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.
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.
