To Lumbini, the birth place of Buddha

So this is what flat looks like...

Since we are all done our field work and Ezina took the whole week off from her ‘real work’ running her school and being a student, she thought it would be fun to go to Lumbini where Buddha was born.  It’s about a 4-6 hour bus ride from Pokhara but only about 4 hours from Tansen, and it is also about 10km from the Indian border.

We took local buses all the way here which admittedly is worth the price of admission, about $2 to get all the way here, but not without a sore back and a headache.  I really can’t complain too much, it was cheap, they drove slowly (not the one coming down off the mountain, I thought we were done for) and we really didn’t have to wait very long for any of the 3 buses.

The landscape quickly changed after we coasted down the final mountain pass. It’s flat here, and hot, and the roads are long and wide.  We went through Butwal and basically it looked like one big sprawling city divided in two by the highway.  The guidebook suggests there’s no reason to stop there, and I can see why.  The rice fields are also larger and the stacks of rice chaff are much larger which means a bigger crop.  There’s also bananas!

Baby Buddha Statue

Lumbini is a real pilgrimage destination for people of the Hindu and Buddhist faiths and the 2.5km by 3km site itself has a long history of temples and other shrines being built over the last couple thousand years in reverence to the great Lord Buddha.  Today we went into the Maya Devi Temple, the very place where Siddhartha Guatama or the Buddha is said to have been born in 563 BC.   

Thanks to the SAARC meeting, things are being fixed up, or built for the first time, like a metal tent structure that blocks where you put your shoes to go into the temple.  We saw about 15 people in one of the giant ponds cleaning out the weeds, and I couldn’t help but wonder about the other giant ponds all over the grounds that are really overgrown… is there enough time or is the visit going to be so precisely staged that no one will notice most of the grounds need some sprucing up too?

Anyhow, today was mostly a bus day and then a short jaunt into the grounds, so tomorrow we’ll have a bit of walking to do to cover the big long walk down to the rest of the temples which will be really interesting I am sure.

At the Maya Devi Temple.