On August 5th, we travelled from the big city of Delhi to Patna in the state of Bihar in the eastern side of India.  The state of Bihar lags behind most any other area of India in terms of human, social, and economic development.  Its a pretty tough place stricken with poverty and this year, the monsoons were not kind to Bihar and families couldn’t grow the volume (or any) rice that they need to feed themselves and earn (small) incomes for themselves.  We heard lots about this on our travels, even outside the region later as we ventured west across India.  During our 4-5 hour journey by car from Patna to Bodhgaya we travelled through part of the state and saw the countryside first hand.  It was our first experience on the intense roads of India.

Our journey through the state was focused on arriving in Bodhgaya to see the Mahabodhi Mahavihara, the temple and site where Siddhartha Gautama attained enlightenment over 2,000 years ago.  The Mahabodhi temple in Bodhgaya is an important destination for Buddhist pilgrims throughout the world.

The photos show a few of the sites around Bodhgaya and give a sense of this amazing place that was well worth the hours of transport along the dusty roads of Bihar though dry rice plains and many small rural villages.  It was an amazing and memorable part of our adventure!!  :-)

Don’t forget you can see all our photos best if you click the first one and navigate through them in their full larger sizes!

Phew!  We made it home through a few days of not sleeping, including where I couldn’t sleep for 48 hours (thanks, guy from Shangai, for leaning on me, snoring, and then grossing me out when you clipped your nails and they flew everywhere on our long connecting flight from China to Vancouver).  Having been hammered with my second bout of “Delhi Belly” only an hour before we were leaving for the airport in India, it was a couple days of travel under trying circumstances (thanks Cipro and Immodium, for saving my life).

Now that we’re home from our adventures (and as promised and requested!), it’s time to share some of the best photos we took during our travels this past month.  Over the next week or two, I’ll post photos from each of the major sites we visited ~ some of crazy India stuff, but with of course a few cutesy (cheesy) photos of us mixed in   In the meantime, Jess is off to Vancouver, starting her 4th year of medicine!

Tips for viewing the photos: You can hover over photos for captions, and click any of the photos to expand them to full-size. In full-size mode you can read any descriptions we’ve added.  To navigate once you’ve expanded a photo, you can click in the top left or right corners to move through each photo in the gallery.

Hope you like the photos! More in a few days

Brodie

Well, we made it to our last day here in Mother India, what a trip! And this time, we avoided visiting any hospitals on our vacation! Awesome or what?

From sights of ancient Mughal tombs, cobra snakes, delicious foods, animal sacrifices, heatwaves, monsoons, autorickshaws, Buddhist temples, apple pies, and floating on the Ganges River, its been a trip filled with lots of weird, trippy, freaky, and wonderful memories to look back on! Now, we’re pretty much expecting Canada to feel a bit boring at first when we hit the ‘reverse culture shock’ tomorrow back on home soil.

We woke up this morning in the laid back Himalayan foothills amongst the orchards and flew back to Delhi to avoid further crammed adventures in the back of a passenger van flying along the cliffsides through beat up narrow roads, landslides, and impromptu river crossings (hey, we didn’t cop out, we put in at least twenty hours of that style of travel over the past couple weeks). Our backs and knees are thanking us! Of course since this is India, the flight arrived over four hours late for departure. Glad that we boarded and flew out just as the afternoon monsoons were getting ready to kick into high gear again (and blocking air travel out of the foothills).

Now, we just fly out at 3am tonight from Delhi, arriving back in Prince George by tomorrow (Aug 25) night. In the meantime, its veg burgers (no more dodgy homemade paneers for me!) and chillin’ in our Delhi guest house. Looking forward to being back in Canada, our home, our cats, and just plain normal living plus not having to use bottled water to brush our teeth (gets to be a bit painstaking after a few weeks of it to be honest).

We’ll post up a selection of our craziest and most interesting photos hopefully next weekend to the blog! So look forward to a little more J+B spam from the subcontinent headed to your inbox soon

See you next in the great white north! (after twenty-eight hours of flights involving a couple countries and three more plan rides of course).

Brodie and Jess

Yesterday, we walked into the main town and noticed a bunch of schoolchildren and people lined up along the roadside.  Then we saw most of them were holding the white scarves that the Dalai Lama traditionally blesses when he holds an audience.  We realized he was perhaps coming into town a day earlier than we thought so we waited for a few minutes and suddenly there was a motorcade and then he was riding past a few feet from us, smiling and waving!  It was really cool to see him in person, and pretty emotional to be surrounded by hundreds of people who were so obviously thrilled and honoured to see him.  It also made me think of the stories of Tibetan people we learned while in McLeod Ganj, who literally risk their lives to escape from Tibet to India, in part to be in the vicinity of the Dalai Lama.

It turned out the teaching we had planned to attend in Manali was occuring that day rather than the next as we had thought, so luckily we were able to get a spot under the tents that were set up all around the Tibetan temple, sitting on blankets on the ground surrounded by hundreds of Tibetan and Indian people, monks and nuns, and foreigners from all over the world. When the Dalai Lama drove into the temple grounds and got out of his vehicle, he was ushered in by high ranking monks wearing the traditional yellow headdress and blowing eery sounding flutes.  He then climbed up on the dais of the temple and started the teaching, which was based on a Tibetan text called “37 Practices of a Bodhisattva” – which are people who devote themselves to alleviating suffering of all living beings. We had heard the teaching would be in Tibetan so fortunately we had brought a little radio and headphones and tuned in to the English translation.  It was really cool to hear and it diverged from the theme sometimes with little bits of streams of consciousness with little asides and anecdotes to the Tibetan people there, so probably was a bit different than what we might have heard at one of his talks in North America –  and it lasted for four hours! Throughout he was making little jokes and laughing, and you definitely got a sense of the serene and good-hearted attitude he always seems to portray. We’re really happy it worked out that we got the chance to see the Dalai Lama here!  

Today we did a little hike up to a temple on the mountaintop above Manali, an ancient Hindu shrine that was built in the 1500s, and is still site of animal sacrifices – in fact today the ground in front of the temple was splattered with the blood of some goat or yak slaughtered this morning!  On a happier note, there were many women milling around in traditional Kullu Valley dress holding angora rabbits, wanting us to pose with the rabbits for a picture.  We resisted at first but had them dropped into our arms anyways – their fur was amazingly soft and they just hung out and let you cuddle them, so we got some cute pictures.  The rest of the day we enjoyed the mountain views from our balcony and sampled some more apple pie.  One more day of R&R tomorrow, then Tuesday morning we catch a flight back to Delhi! We decided we couldn’t bear a 16 hour overnight bus ride back so are looking forward to getting to see a hint of the Himalayas from the air!

Namaste,

Jessica

The past few days we’ve been relaxing in Manali, a place that was described to be before we left as “just like Jasper” by a person from India – and it turns out it is a lot like BC.  We have a guesthouse up on a steep hillside, and we’re surrounded by towering mountains on all sides and the valleys are lined with apple orchards.  More unusual is the proliferance of hemp plants growing randomly in all the ditches!  

It’s been great to have fresh air, bursts of sunshine mixed in with the rainshowers, and lots of bakeries with delicious applie pie!  It’s like a little mini holiday within our trip and we can hardly remember the 40 degree heat from a week ago…