Ghee (clarified butter) was also squeezed out of plastic bags onto the logs and some black powder was also added.  The body was placed on the wood and more sandalwood powder and ghee was spread onto it.  The pyre really burned well when lit.  All this was happening only maybe 20 feet below me.  I walked back along the river after nightfall and watched another ganga aarti, this one with five yellow-clad celebrants, but with basically the same routine as the night before.

The next morning I got down to the river early again to watch all the activity.  It is all very interesting, but you do have to put up with persistent touts who want you to take a boat ride, have a massage, or buy something else off them, and they just won't take no for an answer.  I try to totally ignore them.  I made my way north, upriver, past the Manikarnika burning ghat, and eventually reached as far north as somewhere beyond the Alamgir Mosque (Alamgir is another name for the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb) high above the river.  River activity decreases as you head away from the center, but there are interesting things to see, including some massive, but run down, buildings along the ghats.

After lunch, I wandered through the narrow lanes of the old city.  At one point, eight or ten massive water buffalo came through the narrow lane.  I climbed on a step into shop to avoid them.  I reached the Shiva temple known as the Golden Temple for its gold-plated spire.  It is supposed to be the holiest temple in Varanasi, with darshan, or worship, here belived to remit all sins.  It is only a little more than 200 years old, previous ones having been destroyed by Moslems, most recently by the intolerant 17th century Mughal Emperor Augrangzeb, who built a white, domed mosque on the site.  The newer temple is right beside the mosque and there is tremendous security all around.  Despite a sign requesting non-Hindu gentlemen not to enter, tourists are allowed to enter, but (as with Indians) without bags, cell phones, and cameras and only after about four or five pat downs by the police.  Inside the temple the courtyard was wet, dirty and slippery.  Monkeys (red-butted, red-faced macaques) scampered around.  Inside the main temple in a foot-high, bulbous, black stone lingam (penis) of Shiva, which worshipers touch several times and then touch their heads.  Nearby is a pool, which non-Hindus are not allowed to see, where one of my guidebooks say Shiva "cooled his lingam."  I would like to have seen Shiva do that, or come to think of it, maybe not.

The big mosque nearby is off-limits to non-Moslems, though you can look at it from a narrow lane.  Around it are two walls with barbed wire and a high guardtower.  I talked to a shopowner who told me it has been this way since 1992, the year Hindu fanatics destroyed the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, setting off all sorts of Hindu-Moslem violence.  He told me there were 1000 soldiers around the old city, and you do see lots of them, with rifles, at intersections in the lanes in the old city, occasionally frisking motorcyclists.  So I guess the soldiers are there as much to prevent Hindus destroying the mosque as to prevent Islamic terrorism.  There was a bomb that exploded about a year ago at Dashashwamedh Ghat, killing several people.  From the temple and mosque I walked through the narrow lanes to a lassi shop with excellent lassi, a yoghurt drink.  While sitting in there sipping my lassi, I saw two funeral processions come by, with chanting men accompanying a yellow or orange clad body on a stretcher.  I eventually made my way again to the burning ghat, Mandikarnika, watched for a while, and then made my way back to Dashashwamedh Ghat for the evening ganga aarti.

Again I got up early the next morning to watch the activity on the ghats.  I went into a massive riverside palace built by Man Singh, the Maharajah of Amber, about 1600.  On top is one of the observatories built in the 1700's by Jai Singh, his descendant, who founded the city of Jaipur and built six other observatories, including ones in Delhi and Jaipur which I visited last year.  The palace is much run down, but there are great views from the roof.

After a couple of hours on the ghats and then breakfast, I took an autorickshaw to Sarnath, about 6 or 7 miles away.  I had planned to go the day before with the Canadian microbiologist, but she had taken ill.  A little too much Indian microbiology, perhaps.  I got to Sarnath about noon and was disappointed to find its museum was closed.  It contains the famous four lion capital to a pillar erected by the Buddhist Emperor Ashoka in the 3rd century BC, which is now the national symbol of India, depicted on seals and some coins.  Sarnath is where Buddha gave his first sermon, five weeks after his enlightenment at Bodhgaya.  A great brick stupa about 165 feet high arises in the grassy enclosure.  It apparently was much higher until destroyed by Moslems around 1200.  Like Bodhgaya, Sarnath was abandoned and then rediscovered and restored by the British in the 1800's.  Around the stupa are the foundations of monasteries and the broken remains of the Ashoka pillar, with a Sanskrit inscription warning Buddhist monks to avoid schisms.  There weren't many pilgrims, though I did see a few Tibetans.

