On the path to Bohdgaya

Up the next morning and after all of us just barely get our lunch in Sarnath by noon, three of us head into Varanasi to alter some more train tickets. With two others I haggle a price with two tired looking bicycle rickshaw drivers to cart all our stuff from the Thai monastery to Burmese, which I'm not exactly sure why we must hassle with anyway. We load on our dozen and a half bags and two dozen water bottles and they bike the one mile, insisting repeatedly that I don't walk with them but rather sit on the extremely uncomfortable and precarious handlebar in from of the driver. Naturally the bus showed up several more hours late, and we hopped on. Just before leaving though, asking Alastair where the bathroom was and him walking me through the monastery to show me, another foreigner approached us with his entire money belt and plane ticket, having left it behind but rewarded for taking the trouble to help me find the facilities! But before leaving we are surprised to be charged several thousand more rupees than the agreed on price, and must make several more negotiations and phone calls, before admitting we have no other option. We write a silly contract in a page from a girl's diary and make the representative sign it, asking as many questions as we can to avoid future issue of miscommunication (in India an impossible order). Unfortunately we forget to ask if the half dozen built in mini-fans work on the bus, they don't, and we are treated to dirt cocktails our following week...

We pick up our three other friends at the "Tag Ganges Hotel" in Varanasi, then as we are leaving the city begin to wonder why there is a second Indian man with our driver (we had been assured in our previous talks that only one would accompany us). If we don't get him out now we may never, so just as the yatra crew is on the road, we demand the bus stop and the additional man get out. There are actually enough seats for every person, but this new arrangement requires four to sit rather close together in the back, and not the three we had planned on, and agreed upon when signing Lek's diary. This brings on a new layer of even more involved, confusing, and baffling conversations in which several phone calls are made by Indians and Westerners alike, long talks are made, phones are passed, conversations end and silence reigns and nothing still is happening except us demanding he get off the bus and the Indians staring back at us. Each call made no one in the company we are calling wants to take responsibility, passing on new numbers and layering us with misinformation so that we will just go away. We don't, and we finally reach a head office that tells us this extra man must come because he is the bus cleaner. We assure them we will clean the bus or pay for someone else to, and that we were already promised no one else would be coming, and plus we had already paid, so he could take his share of the money and be happy without working the next couple weeks. The phone was passed again and more Hindi dialogue followed, the phone was hung up, and with a long face the cleaner walked to the back of the bus, slowly opened a locker and took a small bag from it, and exited the bus. It was quite melodramatic. We all felt darn awful and explained we had nothing personally against him, and as the bus pulled away the extra room soon relieved any lingering feelings of guilt.

There were ten of us now on our way... Anita and Kedaar from Canada/India, Ravi and Kavita from Southern India, Bhanteji, Alastair and Janet from Australia, Lek from Thailand, Gilad from Israel, and me. We drove through the incredibly dusty and dirty roads and got wave after wave of it stuck to our faces, hairs, clothes, and bags. Bhanteji chanted for much of the way and gave us instructions, we would meditate together for some time and he would chant and give metta and open our eyes again. As I look out the window now, I marvel for the first time how strange it is to be seeing the poverty-stricken outside from a rather comfortable and familiar interior...

We did make one memorable stop on the way. It was in some crossroads town, with huge trucks barreling past that caused constant whirlwinds of dust and noise. I have never seen a place like this. It felt like it was on the edge of some very dangerous frontier. If we had entered a cafe, I'd imagine it looking somewhat like that bar Luke and Obi-Wan go to before leaving his planet in the first Star Wars. We just get a fresh pomegranate juice here at the road side (which we pour entirely into my bottle for fear of the dirty glasses available), and which our 8 precepts allows, and Alastair and I dare a short walk to look for chocolate, something that both of us were recently delighted to find is also permissible in the Vinaya. We settle on coffee candies amidst a commotion that soon gathers many Indians looking to "help" us.

Sometime as night fell, we found our way into a monster traffic jam. Here is one of the many moments I faced in India where I don't know if I can find enough or any words to properly convey what was going on here. Vehicles of all kinds-- buses, cars, TATA trucks, even some poor and sad bicycle rickshaws-- were going in all directions, sometimes one behind another, sometimes head on, sometimes perpendicular. Drivers honking and swearing, maneuvering in the little room available, dozens of minutes passing and crawling inches. Of course not knowing the cause or length of delay, or anything, anyone, just wanting to get out of it... I am sitting shotgun so from time to time am required to make frantic hand movements signaling other drivers to let us cut in or move over, which they miraculously respect. Bhanteji has us sitting through much of this, and at one point during a sit, the driver interrupts to ask for assistance. He has just spotted a possible opening, and so Alastair and I get out in the middle of this pile-up. As the opening gets just a tad wider, we jump head on in front of a bus and start gesturing madly that it must stop, meanwhile calling for Mahindra (our diver) to come forward, other Indians seeing these two crazy Westerners and delighting in it, soon half a dozen Indians are with us fervently calling on the big TATA truck to hold its ground, then in our exhilaration hopping on our bus before it drives away. The crawl soon continues though, I chat with nearby truck drivers and pedestrians and liberally give them some of the coffee candies I bought. Finally Mahindra, who has been carefully eyeing some alternative cutoffs from this mess, takes one now, and we drive way off-road through a sleepy town, eventually meeting up with our road later on. We all cheer and clap happily-- after many hours we are free!

But too soon... the second traffic jam that hits us is a truckload of real dukkha. It is no longer fun in our amazement. We are on one of the longest bridges in the world, and we must make a Guinness record for amount of time on it. I might estimate it was about 2 hours total, though it felt like 12. One lane going nowhere, the other lane almost totally clear but a big gamble-- the further you go on it, the higher chance a car will approach you in the dark going lightening speed and you'll have to connive your way to cut back into the crowded correct lane, or drive back in reverse the entire length of the bridge. Bhanteji begins to give us a discourse about the virtues of patience, and how our time here is just as valuable as if we had already made Bohdgaya, and we should use it wisely. Always use this precious time so wisely... But he is interrupted by a cry from the back... Janet is leaning out the window yelling "Kitna kilometers? Kitna kilometers?" (Kitna meaning 'how many') Somehow we do finally get out of it, and many of us catch whatever period of dozing we can find for next little while...

To check out the photos of Bohdgaya, click here....