The Road to Agra

Today we got up early to get on the road before major traffic jams. A futile effort, we seem to be in plenty of traffic from the start, can’t imagine it gets much worse.
We are on a bus ride to Agra an old capital of Mughal India with many points of interest in particular the Taj Mahal.

Giant goddess on the way to Agra

Our lunch stop is planned to visit an ashram of the ISKON (International Society for Krishna Consciousness) folks, popularly known as the Hari Krishnas in the US. We take a tour of the facilities and see the industrial scale program where they feed 50,000 school lunches from this facility, all volunteer work. And around the area they have facilities that feed another 100,000. They also have programs to feed widows. We have lunch there and the food is good, better than some restaurants we have eaten in. We buy some trinkets and make some donations, its hard not to when you see a program working so well and run by happy, dedicated volunteers.

We climb back on the bus and head towards Agra. We hit a lot of traffic, some three wheeled scooters carry 10 kids home from school. At one point the traffic grinds to a halt, there is a mechanical breakdown ahead on a vehicle that looks surprising it has ever ran, a reject from the junk yard. Vehicles actually turn around and go the wrong way back to try to find some around the jam. Several of us pile off the buss to help push it off the road so we can get on our way. Fortunately the repairs are concluded  as we arrive and we don’t have to strain our bodies in unexpected ways.

Trouble on the road.

Tomorrow is the Taj Mahal we do not have enough time today but we do visit the Red Fort which is about as impressive fortress as any in the world. It was mostly built in the early 1600s with three sets of walls, a moat and originally some 500 buildings within it. When the British controlled India they used it as an army garrison. It was temporally overrun by rebels in the 1857 Seapoy Mutiny but its hard to imagine anything taking over this formidable facility. From the fort the Taj Mahal is visible and inviting.

Interior Palace

One of the four gates

 We check into our local hotel and it looks great, especially the food, another buffet. We need to just skip some meals. The food is just too good and too much.

 A difficult development, Sybil is not well, significant gastric distress. A doctor visits but wants to have some tests to make sure it is not a serious problem. Everything is in limbo for her, will she feel better, need some minor treatment or have to end the journey early. We will not know until tomorrow.

Old Delhi

Today was an incredible experience of another culture, two actually; one historic and one very much alive. We start with a visit to the Qutub Minar mosque complex. Built starting in the 1100’s from older Hindu and Jain temples. The most imposing structure is a 5 story minaret. Impossibly tall tower, calls up images of the Tower of Babel racing to the sky.

The Qutub Minar

We visit a shop with crafts from the Kashmir area, particularly rugs. Susan finds a beautiful Tree of Life patterned prayer rug and breaks out her mad money to assure it will find a place in our home.

We go on to visit the  old Red Fort of Delhi and the Red Mosque there. This large structure from the 1200’s could hold 25,000 people at prayer. 

The women in our group had to wear borrowed robes.

A pedicab ride sounds relaxing but turns out to be the wildest activity so far. We ride through the streets of Old Delhi. Snarling traffic, constant horns, a traffic jam that just pretends to flow. We weave through narrow streets our senses assaulted with every kind of image, smell, sound and physically bouncing ride. We narrowly miss hitting people, animals, vehicles so many times it sometimes seems like a Road Runner cartoon. But this is real, a slice of everyday life in Old Delhi.

And this wasn't the narrowest street!

We return to our hotel, over stimulated and exhausted. We gather for dinner and cannot come up with a way to describe the ride we have been on. Fortunately we have each other to recount the narrow misses and wonder of it all. What more could lies ahead?

And Now We Are Eighteen

Two from Southern California, two from Texas, four from Arizona and eight from Northern California. Friendly souls all, mostly hearty seasoned travelers, each drawn to India for their own purposes. Some religious, some more traditional than others, some skeptical, all adventurous. We get to know each other at a first dinner and then its now Sunday our first day of the tour and what a tour it is. We first visit the Chattarpur Katyayani Devi (goddess) temple. This is a large complex and although looking traditional and old is actually a new (1974) temple. We remove our shoes, walk over freezing marble and get in lines to several temple rooms each with their images. We are neither specially welcomed or kept away, just part of the mass devotees there for prayers and offerings. In a large pavilion singers are chanting the Hanuman Chalista all the hour we are there and who knows how long before and after.