In Sarnath I also visited a Jain temple and a Buddhist temple built in the 1930's with interesting Japanese murals depicting Buddha inside.  Outside is a Bodhi tree grown from a sapling of the Bodhi tree in Sri Lanka with statues underneath of Buddha delivering his first sermon to the five ascetics who were his audience.  The story is that before his enlightenment he had been fasting in the hills around Bodhgaya with them.  Nearby are plaques with the text of his first sermon.  They are in the languages of all the major Buddhist languages, but the main one is in the ancient Pala language, but oddly in Roman script, with an English translation,  In the sermon he advises the way to enlightenment is not through denial of sensory pleasures or self-mortification, but through "the middle way,"  the eight fold path, right thinking, right behavior, etc.  The English version contains a lot of basic Buddhist concepts, though some of it is almost gibberish, which I hope is the fault of the translation.  I took an autorickshaw back to the old city and searched for the place I had stayed in when I visited Varanasi.  It was a private home in the old city of a guy we had met on the way to Varanasi and I had found the address while reading my old letters from 1979.  I wandered through alleys looking for it, with lots of help from friendly people.  I did find the alley, but not the house.  I think I might have eventually, but it was getting towards dark.

After again getting up early to watch all the early morning activities on the ghats, I spent a relatively lazy day the next day.  I have a comfortable hotel here, with a bed with a fairly good mattress for a change (though it's only a foam mattress) and hot water showers for about $9 a night.  I enjoy wandering the narrow lanes of the old city (despite the annoying honking motorcycles, it is much nicer than walking the chaotic streets) and along the ghats.  There is always something to see.  You do have to be careful in the narrow lanes.  They are filthy and you have to be careful not to step into the piles of cow and dog shit, besides avoiding all the other garbage and the cows themselves, those damn motorcycles and men carrying big loads through the narrow alleys.

I got up soon after 6 the next morning, headed to the ghats, and boarded a boat for an hour trip on the river along the ghats.  It was cool and misty, or perhaps hazy is a better word.  It is always hazy here.  The sun arose barely visible through the haze about 6:45.  Actually, it had arisen before that, but you couldn't see it through the haze until then.  There were lots of boats on the river, most but not all with foreign tourists.  I enjoyed being rowed along the ghats and watching the bathers and a group celebrating a puja facing the rising sun across the river.  Afterwards I walked along the ghats, chatting for a while with a group of students from Banaras Hindu University on a Sunday morning stroll before, they told me, heading to the cinema on their day off.  I saw a group of pilgrims, the men all in white with hats like those Nehru used to wear while the women wore colorful saris.  The students said they were from the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, recognizing them from their clothes and speech.

After lunch I took another walk through the old city's narrow alleys, first watching three boys playing wiffle cricket in the garbage and cow excrement filled narrow alley just outside my hotel.  Actually, I guess it wasn't a real wiffle ball as it had no holes, and they were using a standard wooden cricket bat.  I eventually reached Manikarnika Ghat and watched the cremations for a while.  There were ten or more going on, with quite a crowd watching, mostly Indians but some westerners.  One woman was brought to the ghat not on a bamboo stretcher as usual but on a sort of wicker bed.  Her face was uncovered, with Hindu religious markings on the forehead.  That is the only corpse I've seen here not completely wrapped in white cloth.  At one point a half dozen or so water buffalo charged up the ghat steps, scattering the watching crowd.  I walked through some more alleys and reached the river again and then walked along the ghats to the central Dashashwamedh Ghat, where they were preparing for the evening ganga aarti ceremony.  I watched a guy laboriously putting wicks and oil in the candelabras.  He dumped the wicks into a big pot of oil and placed them one by one into the seven candelabras.  Each has 49 spots for wicks, so it takes a while.  I gave up watching after he finished the first of the seven.  

November 23 - 27, 2011: Calcutta - Bodhgaya - Patna

I had enjoyed Calcutta, and left on a train bound for Gaya to the east about 1 on the afternoon of the 23rd.  On the way to the train station (not Howrah, but one of Calcutta's other three train stations), the taxi driver got lost, getting himself tangled up in a street market and then turning around and cutting through small alleys.  It was quite interesting driving through that massive city, with something like 14 million people (India's second largest, after Bombay).  We reached the train station in plenty of time, though.  The train fare for the seven hour journey was only 240 rupees (about $4.80), though I paid a commission to the guy who got me the ticket of 150 rupees and the taxi to the station cost 180.  The rupee has dropped quite a bit since I was here last January.  Then it was about 45 to the dollar; now about 52.

