Day 225: A Different World

After Varanasi we worked our way north towards the Nepalese border on a horribly maintained road. Any road travel in India seems so slow compared to North America or Europe because all the vehicles need to constantly slow down to avoid huge potholes, other vehicles, or just entire sections of torn apart road. The town we finally crossed over the border at was a good symbol of the larger country shift. On the Indian side it was a traffic jam of vehicles and carts, with constant honking and yelling. We had to switch vehicles, so we took all our bags off the bus and put them on rickshaw bikes to pedal us across the border. The border office was just a little shop to the side of the road to stamp our passports, then another one right across the border to deal with the Nepal entry visa. Almost as soon as we got onto the new bus and took off, the entire atmosphere of the surrounding area was completely different. The roads were busy, but in better repair and refreshingly silent. No honking, no yelling, no stopping to wait for cows to amble by.

At the pit stops along the way the locals were friendly and welcoming, and it just had a much more relaxed, friendly vibe than we had felt in India. The people are still very poor, but in India the poor came off as predatory and aggressive, as if their poorness entitled them to treat you however they wanted, while in Nepal it just comes off as humbleness and higher values. In India if somebody was poor they would beg or husstle, and in Nepal they just seem to work hard and appreciate what they have. I shouldn't really be basing it on country though. More likely it's the fact that in India I mostly was visiting large cities, and Nepal doesn't really have large cities (other than Kathmandu) - so it's probably more an urban vs rural issue than a national one, but the observation still stands. When I finally did get to Kathmandu, later in the trip, I found it closer to what I'd felt in India than elsewhere in Nepal.

We stopped for the night in Lumbini, which is famous for being the birthplace of Buddha. We visited the exact spot he was supposed to have been born, and the sacred pond where Buddha and his mother bathed after his birth, as well as a sacred Bodhi tree.

While he waited for us, our guide sat cross-legged at the edge of the pond and meditated with his eyes closed. This quiet scene attracted an old Chinese woman who proceeded to take about 50 photos of him, and her focus attracted other tourists out of the apparent principle that if somebody is taking pictures of something, it must be worth taking a picture of. For 4 or 5 minutes there was a swarm of people around snapping pictures, and then it all melted away, and eventually our guide opened his eyes, unaware of the stir he had created (at least briefly, as I was quick to delightedly inform him). Later, at the hotel for the night, I recognized the same Chinese woman and pointed her out, and after her initial star-struck awe was happy to show him the collection of pictures and even send him a couple.