The Bumpy Road to Graphic Enlightenment

Women applying make-up and nail polish, one of many scenes of daily life carved onto the temples at Khajuraho

We drove off to the airport again, a thirty minute drive that was marked by the passing of cars driving back to Varanasi's with yellow bundles strapped to the car roof . These bundles were bodies that family members were taking to the river Ganges to cremate. Your are lucky if you die within driving distance to the river: it's straight to paradise with out another reincarnation.

The flight to Khajuraho was only 20 minutes but we share the security line with the model Heidi Klum and her husband Seal (the singer), they were headed back to Delhi after renewing their wedding vows.

Although we have not complained about humidity, we should, at this point, mention it has been at 100% and one's shirt is continually wet. This is because we are traveling with the monsoon.

In the afternoon we met with our guide who was to take us through the group of temples at Khajuraho. I think calling him an art history teacher would have been a more appropriate title. He got us in front of the first temple, one known for it's rather erotic carving and gave us a lecture on the intricacies of Hindu iconology.  We would have sat longer in the soporific, hot, dripping sun if the monsoon had not saved us by pouring forth from the heavens. It rained and rained until the site closed. Somehow the rain shifted the conversation to the political situation at hand and we waded back to the car through, at times, knee deep water.

Little boy riding his bike home from school through flooded monsoon drenched streets!

The next morning we got up and met our art history teacher who went into guide mode and saw the temples.  They had been lost for centuries in the jungle but were rediscovered by a British cavalryman. The city had been the religious capital of the local dynasty separated from political headquarters by 50km. This, our guide told us was the very first enforcement of the concept of separation of church and state. The temples, which some of you may recognize from Gardener's History of Art, are covered in intricate carvings in red sandstone with scenes of daily life, angry gods and a variety of mischievous elephants.

  

Family photo in front of Vishvanatha Temple at Khajuraho

The drive to Orchha was only 130 k but took 4 hours because we were traveling on typical country road shared with water buffalo, goats, cows, motorcycles and ox carts not to mention many potholes.  It was an adventures and the scenes of rural India were as memorable as any of the World Heritage sight we have seen. Water buffalo are everywhere, submerged by the road in water wallows or being herded along it for milking. Buffalo give more milk than cows and are far hardier. Small children were being lead into covered wagon like bicycle rickshaws with their back packs hanging out the back. Goat herders sat in the fields under the big black umbrellas, used for both rain and sun.

We stop along the way and had fresh roti, a bread cooked on stone and in the fire. The chef invited us into her two room stick house with a dirt floor to show us how to prepare it. Sam I have plans for a clay oven in the back yard, good for roti as well as pizza. No drive would be complete with out a stop to photograph flying foxes hagging from a road side tree.

Flying foxes in a tree

Fox taking flight

Rickshaw schoolbus

Orcha was our first palace. It sat on the banks of a river and provided our first notion of the magnitude of the forts in the area and the power of the people who lived there because of the sheer size. Our guide described the life that took place in these ruins and all of a sudden the stories of Mongols and Shahs and kings took shape. What was perhaps most remarkable was that the palace at Orcha was just a visiting palace. A rest stop on the way north to Agra or Sikri. Still, it was imposing, with delicately carved stone jalis contrasting starkly with thick ramparts. The entrance gate had three massive steps alongside a more normal size staircase. The lowest step was for military men to dismount from horseback. The second step was for ministers to step down from their camels. The third and highest step was for the Raj (king) to dismount his elephant and walk through the massive palace gates where he would be showered with flower petals and accompanied with music.  

That evening, following the path of the Rajas we took a train to Agra. Taking a train in India is part of seeing the country. We were met by a porter who took our 40 pound bags and hoisted them up on top of his head. After perching two suitcases on top of his headscarf he proceeded to hang two more on his arms. Then without so much as a grunt he walked the 500 yards to the train platform.  The atmosphere at the station was somewhat like walking into Arco for a Kings game circa 1995.  The mood was generally upbeat but the sheer mass of people all trying to get to their designated section of the platform created a kind of overwhelming pandemonium. As we walked through the station we could see the trains looking like centipedes as all of the passengers in the economy class cabins stuck hundreds of arms out of narrow windows on the sides of the train cars. They were packed closely together and I doubt the train was air conditioned. On our platform, several hundred more people sat squatting on the concrete with there feet flat and their hips tucked underneath them right between their legs. This is how everyone in India sits when they are waiting for someone. Their balance and flexibility is amazing but must come from a lifetime of sitting this way. In fact even in the court scenes we saw later in palaces the ministers of the kings cabinet sat on the floor and in the many rooms and audience halls furniture was replaced by carpets and cushions.