The train slowly made its way through the city and crossed a bridge over the wide Hooghly after half an hour or so.  The flat West Bengal countryside was green, with lots of yellowing ripened rice, much of it being harvested.  There were lots of palm trees and people working in the fields, some with mechanical plows.  In the eastern part of the state we passed some huge, rusting mills, at least one of them a steelworks.  We crossed into the recently created (2000, formerly part of Bihar) state of Jharkhand and the topography became more uneven, and even hilly in places.  We reached the city of Dhanbad soon after 5, and it was dark by the time we left.  We sped through the night and I had two seatmates from Calcutta also bound for Gaya.  The train was relatively uncrowded, though dirty and dusty, and we reached Gaya, in Bihar, just after 8.  I got a halfway decent hotel across from the train station.

The next morning about 8 I took a bus south about 8 miles (but 45 minutes) to Bodhgaya and found a hotel and had a big "English breakfast," kind of greasy, but with eggs, beans, mushrooms, fried tomatoes and fried potatoes in a tented restaurant called Mohammed's in the Tibetan tent village.  I then walked around the small town, surrounding the temple honoring the site where Prince Siddhartha Gautama achieved enlightenment and became the Buddha.  This is Buddhism's holiest site and there are subsidiary temples built by various Buddhist countries:  China, Japan, Thailand, Bhutan, Tibet, Nepal and others.  The Bhutanese and Japanese temples are particularly nice.  There are lots of Buddhist tourists around, including a lot, it seemed, from Thailand.  There are also lots of Tibetans, who come here in the winter.  The Dalai Lama is said to come every year.  There are also lots of Indian Hindus, who consider Buddha an incarnation of Vishnu, along with Rama and Krishna and others.  Apparently, the Buddhists and Hindus clash over management of the main temple. 

Outside the main temple are hordes of beggars, including cripples, sometimes fighting over the alms (bread, toys) distributed by the groups of Asian tourists.  As usual in India, there is filth and garbage everywhere.  But the main temple, the Mahabodhi Mahavihara, and its big enclosure are very nice.  After visiting the subsidiary temples and an archeological museum, I entered the main temple about 3:30 and stayed until after 6.  Interestingly, the site had only been rediscovered by the British in the 19th century.  The great Buddhist emperor Ashoka had built a temple here in the 3rd century BC, and the current temple dates, I think, from the 5th century AD (though it is now much restored), but the Moslems sacked the site about 1200 and drove the Buddhists away.  Buddhism was already in decline at that time.  The restored temple is quite nice, a tall spire around which people walk on three different levels.  You enter the compound on the east and just west of the temple is a peepul tree, said to be a descendant of the tree under which Buddha achieved enlightenment.  The original tree was destroyed, perhaps by Ashoka before he became a Buddhist or by his jealous wife (there appear to be various stories), but a sapling from the original tree had been taken to Sri Lanka, and a sapling from the tree in Sri Lanka was brought back and planted in Bodhgaya. 

I walked all around and sat here and there.  A big Chinese contingent in bright yellow robes was praying and chanting on the west side.  Lots of red-clad Tibetan monks were everywhere.  Hundreds (mostly Tibetans, but some westerners and others) were prostrating on smooth wooden boards under the trees in the compound surrounding the temple.  Towards dusk, I sat under the Bodhi Tree, as it is called, and watched the pligrims.  The tree, a peepul, has heart-shaped leaves and sheds little black berries.  Pilgrims quickly grabbed any leaf that fell and a man swept up the berries.  The tree itself is behind a stone screen.  It was all very nice.  After dark, I walked around on the upper levels surrounding the temple.  The whole compound was lit by thousands of little electric lights, with a big spotlight on the temple.  By 6 most of the prostraters had covered up their boards with plastic, in case of rain perhaps. 

At 7 the next morning I left on a day trip organized by Bihar Tourism to several sites to the northeast.  There were eight of us in the group, including another American (a student studying in India), a Japanese, and four Indians from Calcutta.  We drove through the countryside, past more rice paddies and other agriculture (the guide told me they grow rice during the rainy season and then wheat during the dry winter) to Rajgir, the former capital of the Magadh Empire, one of India's earliest, from about the time of Buddha (6th-5th century BC).  We saw evidence of the former walls, said to be 25 miles in circumference, and wagon or chariot tracks worn into stone.  It is a hilly area and we took a rickety chair lift up about 750 feet to a bright white Japanese built (in 1978) stupa with good views over the hilly countryside. 

