Behind the Curtain

On November 17th, we plan to begin our overland journey across the Himalayas, from Kathmandu to Laos via Tibet. Since the Chinese government will be monitoring our internet usage, and since we'd like to avoid winding up in jail for honestly describing what we're likely to see in Chinese-occupied Tibet, we will suspend our blogging efforts until we reach SE Asia in December. Wish us luck!

The Epcot Center of Buddhism

About 2500 years ago a man named Siddharta Gautama sat down under a tree and vowed not to rise until he had discovered the true nature of reality. Thus the religion which we know as Buddhism was born.

Today a distant cousin of the tree stands on that spot, in the center of an beautiful temple complex which is itself surrounded by Buddhist temples from China, Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, Japan, and Thailand. Sit for a moment in Bodh Gaya's town square and you'll see Ladakhi ladies bundled in wool felt mingling with the local women in their bright saris. In the temples Tibetan monks in maroon meditate next to Indians in saffron, and Japanese in grey silk. It was an enchanting place to spend our last few days in India.

In the Arms of Mother Ganga

Susannah: One of the things that affluent westerners find uncomfortable about India is that the things we like to hide away and forget about are left exposed to the senses: poverty, disease, death, trash, sewage. Nowhere is this more true than in Varanasi (Benares), the ancient city of the gods on the banks of the sacred Ganges.

Mixed in with the sadhus, pilgrims and flower vendors along the ghats are horribly deformed beggars, people shitting in corners, dogs and cows with bloody wounds. The astounding thing is that people are completely unfazed; they laugh and gossip, their children run around barefoot and play happily with kites made of colored paper plucked from the piles of trash. Life goes on.

Our first evening in the city we walked past the burning ghats, open-air crematoria where people from all over India bring their deceased family members to spread their ashes in the holy waters. Watching the brightly shrouded bodies placed on the fires, the sparks spraying into the inky sky, I was overwhelmed by the nearness of death. In the next alley over, happy music blared out of the shops while customers haggled loudly over candles, miniature deities and other trappings of Hindu worship.

Early the next morning, we hired a small boat to look at the ghats from a different perspective. Thousands of people were bathing in the holy water, some praying as they did so, others splashing each other playfully. Rowing by the bathers, we passed two floating corpses lodged between moored boats, then watched a charred torso drift by.

Just as deities of both creation and destruction are worshiped and understood to have their place, life on the banks of the Ganga embraces the myriad joys and pains of existence.

Eye of the Tiger

Our jeep ground to a halt at a bend in the jungle trail near a dead tree. Awestruck, I gazed at inch-deep rents in the wood six feet off the ground. A male tiger had used this tree to mark his territory, and I had no trouble believing that he was calling the shots around there.

It was our first morning in Bandhavgarh National Park, one of the last tracts of jungle that once blanketed central India. Ruled by a population of 75 tigers, the park’s grasslands and forests overflow with animal and plant life.

Before we even entered the park, though, we’d already made one great find. We met Nils Urich, intrepid Norwegian adventurer and legendary moose hunter, at the train station. Following a recent overland trip from Cape Town to Cairo, Nils had improbably stopped in India en route to Antarctica. The three of us became fast friends, and Nils joined us on all our forays into the park.

From our first morning in the park, signs of the massive cat were all around us. We followed trails of six-inch paw prints, examined large piles of furry scat, and gaped at hardwood scratching posts. Despite a tingling in the back of my neck, the tigers themselves were nowhere to be seen.

As we followed the trail, however, we encountered herds of hundreds of spotted deer, peacocks in a mating dance, families of wild boar, resplendent tropical birds, sambar weighing up to 300 kg, eagles, monkeys, a solitary jackal, and a pair of tiny spotted owlets peering out of holes in a hollow tree.

The next morning, after teaching a group of 75 Indian schoolchildren to recite “Nils is an Eskimo” in unison, we resumed our search. Again we followed the massive paw prints, finally catching sight of a dark, distant shape in the grass with a twitching tail and ears. Later in the day, we caught a fleeting glimpse of a second tiger vanishing into a distant woodline. Finally, as light faded on our last foray into the jungle, we came face to face with the lord of the forest.

After a nearby jeep spotted a dominant male tiger at a watering hole, word went out across the park and a pell-mell chase ensued. Shrewdly anticipating the tiger’s movements, our guide positioned us near a game trail. The tiger padded out of a stand of bamboo less than twenty feet away and strolled casually past our jeep before remarkably turning onto the road. We followed at a respectful distance as the tiger led a procession of gawking homo sapiens on a five-minute parade down the road. Finally, as the last light of dusk faded, the tiger vanished into a stand of bamboo.

Well Worth the Journey

In the far western corner of India, wedged between the arid expanse of the Thar Desert and the Arabian Sea, lies the seldom-visited state of Gujarat. Enticed by tales of isolated villages, nomadic tribes and quality handicrafts at cheap prices, Susannah enthusiastically plotted our course south from Rajastan.

After a two day train journey we reached Bhuj, an outpost in desolate Kutch, a sparsely populated region of vast salt flats and coastal deserts suffering from earthquakes, sectarian violence and frequent drought. In order to reach the isolated villages, we had no choice but to travel in style. After three months of rattling public buses and raucous overnight train compartments, our golden chariot offered a needed taste of luxury.

Each village we visited was inhabited by a different tribe with different customs and styles of dress. Although the two Muslim Jat villages we visited greeted us with barely restrained hostility and we left quickly, in most cases we found people unusually warm and genuine. We were amazed at such good humor flourishing in the harshest of environments.





Exhausted by weeks of sun and sand in India's great deserts, we decided to hit the beach. The twelve square kilometer island of Diu, a former Portuguese colony finally returned to India after a brief shootout in 1961, was the perfect refuge. We ate grilled fish, drank cold beer (banned in mainland Gujarat), and watched our sand castles be carried away by the lapping Arabian sea.

Thus fortified, we journeyed East to the sacred Jain mountain in Palitana. Capped by a fairy-tale city of 900-some temples, Shatrunjaya Hill is the epicenter of the Jain faith. Emerging contemporaneously with Buddhism, Jainism advocates radical nonviolence and clergy wear masks to avoid harming even the tiniest insects. Each spire on Shatrunjaya Hill, large and small, caps an indivual tuk, or temple enclosure, named after the merchant who funded it.



Crossing into Madhya Pradesh on an overnight train, we stopped for the day in the small village of Sanchi to visit one of India's oldest surviving religious monuments, a Buddhist stupa dating from the third century BC.

Evening found us aboard yet another night train, barreling East into Kipling's fabled jungles in search of the elusive Bengal tiger.