The trains in India were not like those I had ridden in either Thailand or Vietnam. Instead of having separate seats as on Thai trains or separate compartments as in Vietnam, Indian trains have shared each seats, which serve as beds when everyone on the bench decides that it is time to sleep. I had been spoiled by the trains in Thailand where I rode in air-conditioned sleeper cars, in which servers came around with menus to take your dinner order, men walked through with buckets filled with ice-cold beer, and attendants came around to make up your beds; and the Vietnamese sleeper cars which housed only 4 people, each with their own bed immediately upon entrance to the car. In our Indian car, there was one bench along the right hand side of the car with two benches facing each other on the left and a narrow hallway between with the people on the right facing into the aisle and the people on the left facing the patrons on the seat opposite them. If you were lucky enough to get a top berth, you could technically climb right up upon boarding and stretch out in the luxury of your own bed, unlike those in the bottom and middle whose beds served as the seat and back of the bottom bench until everyone was ready to sleep. But more often than not, the top berth would be laden with boxes and other luggage and the person whose bed it was, would either have to ask everyone to find space for the luggage somewhere else, an almost impossible task with everyone sitting and all feet on the floor, or grin and bear it with the rest of your seat mates until the communal decision was made.
Although each side was supposed to seat three people, one for each berth, often entire families or groups of 5 to 6 individuals, were squeezed onto one bench, leaving me wondering were everyone was going to go when it was time to fold down the beds. For the first few hours, Mark and I shared our bench with four other men and entertained ourselves by reading or watching the blur of the countryside on the other side of our window. At some point in the evening, the people in our area began getting up and shuffling around and we figured that it was time to set up the beds. While the back of the benches were raised up and fastened to the upper berth with a metal rod to form the middle berth, the extra people disappeared to parts unknown and Mark and I climbed up onto the upper berths, now cleared of luggage.
Since pointing the bottom of your feet at someone is considered a grave insult in this part of the world, as well as the fact that I had managed to rip a huge hole in the pants I had brought over from Bangladesh which I managed to conceal while standing, but which otherwise revealed a large portion of flesh that I preferred to keep covered, I locked my bag at the end of the berth near the windows and settled in with my head near the aisle. It was not the most comfortable position, but after our bus ride from Dhaka, I was merely grateful to have a space to lie down. Soon after settling in, I feel into a restless sleep.
The following morning, we arrived in Gaya - a fact we ascertained by pointing out the windows at each stop and repeating, “Gaya?” in a questioning tone – and exited into the filthiest city I had ever seen. We had decided to spend one night in Bodh Gaya and the next night in Gaya, because we had to catch the 5:00 a.m. train to our next destination the following morning. With this plan in mind, we exited the train station and were able to confidently refuse the insistent offers of the rickshaw and auto rickshaw drivers to take us to Bodh Gaya and head through the line of food vendors, across the garbage filled piles of mud to the drab looking strip of hotels facing the train station.
There were three hotels right next to each other, each with open-air restaurants on the ground floors, consisting of picnic tables and a man cooking over a stove in the corner. We were approached by a man who asked us if we wanted a room and I explained to him that we were hoping to look at the room, but not need it until the following evening. The man nodded and led us up a wide cement staircase to an institutional looking hallway with doors on each side. After struggling with the key, he opened one of the doors to reveal a drab, bare room, furnished only with a sagging mattress covered with stained sheets on a rusty metal frame and small private bath. After dealing with bedbugs in Calcutta, I was concerned about the sheets, but the manager assured me that they were clean. Mark commented about the smell of mildew in the rooms, but knowing that this was ranked as the best the worst in our Lonely Planet, we agreed that the room would be sufficient for our purposes since we wouldn’t be there long.
We left the hotel and made our way downstairs to find an auto-rickshaw to Bodh Gaya. Once outside, we entered the throng and got a driver to agree on the price listed in the lonely planet. The ride to Bodh Gaya was a nice change since all we had seen of India up until this point had been cities, save a few brief glimpses of rice paddies through the windows of the train. The area between Gaya and Bodh Gaya is mostly farmland and open fields for grazing livestock. During this trip, we saw our first Indian cow eating grass!
When we arrived in Bodh Gaya, we immediately saw our previously selected guesthouse and asked our driver to let us off. Upon entering, we found that the Lonely Planet’s recommended guesthouse was a big step up from the accommodations in Gaya and we happily checked in and settled in for a late morning nap.
After our nap, we headed out to see the sights. Bodh Gaya is one of the holiest places in the world for followers of the Buddhist faith and many countries, including Sri Lanka, Thailand, Burma, Tibet, Bhutan and Japan are represented there via a temple built in their traditional style. The Mahabodhi Temple is the most famous and is the site of the Bodhi tree under which the Buddha is said to have achieved Enlightment. The scene outside of this temple is not unlike one you would see outside of a North American theme park with vendors selling postcards, souvenirs and balloons. We managed to politely refuse our way through the crowd to the entrance of the temple, where, after paying to have our shoes watched by the guy who watches shoes, we toured around the outside of the temple.
The temple grounds were filled with many ornate images of the Buddha as well as a wall upon which the Buddha was said to have walked in meditation and of course, the Bodhi tree, which was wrapped in the colorful ribbons I had grown accustomed to seeing around sacred trees in Thailand, surrounded by a group of faithful deep in meditation at its base. After viewing the Mahabodhi Temple, we wandered around the rest of the town, which consisted mostly of barren dirt roads and a few scattered houses, except for the road on which our hotel sat, that was home to a few other hotels, two Indian restaurants (which proved to be as disappointing as every other restaurant we had eaten in up until this point, save the one diamond in the rough in Calcutta) and a few internet cafes. Across the street from the hotels was a gated park, with paths through over grown brush, which did not seem to be too popular with the locals as the only other visitors when we were there were three stray dogs.
