travel diary day 15

In buddhism, life, rants, travel on 21 March 2009 tagged amitav ghosh, battery, beads, bhodi tree, bodhgaya, book, boulevard, bracelet, british empire, burma, cobra, darjeeling, dinner, exile, fish, hotel, illustratoins, india, internet cafe, king, lake, leaves, lecture, mahabhodi temple, mandalay, meditation, monastery, monk, myanmar, oliver, passengers, patna, photos, pilgrims, queue, reserved, restaurant, rickshaw, sandalwood, shortcut, silhouette, souvenirs, statues, stupa, teak, teak bridge, the glass palace, ticket, tourists, train, ubein bridge, video, video camera with 1 comment

i have 4 hours to kill before my train to dar­jeel­ing, so i found an inter­net café and a nice res­taur­ant in the smally shitty city of patna. i plan on sit­ting here until my train departs for the 11 hour trek to india’s north east border.

day 13 (con­tin­ued) — i ran into oliver again that night in bod­hgaya. it’s such a small town and the main boulevard is the best place to hang out. i had din­ner with he and his italian friend. 

i also bought a book, “the glass palace” by amitav ghosh. it’s a story related to the eng­lish con­quest of burma and the sub­sequent exile of the burmese king from man­dalay. actu­ally, the book is a fic­ti­tious tale of char­ac­ters caught up in those events, but the back­ground is very real. des­pite being fic­ti­tious, it’s a good read and i thought it would be a nice back­ground before i head into myan­mar. what caught my atten­tion is the sil­hou­ette of burma’s fam­ous ubein bridge. east of man­dalay, ubein bridge runs across a lake and it’s the longest teak bridge in the world. so, partly, i bought the book based on the cover illus­tra­tions and the asso­ci­ation with burma.

i headed back to my hotel, star­ted read­ing the book, and slept.

day 14 — today i got an early start and had a really, really great day. i decided not to visit the main temple on my first day. instead, i wanted to save it for the morn­ing of my second day, where i could take my time. i walked into mahab­hodi temple early before too many tour­ists or pil­grims had arrived. i took some pho­tos and walked around. the stupa is enorm­ous and really nice. there are lots of buddha statues every­where. the place is very quiet and serene.  under a tree to the side of the main stupa (not the bhodi tree) there was a monk giv­ing a lec­ture to a group of people sit­ting on the grass. 

as i walked around the side of the temple i notice a monk in light col­oured robes in med­it­a­tion. actu­ally, there were lots of people med­it­at­ing, bow­ing and pray­ing around the temple. but this monk was by him­self and he was in a good pos­i­tion for photography.

i approached him and when he saw me, he handed me a video cam­era. it turns out (through his friend’s trans­la­tions) that he is a thai monk. he saw my cam­era gear and, fig­ur­ing i was some­what pro­fes­sional, asked me to handle his video cam­era. i video taped him in med­it­a­tion for about 6 minutes until the bat­ter­ies ran out. i also took a few pho­tos. i thought that would be the end, but from under his robes he pro­duced another bat­tery for his video recorder. we walked down to the bhodi tree where the buddha became enlightened, i made about 10 more minutes of him in med­it­a­tion. i was clever about it all too, i star­ted with a sil­hou­ette of the tree, and panned down to him in med­it­a­tion. i’m sure he’ll be duly impressed with my awe­some cam­era work!

after that i took some more pho­tos and sat under the bhodi tree for a while. there were many pil­grims and monks doing pray­ers under the tree. many people brought offerings. 

the funny thing was that people were quickly pick­ing up the fallen leaves of the bhodi tree; to keep as lucky charms or souven­irs. the fall­ing leaves weren’t com­mon, so it was dif­fi­cult to get them. i sat for about half an hour and dur­ing that time i got two small leaves. when i came back later, i man­aged to get two more big­ger leaves, so i was very happy about that.

off to the side, away from the main stupa is a small, square lake. the lake is fam­ous because (legend has it) that the buddha med­it­ated here dur­ing a storm. the king of the lake (or a god, i’m not sure) in the form of a cobra came to the buddha and stood over him, shel­ter­ing the buddha from the rain as he prayed. 

so, in the middle of the lake is a buddha statue with a big cobra stand­ing over the top of him. it was a little tacky, but i was happy to sit there … until some kid walked up to me and said “hey, give me 10 rupees”. i told him to piss off (how zen of me) and went back to enjoy­ing the serenity. one of the most pop­u­lar activ­it­ies at the lake is feed­ing the fish. they looked like cat­fish, and people throw food to them, which they hun­grily gobble up.

the scene was com­plete when two young broth­ers (maybe aged 4 or 5) began to fight. the littlest one pushed his brother, and it was quite a good shove, caus­ing his brother to fall back­wards onto the steps, then roll down about 4 steps into the water. he landed on a bunch of hungry fish and his father plucked him, scream­ing and cry­ing and soak­ing wet, out of the water.

i was sat­is­fied, so i walked back to the main stupa. 

as i headed out i bought some san­dal­wood prayer beads and a small brace­let (my first souven­irs in india).

the heat of the day was set­tling in, so i decided to take the early after­noon off. i went back to the mon­as­tery and washed my clothes. i read my new book (which is inter­est­ing) and had a sleep. when the heat of the day wore off i headed back to the main boulevlard, checked email, picked up my train ticket and had dinner.

then, after dark, i headed home. actu­ally, i didn’t go straight home, i took a short­cut which i thought would avoid the main street. the short­cut took me to the thai temple and there was no way to the main road. so i had to trek all the way back and walk home the long way.

day 15 — today wasn’t as good as yes­ter­day … not by a long shot. i packed and checked out of the mon­as­tery. right out­side i found a rick­shaw and nego­ti­ated the trip to gaya (where i needed to catch a train to patni … from patni i head to dar­jeel­ing). the rick­shaw drove like a korean bus driver, swerving and dodging everything; as well as over­tak­ing even when he didn’t have enough power or speed to over­take. a few times i was temp­ted to tell him to slow down. it was a big rick­shaw, so he insisted on stop­ping to try and pick up extra pas­sen­gers along the 13km ride to the train sta­tion. he picked up two, which wasn’t so bad, then 3 more, then 2 more. there were 9 of us in total, as well as my pack, crammed into the rick­shaw … and he still drove like a maniac.

we even­tu­ally got to gaya and i lined up for a train ticket. after 80 minutes of queueing and yelling at line jump­ers, i got to the counter and was told that my ticket couldn’t be bought there, i had to buy it at the ‘unre­served’ counter. this was because the train was leav­ing in 25 minutes … but i’d lined up an hour and a half earlier, at which time, i was a the right fuck­ing counter! because of the damn queue, i missed the end of the reser­va­tion time. 

so i got the cheapest ticket pos­sible and was thrown into cattle class. i jumped on the train as it was leav­ing, hop­ing that there’d be more space. but as i jumped on, about 10 more people jumped on behind me. so we were all huddled together with nowhere to move and nowhwere to sit. 

i sat on some guy’s metal con­tainer and read my book. slowly, as the train crawled through dirty coun­try sta­tions, people got off and there was more space. i con­tin­ued read­ing, but had to stand up when the owner of the metal con­tainer got off the train … i aban­doned the book and just waited out the last 50 minutes until arriv­ing in patna.

when i finally got off the train, i headed for the nearby hotel wind­sor (which has inter­net and a café) to wait it out until my 10pm overnight train to darjeeling.

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