Advertisement
Published: September 28th 2008
The night train from Kolkata was comfortable, but I did not get more than about three hours sleep as there was a lot of snoring around me. The train arrived two hours late at Gaya in the morning on 23rd. After bargaining with the rickshaw drivers to take me the 13km Bodhgaya at a fair price and a bumpy ride, I finally arrived at my planed destination.
Bodhgaya is where Prince Siddhartha Gautama attained enlightenment beneath a Bodhi tree and so became a Buddha. Buddhist pilgrims from around the world visit this place and there are Buddhists temples build by several nations here. The main temple is very beautiful.
On 24th I went back to Gaya to take the train to Varanasi. The train was extremely cold as the air-con must have been on full power. My friend Paritosh had booked me into a 5 star hotel in Varanasi at price you would pay for a bed and breakfast in the UK. It was nice to have some luxury before going to Nepal to start a three week trek. Varanasi is one of the holiest places in India, where Hindu pilgrims come to wash away a lifetime of sins
in the Ganges river or to cremate their loved ones along the banks of the sacred river. The main thing to see is the ghats at the river, where people mainly come at sunrise and sunset. It is an amazing place for “people watching” and I would often sit for hours just watching all the activities. Most ghats are used for bathing, but there are a few burning ghats, where bodies a cremated in public (I must say it was not something I enjoyed watching). Some bodies cannot be burned including children, pregnant women and people bitten by snakes. These bodies are thrown in the middle of the river. I had fish that night for dinner and it was not before I finished eating that I thought “I hope the fish is not from this river”.
I had a cold for a few days (properly got it from the cold train) which is not the best to have before a trek. For that reason I relaxed a lot in the hotel and limited my sight seeing, to try and get rid of it before Nepal.
On 28th I flew to Katmandu in Nepal and start a 3 week
trek on 29th, so I will not have internet access for a while. I will write about my trek when I get back to Katmandu again.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.074s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 7; qc: 45; dbt: 0.0449s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