During our stay, there seemed to be many tourists from Eastern countries, but there were very few other obviously Western tourists. Since we stood out from the crowd and since it took all of about 45 minutes to cover the whole town, we had become the targets of a few local boys interested in offering their services as tour guides, as well as a few groups of younger children who simply wanted to walk alongside of us and stare inquisitively. Once we had spent a few hours visiting the local sites, tired of being on display, I went back to the room to rest and Mark spent the rest of the afternoon visiting the international temples with one of the local boys.
The evening, the power went out, as we learned it was wont to do at various intervals throughout the day, and we went in search of a restaurant with a generator. Bodh Gaya is not a big town, as I have mentioned before, but there are a handful of posh looking hotels scattered around in the area of the international temples, which looked very out of place in the little dusty town. We bypassed the fancy hotel restaurants and settled on a restaurant with a candle lit rooftop table, which would had been very romantic had we been with our significant others instead of being just the two of us. We ordered our meals, both not yet having given up on Indian food and settled in to enjoy the evening just as the first mosquitoes began to bite. I had forgotten to put on mosquito spray and instead wrapped the shawl of my salwar kameeze around my ankles, the only exposed flesh below my shoulders. After dinner, we headed back to our hotel, where we set up candles on the balcony and read and wrote letters home until we turned in for bed.
The next day we decided to take our hotel owner up on his offer for a motorcycle ride to the see the cave in which the Buddha spent six years in meditation. The countryside was beautiful and it was a perfect day for a ride. Having spent a good deal of time on the backs of motorcycles in the past few months, I immensely enjoyed the thrilling ride through little villages on the road to the cave. My driver was younger and more reckless and we wizzed by carts of vegetables, families on bicycles and lumbering groups cows driven forward by young boys, while Mark’s driver followed behind at a slower, safer pace. The villages consisted of small mud homes with thatch roofs and open front shops selling India tea, vegetable samosas and various other snacks. Brick walls covered with dried cow patties bearing human hand prints lined the road. Children played under the shade of large leafy trees, while goats and dogs wandered across the road nearly missing the wheels of carts and the rare motorized vehicle. Every so often I would glace back at Mark to see how he was holding up and other than being a little shaken, he seemed to do quite well.
When we arrived at the site of the cave, we were immediately surrounded by kids in torn clothing, begging for money. We followed our guides’ lead and denied the children’s pleas and made our way up the winding path to the cave entrance. The cave itself was not very impressive; just a small entry way into a cavern barely large enough to stand up in and only approximately ten feet by eight feet wide. Outside the cave, a man was selling candles and incense and managed to convince us to purchase some candles that “we would need” to see in the cave although there were already candles lit giving off plenty of light for such a small space. We spent a moment in the cave, enough time to be respectful, and then made our way out where we met up with an American woman who was living in Delhi with her husband. As we made our way back down to the bikes, I chatted with the woman about her work with Vietnamese immigrants in Cambodia preparing them for life in the United States, both of us doing our best to ignore the pleas of the crowd of children who had surrounded us, continually begging for money.
On the way back into town, I asked the driver to stop a few times for pictures and I took some great shots of an Indian shepherd and his flock of sheep and a man plowing his fields behind a team of oxen. About halfway back to town, we realized that the bike I was riding on had a flat tire and after Mark’s driver chastised my driver for his reckless driving, it was decided that I would join them on their bike and the three of us would head back while the other driver had his tire fixed by someone in the local village.
That evening we were loath to leave our nice room in Bodh Gaya for the cells in Gaya, but we agreed that it would be risky to try to find an auto-rickshaw to the train station at four o’clock in the morning, nor did either of us want to get up any earlier than we had to, so we thanked our hosts and arranged for a ride back to Gaya. When we arrived, Mark decided that he wanted to check out some other hotels because, after having stayed in such a nice place the night before, his memory of the mildew tainted room that we had seen the day before was not a pleasant one. So instead of going back to the hotel we had picked out earlier, we went next door and asked if we could see a room.
The man led us through the ground floor restaurant and out to a row of squat two story cement buildings in the back. The first room he showed us was on the first floor and was similar to the one we had seen next door in its lack of décor. For some reason the thought of entering that windowless room and closing the door behind me was stifling and I asked Mark if he minded if we looked at something else. Not wanting to offend our host who was determined to rent us a room, Mark explained that I wasn’t sure about the room and wanted to see something else. The second room, although on the second floor, was even worse and I responded by quietly letting Mark know that there was no way I could stay there. Mark thanked the man and apologized, telling him that we were going to look someplace else, much to the disappointment of the man who offered to show us yet another room in the building. Having a strong feeling that they weren’t going to get any better, I too thanked him and politely refused his offer. After looking at five or six more hotels, some better, some worse, we finally decided on a basic, but clean place and checked in before heading back to one of the nicer hotels where we had seen a restaurant we wanted to stop in to for dinner.
The restaurant was clean and nicely furnished, but the lighting was so low, we could barely read the menu. After a few minutes of futility, we motioned for the waiter, who, obviously understanding our plight, brought us a candle and motioned for us to move to a table with a little more light. There were two Indian men who appeared to be in their early twenties seated at the table next to us. Apparently these two men believed that cell phone rings provided the perfect ambiance for their dinner table setting. With one of their cell phones standing upright in an empty water glass, they treated to a constant cycle of 30-second electronic renditions of current pop songs. My annoyance was topped only by my incredulousness that anyone could consider that constant ringing pleasant.
After dinner, we headed back to our hotel, where we settled in for our early departure to Varanassi in the morning.
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