Bandhavgarh

We've gone into the jungle, very literally. We flew from Varanasi into Kujaharo, then a 6 hour drive to the reserve.

Bandhavgarh is one of India's premier tiger reserves, supposedly still containing more than 50 tigers. There are long drives (> 70 kilometers) every morning and afternoon, and after three attempts we had good photos of varieties of deer and monkeys, boar, even wild peacocks, but we still hadn't seen the one thing everybody comes here for: TIGERS!

Fran slept in for the last drive Tuesday afternoon, to change the karma and bring me good luck, and it worked! After 16 hours of searching, we found a huge male (he seemed a good bit larger than the lions Davin and I saw in Africa), and watched him for almost 14 minutes until he strolled into the bush. Every deer within 500 yards was barking danger alerts. He really was magnificent.

In addition, the lodge is more than a mile from the road, and very early this morning a jeep passed a tiger within 300 yards of the lodge, quite a ways out of the reserve. Somewhere around 30% of the vehicles seemed to see a tiger on each drive, which was a higher percentage than we expected. Our driver is an excellent naturalist who can answer any question about anything we see, and we were very fortunate to have him.

No sense of what's going on in the world for three days. We're not using a mobile phone, and the lodge has no TV, and only one dial-up computer for everybody to use, so we're really out of touch. Two more cities this week, then to Agra Friday night to see the Taj Mahal.

Varanasi

We are in Varanasi for Diwali, the festival of lights.

The holiest city in Hinduism, on the banks of the holiest river, for one of the biggest festivals of the year. They compare it to Christmas in our country. Everybody is festive, and constantly wishing everyone “Happy Diwali.”

The first night we went to the Ganges river for the Aarti ceremony, a 3000 year old blessing at which Hindu holy men light candles, play music, and pray for family and world peace. Four hours before sunset we could see thousands of people walking toward the river (from miles away), and guessed how mobbed it would be.

Driving in Varanasi is another new experience. We saw jammed roads in places like Vietnam and Delhi, but nothing like this. Cars, buses, trucks, auto-rickshaws, bicycle rickshaws, bicycles, and pedestrians (no sidewalks here) share the narrow roads with cows (sacred),monkeys, goats, and other animals. Fran still won't open her eyes. Anyway, we drove until the car could no longer move, than walked through the crowd to the river.

The rituals of life and death occur daily in and around the holy water of the Ganges River. We rose at 4:00 a.m. this morning to go back to the river, and moved through tens of thousands of pilgrims and residents walking (barefoot) through the darkness of the city to the river for morning ablutions. Every devout Hindu aspires to die in Varanasi, and to be cremated at the river's edge. There are so many that cremations are conducted 24 hours a day; they are especially poignant at dawn, as the sun rises over the river. We watched this morning's event from a boat on the river, and placed holy lights in the river for each of our parents and our kids.

After breakfast, we visited Sarnath, where the Buddha preached his message of enlightenment more than 2500 years ago; Varanasi is also the birthplace of Buddhism.

Tonight we'll visit a local family in their home for dinner and Diwali festival activities.

More Delhi

I spoke too soon! Breakfast disagreed with Fran, she headed right back to bed, and Bob set out to explore.



First stop was Humayun's Tomb, which later provided the basic design idea for the Taj Mahal in Agra. Large grounds and gardens, separate tombs for his barber and astrologer (seriously), and the tomb is still largely intact today. Renovation work including extensive stonework is underway. I saw female stone masons! Another first.

Today is the first day of Diwali, and flowers are a common gift. I walked through one of Delhi's large flower markets, and watched entire families preparing marigolds and dozens of other flowers to be taken home and given as gifts.



Afterward we walked through the Qutub Minar, a 234-foot high minaret constructed as part of a large Moslem mosque when the country was invaded about 400 years ago.

Lunch was at the Lodi Gardens. In the afternoon I visited the Sikh temple during afternoon prayers, and to view the kitchens where volunteers cook for, and feed any persons who show up, at any time, on any day. Sikhs believe in one God instead of many (Hinduism), but today these groups seem to coexist more easily than others.

We're in Delhi, India!