The hubbub of the platform contrasted radically with the calm, air-conditioned cabin in which we found our seats. The porters loaded our luggage and a food trolley came down the aisle with sandwiches and tea and buttons with smiley faces on them. 

More Photos!

A platform in the courtyard of Orchha palace where
dancing girls performed for the Raja and special guests

Makeshift tandoor oven for making naan, outside Orchaa palace

One of the few remaining lakes that connected the 84 temples at Khajuraho

The three stages of enlightenment by overcoming lust

and learning to love an individual may reach Nirvana

The River Ganges

The Ganges River during morning prayer

We woke up to pouring rain and headed to the airport to Varanassi known as Benares known as Kashi as every person who spoke English would point out. No matter what its name, it’s the undisputed holy capital of India. One guide said Jesus even visited here in his unaccounted for teenage years. This is a place where pilgrims come to wash in the Ganges and worship at Ghats along the river. It is also the most holy place to be cremated and it is said that if you are cremated there and your ashes go in the Ganges you stand a good chance of going straight to heaven rather than suffering through another reincarnation in this world.

Worshippers bathing in the river in the early morning

Before entering the mystical world of Varanassi our guide took us to Benares Hindu University, one of the largest universities in India. The campus had separate male and female dormitories on either side of the campus. There was nothing modern about this university on the outside. (See pictures).

We are here visiting in monsoon season and the water was extremely high on the Ganges so the ghats (temples on the river) were covered and the steps leading down to the riverbank were totally submerged.

I don’t know how to begin to describe Varanassi. The narrowness and grime of the old streets was similar to Delhi but every time you looked up there was a temple tower or a minaret or shrine. We made our way through them down to the banks of the Ganges and, with the other pilgrims, sat to watch the Ganga Arati ceremony. The arati is performed every night to put the river, who Hindus believe is a goddess, to sleep. As we watched the original prayer, we were struck by how timeless it was, it was recited the evening before, the year before, the century before and back into the beginning of this civilization.  The spirituality of the incense and clapping and music was pervasive and undeniable. It was uplifting.

Priests performing arati at sunset

Normally, this ceremony is watched from a boat, but with the river so high, we were not allowed out on the water. We did however, make it into the city through the Muslim part of town to the silk market one evening led by a friendly local who escorted us past hundreds of Muslim men staring in curiosity at our presence in their bazaar. Down one of these alleyways is the famous golden temple of Varanassi whose top dome is 2500 pounds of solid gold. It is built beside a mosque and so under heavy military guard. This guard is necessary because of bombing in the area. One such bombing took place when a member of Al-Qaeda detonated explosives at the red temple of the goddess Durga. It was chilling standing in that courtyard imagining it full of people on the festival day when the bomb went off, killing seven.

The Red Temple to the goddess Durga who rides a tiger and gives courage to those who offer prayers

The next day we left Varanassi to go to Sarntah and see the site of Lord Buddha’s first sermon. Here at the stupa we learned of Siddartha Guatama’s, the prince who became the buddha’s, journey to enlightenment through paintings on the temple wall.

The Stupa at Sarnath, intended to echo the shape of Buddha's overturned begging bowl

Bull in a china shop. He is there every day
and has become the official store mascot

 Curiously, in the fifth century in response to the growing popularity of Buddhism which eschews the caste system, Hindu priests claimed the Buddha as the ninth incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu so as to bring errant Buddhists back into the fold. Indeed, Hinduism was seen more as a world view than a religion in India. There was a small museum there with a stunning collection of carvings. It included the lion capital from the reign of India’s first real emperor, Ashoka. That particular piece is from the fifth century. Having made a thorough round of the holy sites we left Varanassi for Khajuraho.

Scaled marble map of India on the floor of the Mother India temple showing geography of the subcontinent

 

Photos: Statute of Ganesha in the red temple, Statute of Shiva as Destroyer, Tailor working in an alley shop, Cows piled by wood for cremations. 

1000 Years In Delhi

Daddy arrived 2 am Monday morning and the rumpus began.

We all seemed to expect Delhi to be like a scene out of some arms smuggling, desert championing, jungle hunting movie. The kind where some brawny guy, in a khaki button-down on a motorbike is weaving through traffic and clamoring street hawkers and monkeys and maybe a prostitute. That kind of stereotypical image you get of streets in big cities in “the east”. 

Delhi surprised us with its state of the art airport, European boulevards, shiny new metro and western style shopping mall. But, lurking under this is the unchanging reality of poverty in a country with 1.2 billion people, a persistent social stratification and a government that funnels millions in state funds to its representatives bank accounts in Switzerland.