Further down the hillside is Gridhkuta, where Buddha is said to have given his second sermon after enlightenment.  We walked down there, where there is an altar and two nearby caves said to be abodes of his two principal followers.  There were quite a few pilgrims.  We then drove to a hot springs, full of Hindus partaking of its medicinal properties.  Up the hill from that is the place where the first Buddhist convocation is said to have been held after Buddha's death, where they agreed on a compilation of his teachings.  We then drove further northeast to Nalanda and visited a huge new temple built by the Chinese dedicated to a Chinese who made his way to Nalanda over the Silk Road in the 7th century.   After a good lunch, we finally made it to the ruins of Nalanda, formerly a great Buddhist university.  It flourished for centuries before being destroyed by Moslem invaders about 1200.  Its library is said to have taken six months to burn, though I imagine that is an exaggeration.  There are something like eleven monasteries of brick ruins, though it is somewhat hard to tell what is original and what is restored.  Nalanda, too, was rediscovered by the British in the 1800's.  About 3:30 we headed back to Bodhgaya, a more than two hour trip through the countryside, also passing through a few densely populated little towns.  It was a pleasant journey, but I would hate to have to drive in India.  The driver carried a short (maybe four foot long) bamboo stick, used, he told me, to hit other drivers and pedestrians he got into fights with.  Back in Bodhgaya, I went back to the main temple and walked around it several times in the dark with the pilgrims.

The next morning I went back to the temple for several hours, watching all the activity.  I had a late breakfast and then about noon took an autorickshaw to Gaya and finally a 2 pm bus north to Patna.  I had a seat in the last row of the bus and we bumped along Bihar's narrow roads.  Bihar is one of India's poorest states, with something like 100 million people in something like 40,000 square miles.  We reached Patna, Bihar's capital with more than a million people (I read in a newspaper that India has 51 cities of over a million) in the dark about 5:30.  The bus parked in an area of seemingly hundreds of buses.  I took a cycle rickshaw to the train station through a chaos of people and vehicles.  After getting my bearings at the huge train station, I sought out a hotel.  A small, old guy (probably not as old as me, though) came up to me and asked if I wanted to go to the Garden Hotel for 10 rupees.  That was on my list, so I took his cycle rickshaw through the massively crowded streets.  The Garden had no rooms to my liking, so he took me in search of other hotels and after maybe 45 minutes we found one to my liking (well, not really to my liking, as there wasn't much to like about it).  I checked in and had a good dinner in a nearby, nicer hotel.

Patra is the site of Pataliputra, the capital of the great 3rd century BC empire of Ashoka, and was described by Greek ambassadors of Alexander's conquests as more impressive than the cities of Persia, but there appears to be nothing left of it.  There are a few sights, though.  The next morning I took a cycle rickshaw to a dome shaped building called the Golghar, built by the British in 1786 to store grain after a famine in the 1770's.  Steps spiral up to the top on either side, one set for those bringing grain to be dumped into the top and one for their descent.  I climbed up the 150 or so steps for the view over the hazy city.  I could see the Ganges but it looked quite narrow.  During the monsoon it is supposed to be three miles wide at Patna.  A guy on top told me that during the monsoon the nearby maidan is flooded, as is the base of the Golghar.  Now, crops were planted on the former bed of the river. 

From there I took a cycle rickshaw to the train station and very easily got  a train ticket for the next day for Varanasi at the foreigners' ticket window.  I then walked to breakfast and then to the Patna Museum, in a massive old colonial building, when it opened at 10:30.  The museum had some wonderful statuary, plus moth-eaten stuffed animals, weapons, Mughal paintings and other stuff.  I spent about two hours inside.  There is a statue of  a former viceroy outside. 

From there I decided to go to the old city, six miles away.  It took me over two hours to get there.  I hired an autorickshaw for 100 rupees and there was terrible traffic along the way.  He decided to take a short cut through narrow alleys and they were even worse clogged.  I was inhaling massive amounts of exhaust and my eyes and throat began to sting.  I sometimes wonder if traveling in India is comparable to smoking several packs of cigarettes a day.  I finally made it to the Har Mandir, the birthplace of the tenth Sikh guru, and stayed there over an hour.  It is a gleaming white domed building.  The people there were very friendly (I was the only westerner there), but unfortunately there was no music playing in the hall.  They did have on sale Sikh knives, bracelets, combs and underwear.  First time I had seen the underwear.  There was also a museum, filled with depictions of Sikh martyrs and battles and the like.  There were a couple of other places I would like to have seen in the old city, the great mosque of Sher Shah and the East India Company opium godowns (warehouses), but it was past 4 and as much as I dreaded the trip back across town, I wanted to do it before dark if possible.  I made it back by about 5:30 in a shared autorickshaw.  Another unpleasant journey because of the exhaust, but an interesting one.