Devi Goddess Temple

Next on the tour is a visit to Gandhi Smriti (Birla House, the place where Gandhi was assassinated. It is preserved as a memorial. The grounds are a peaceful place. A good place to relax from the busy pace of Delhi. We have worked up an appetite and lunch is arranged a a nice restaurant. Susan and some of the group get our first encounter with a snake charmer. Susan sits and chats and gets to hold the live cobra while we snap pictures. Just like in the movies, this one. We bundle back on to the bus and go to visit a really large Sikh Gurudwara (temple) where our main focus if the kitchen. It is a Skih tradition to feed all commers for free. The kitchen is on an industrial scale although the labor is manual. They feed some 30,000 people each day, 18,000 for lunch. The place is packed as only a free lunch and devotional duty can pack in a place in India.

Women Making Bread

Our next stop is Humayun’s tomb, built in 1562 it is similar to the Taj Mahal which made later and larger in its design.  We were scheduled to visit a Kashmir cultural center but we are exhausted on our first day and decide to head home for a brief rest before dinner. And auspicious start to our journey is this exploration of Delhi.

Hanayun's Tomb

Arrival

We arrive in Deli at three in the morning. Although we are exhausted it is actually a good time to arrive to miss a lot of traffic, noise and pollution. The airport is modern , efficient and attractive, decorated with large mudras (hand position) sculptures. Even at this time the air reminds us of a bad smog day in Los Angeles, what will it be like in the next few days as countless vehicles take up their daily burden? We arrive in Delhi and it is closed. Literally. We did not know that we would be arriving on Republic Day, the equivalent to our 4th of July. The shops and a lot of services are closed. How convenient as we need a slow  day to recover from the 24+ hours of travel. A couple hours of sleep and
we get up for breakfast and try to adjust to the time change. We meet Shanti and Jivat and more of our group who arrive a few hours after us. We wander over to an ATM to gather some local currency, look at the mostly closed shops in the nearby mall and return for a nap. Instead Adventure Girl Susan arranges for a car to drive us around the city. It is a good low traffic opportunity. While we expected a lot of poverty, slums and beggars which we did find, we are surprised at the opposite--wealth, cars, houses, new large business and apartment buildings, and a large modern metro system. Cows and pigs roam the streets with new BMWs cruising by. The people are helpful. We try to figure out things like tipping, exchange rates, bartering, nearby shopping opportunities. Everyone is helpful. Already we have a couple medical incidents. Henry had a difficult flight and while he is recovering Sybil has some digestive distress and will be resting up, hoping to be back to full energy tomorrow. Even though we had clean airline and hotel food, the difficulties of jet lag and not being as young as we think we are have taken there toll.

Getting Started

How do you turn desires into actions, dreams into realities? This is the story, mostly a travel story, of how Susan and I finally made it to India, Bhutan and Nepal. All it took was the right opportunity and a little willingness on our parts along with financial and temporal resources.

The prospect of India.
Why now comes down to three elements, preparation, an appropriate guide and the opportunity to experience the spiritual pilgrimage to the Kumbh Mela. We have been to fairly exotic places: Rarotonga and remote South Pacific islands, Fiji, Bali, Viet Nam, Cambodia and Burning Man, all of these we see as just preparations for India; the most other of  civilizations to our own life in Pasadena California. India: spiritual, poor, ancient, dangerous and yet welcoming. There is something that calls us to experience the 'other', other ways of being in our world that are not necessarily better or worse, just different; to be able to see the world through another's eyes. The easiest version of this would be just being in the UK and other places that drive on the left side of the road. The social edict to 'keep right' starts to feel organic to us in our society but it is only a social convention. How much of our life follows conventional thinking and starts to feel like it is the only natural way? Or the experience in Bali and other places of only using the right hand for eating and social interactions. Or wadding into traffic in Viet Nam, trusting that the cars and scooters will magically go around me. Or having kava with the chief of a small village on an off island of Fiji, following their custom, suddenly being part of the village, no longer a stranger. And music, all of these places with their own sound tracks. Dancing in Fiji, church music in Rarotonga, the Barong in Bali and everywhere chanting always going on. These places have their own sounds, singing, music, chanting; dancing and pulsing with life. India alone offers more universes than all the places we have been. And we want to experience them, to sing and chant and dance together, no longer strangers.

