a beginning

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landed in delhi at around 10pm after a two day flight which included an 8 hour layover in singapore... was not interested in actually seeing delhi so i spent the night in the airport, just crashed on a seat and rested... the next morning i caught a train out of delhi heading east to bodhgaya...
this is the place of the buddha's enlightenment... a very peaceful place, small town of about 30k people and at any given time about 30k more tibetan refugees and tourists... there is a large temple built at the spot of the bodhi tree which siddartha gotama was sitting under when he attained enlightenment... the tree is still there (or at least a replanted sappling from the original but that was in about 600ad or something)... this has become a polgrimage spot for buddhists and buddhist monks from around the world, very special... everyday the grounds are filled with chanting, meditating and reverence...
i met a young man when i arrived and he let me pitch my tent on his families roof, very poor family but they welcomed me, offered meals and were generally very nice... om was the young mans name... one day om borrowed a motorcycle and drove me out to the caves where siddartha gotama spent six years as an asthetic prior to his enlightenment, an interesting visit... on the way home, on the crazy roads of india, a boy ran in fromt of the motorcycle... we ran over his foot then dumped the bike trying to avoid him... i flew off the back, was running in mid-air and kept running when i hit the ground until i reached a wall that stopped me... everyone was more or less fine, no worries but welcome to india ;-)
after about 4 days here i decided to do my second ten-day vipassana retreat which is a chance to learn and practice the meditation that the buddha taught which has been carried on since his time by monks in burma... each day starts at 4am and goes until 9:30pm which includes 10hrs of seated meditaion, noble silence (not even eye contact, no reading or writing, etc...), breakfast and lunch of local cuisine but very basic (porridge for bfast and rice for lunch) with tea and lemon water only in the evening for returning students (me)... it's a hard ten days, which is actually 12 days, but a great opportunity to do an operation on one's mind to perpetuate the process of healing and helping to lead to liberation from suffering... i strongly reccomend this for anyone interested, ask me about it if you are interested...
at the end of the course i found out that om was running a scam on tourists trying to get money for a school but the money would just go into his pocket so when he tried it on me i cut ties with him... spenbt the next week in a guest house for about 2us$/day... during this time i would meet others from the meditation retreat and we would have morning and evening sittings under the bodhi tree or at least very near it... a great place to meditate, very good vibrations and very special...
one bloke i met on the course is an australian from melbourne and we decided to travel to varanasai together... that's where i am now but am heading out of varanasi tomorrow morning and heading northwest
i will leave that for my next entry, hopefully soon... also photo's, i need to figure out how to post them on this site so hopefully over the next couple of entries that will happen... be happy...

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Photos

mahabodhi temple
temple built at the place of the bodhi tree and buddha's enlightenment

chat puja
an festival where offerings are made in the river by fasting woman to give thanks to the sun...

Jun-Jun Baba
a ghiri baba who gave me my guru name of bj kala baba...