Tuesday

Travel seems fraught with anxiety these days. The taxi forgot to pick us up, we had a short connection in Frankfurt with long lines for Immigration and Security and a sprint for our connecting flight, and we were not sure the luggage made the flights, but finally everything worked out exactly as it was supposed to . . . and our guide was waiting for us at 1:00 a.m. in Delhi!



Everybody is so gracious here. Two large planes landed at midnight, but every single passenger was given a rose, and our guide had more flowers and gifts for us. Every passenger was screened for swine flu by a nurse before we even got to Immigration. Exiting the luggage area, there must have been 75-100 guides waiting patiently with name cards for specific passengers, even at that late/early hour.

The time difference is 9.5 hours (yes, a half time zone), so at 2:30 a.m. it felt like 5:00 in the afternoon, and I was wide awake even after 22 hours of travel. So, a few hours' sleep, some breakfast, and we're ready to explore! We'll collapse early tonight!

We're 24 hours into an intense indoctrination in India! It is intense! And there's a LOT to learn!

Delhi is big! And old! We spent this morning in Old Delhi, the ancient Muslim capital, where very old and very new coexist, side-by-side. New modern buildings and lots of renovations for the Commonwealth Games in 2010; and temples and mosques and forts that have been around for 500 years. Lots of traffic, few cabs but thousands of small “auto-rickshaws,” people clinging to buses in ways that completely violate the laws of physics (there's no way the 4th guy outside the door can possibly stay on). Crazy compared to home, but we're becoming used to traffic in Asia, and this no longer seems so unusual.

Delhi has been continuously occupied for more than 6,000 years, 9 different times the capital of India, has changed hands dozens of times. We visited the Red Fort, a UNESCO World Heritage site built more than 500 years ago during the height of the Moghul empire. Built of sandstone and marble, it has been ransacked and overrun various times, but the Persians stripped it of precious stones and sandalwood and artifacts and carried them back to Persia, where many of them sit in Iranian museums today. The fort is being restored, but it is presently in serious disrepair.

From there we took a bicycle rickshaw ride through the Chandi Chowk Bazaar, Old Delhi's amazing shopping area. It's different and smaller than Bangkok's Chatuchak market (which has more than 15,000 shops), but may be even more intense. Everybody wants tourists' dollars, including the guy who gestured to me with a small round container, which he opened to reveal a 3-foot cobra (about 9 inches from my arm). He was offering, for a few rupees, to make the snake dance.

From the bazaar we visited Jama Masjid, a 400-year old mosque which sometimes holds 20,000 Muslims for Friday or holiday prayers.

They provided polka-dotted cover-ups for Westerners because our clothing (even with long pants and long-sleeved tops) does not cover us up as much as is preferred. We noticed that we were getting serious scowls from the men in the entrance.  Afterwards, our guide told us is was because Fran looks very Iranian and the men were expressing disapproval for not wearing traditional garb!




Later we drove past the new Lotus Temple, and the sites where Mahatma Ghandi, then later his daughter Indira (then Prime Minister), and later Mohandas Ghandi, her son, were cremated. These (adjacent) sites are now Hindu holy places.


In the afternoon we visited the new Akshardham Temple, which is staggering. Completed less than 4 years ago, almost entirely of marble and sandstone, but with extraordinary carvings, it covers 100 acres and is one of the largest places of worship ever constructed on the planet. Where did they find enough skilled craftsmen, Hindu or otherwise, to provide 300 million stone carving hours, in the 21st century??

Religion still drives lots of human behavior. Hindus and Muslims seem to coexist in an uneasy alliance. (India is 88% Hindu; Pakistan is 99% Muslim. And they don't always agree on everything.) Security is a priority everywhere. At the Red Fort, there is a bunker, surrounded with sand bags and manned by a soldier with a machine gun, about every 25 yards. At the temples and mosques every person is individually patted down. We saw hundreds of soldiers armed with automatic weapons at points throughout the city. Our driver was stopped and questioned (a previous bomber impersonated a tourist guide), although I'm still certain we were stopped because the guy in the back has blue eyes! A typical modern-day terrorist for sure!!

We're enjoying the food, but we still have lots to learn about spices and tastes! As long as we stay with medium seasonings, we're doing fine.