Like most miracles our guide arrived inadvertently when a friend of a friend was visiting our church. Shanti was pleasant enough and said she and her Indian husband, Javit, lead trips to India. Fair enough, we exchange pleasantries and email addresses and went on with our lives not thinking much about it. Some days later an email arrives with some travel information and a web link. Susan and I look over the itinerary, look at each other and simultaneously say 'this is it'. Going in the right season to most of the places we want to go. More a spiritual than a recreational tour. We would go to some common places like New Delhi and the Taj Mahal but more importantly Amritsar (the Skihs temple), Sarnath (the Buddhas first lecture), Vernasari, Mother Theresa's place in Kolkata. and most importantly the Kumbh Mela, the ancient and contemporary Hindu pilgrimage which occurs only ever twelve years and will  gather 50 million souls to the shores of the Ganges.  What an opportunity. A western guide and an Indian guide, about a dozen people in the group, going to where we want to go. We call my sister Sybil and her husband Henry who live in Jerome Arizona and tell them of this opportunity and they are in too. They talk to friends of theirs and we have another couple. It all just comes together.

Bhutan. In some kind of mystical way I have wanted to go to Bhutan for at least as long as I have heard about it. A remote, mountainous, cold Buddhist kingdom. They were not open to any visitors until the 1960s , they did not even have a currency. Half the country still does not have electricity. Yet it has a reputation from those few who have visited there as actually being 'the happiest place on earth' and it is not an amusement park. They have developed the concept of GNH Gross National Happiness to focus on rather then GNP, Gross National Product, a purely financial measurement. I meditate in various Buddhist traditions, mostly Japanese Zen and Siri Lankan vipassana as well as modern western versions. Bhutan has a very pure form of Buddhism similar to Tibetan which calls to me.  Amazingly, to me, our older son had been there 20 years ago. He knew I wanted to go and one day I get a call he is going on a tour there with some friends of his, before me! Combination of ecstatic for him and a bit of jealousy too. He comes back with stories, pictures and a mandala which is promptly hung on the wall of our dining room. Someday I WILL get there. And now that we are planning to visit India it is time.

Nepal. Nepal never called to my but it did for Susan and since I added Bhutan she added Nepal. A mountainous Hindu country. Sybil had be there a couple times in her climbing days and wants to see how it has changed twenty years on. A pristine version of India, so I'm told.

Ganesha, the remover of obstacles. Like any great project one sets out to do the first thing one encounters is obstacles. In my case it is medical. I have a fairly common heart condition atrial fibrillation (a-fib). An episode arrives quite randomly, generally not very strong or long I had a major episode in 2007 which helped me decide to retire in 2008. Not much to do about it just taking a couple mild medications but now events are more frequent and stronger. The cardiologist puts me on a stronger medication and has me wear a heart monitor for a month and just two weeks before trip is to leave she calls and says to cancel the trip and come in for a heart proceedure. She is concerned that my pulse had hit 250+ at one point and this should be treated now. I am totally crestfallen. I explain to her that I am planning a spiritual trip to an event that only happens ever twelve years and I would already be on the Ganges if anything fatal occurred. Surprised, she goes over my records with the electro physiologist and they decide that since I went through such an a-fib event without fainting I must have a basically strong heart from many years of running. I can go with the instruction to take extra meds if my heart should speed up and when I get back the surgery will be scheduled.