The Qutub Minar (tower)

We began our adventure by visiting Old Delhi and the Qutub Minar built by the slave general Qutub of the first Muslim invasion of Hindustan. It was our first encounter with the brilliant red sandstone carving that is the medium of choice for monuments, temples and palaces across the north of India. The Qutub complex contains a mosque built over Hindu temples and a rest stop for weary camel caravans. It is dominated by an enormous tower of sandstone and marble which served as both a tower of victory and a minaret to call the faithful to prayer.

We left the complex and headed to New Delhi. which was established by the English in 1911 as they were moving the seat of their power from Calcutta in the East. Delhi, has in fact been a capital of seven cities but New Delhi is the latest and it imposes itself impressively on the past. In fact, it looks a bit like Paris with its broad streets and big palace and even a duplicate of the arc’d triumph honoring the Indian soldier who fought and died alongside British ones in World War II. 

Old Delhi: A mosque built over
a Hindu temple at the Qutub Minar Complex

New Delhi: A European style palace
on the way up the main boulevard

The green spaces too, evoke the gardens of Paris. But the brilliant green parakeets and large brown kites that criss-cross through tropical trees remind you that this is the other side of the world. In one of these gardens. 

The site of Ghandi's Cremation

We saw the site of Mahatma Ghandi’s cremation, which was surrounded by a constant stream of visitors. In another garden, was the tomb of Humayan, the second of the great Mughal emperors of Hindustan.  He had succeeded Babar (King Babar, perhaps an inspiration for the leephant king) who had come down from Mongolia and conquered Delhi, putting down the rajput princes and uniting the north. Humayun, his son, fond of opium and girls had frittered away the empire, losing his seat and, in the guise of a pilgrim, pleading with the King of Persia to recapture the empire. After seven years in exile he succeeded. His tomb omits such details and instead tells a story of power and faith. Its architectural plan was actually the predecessor to the Taj Mahal.

A window into Humayun's Tomb

Mom and Dad at the gateway to Humayun's tomb

Leaving behind the tomb, we passed the red fort and wound our way into the narrow streets of Old Delhi. Jama Masjid Mosque dominates old Delhi and was built in 1656. We climbed the stps and covered ourselves appropriately. This was Shah Jahan’s last building a huge complex. The structure was mostly an open courtyard that could be covered by a massive canopy. It is worth noting, however, that the Islam of Shah Jahan was a gentler religion than the one we know today.

The Indian Arc D'Triumph

In the tradition of Mughal emperors, Shah Jahan tolerated and even encouraged the freedom of religion in Mughal India. It was only with the coming of his grandson, Aurangazeb, that Islam was declared the single religion of the empire. This intolerance hastened the empire’s collapse and Aurangazeb was its last ruler.

Mom putting her token in the metro, oops no photos allowed

We left the mosque for more secular pursuits and climbed into bicycle rickshaws to squiggle through the narrow stone streets of Old Delhi where reality seems to match more closely the exotic images of the backstreets of India we conjured on the flight from California.

After a full day of sigh seeing our guide dropped us at the Lodhi Gardens which is a beautiful park and necropolis. In 1931, Lady Wellington turned this group of tombs into a park and it feels a bit like a smaller Golden Gate Park. While the paths wind around beautiful old tombs, dating back as far as 1390 they were populated by today’s Delhites in jogging gear with western-breed dogs.  We tried to capture the sun setting over one of the tombs in an artsy moment and then headed back to our hotel via the subway, which was as modern as any metro in Athens, Rome or D.C. Of course, we still had to catch a tuk tuk to make it all the way home.

Sunset in the Lodi Gardens

It was a lovely day of adventure. . . should we tell you about dinner: it was tasty. 

In Search of the One-Horned Rhino

We woke up to driving rain and headed to the airport for our twenty-two minute flight from Kathmandu at 4400 feet to the Royal Chitwan National Park at 2600 feet, a steamy, wet tangle of vines and Saal trees like something out of The Jungle Book.

After three hours in the airport, twenty minutes in the air and an hour on the bus and then we were loaded into a troop transport truck that lumbered over the rain soaked road leading into the park. We saw a kingfisher flit through the trees and elephants crossing the river at a distance. The truck stopped at the edge of a wide shallow river, fast flowing and triple in size with the heavy rain. To our surprise, the elephants were headed in our direction and we soon realized that was the last leg of our transport to the park. Champakali, the Indian elephant, knelt down on her massive knees and the porters tossed our suitcases into a palanquin perched on her broad back. Then, we too climbed aboard and began a jostling trip across the river, through the marsh and up to the lodge.

A rainbow breaks through the monsoon clouds as we ride elephants through grass as tall as they are.

The advantage to an elephant is that she rises above the dense, wet-season foliage and with one command from her mahoot she will snap an obstructive tree limb or topple a small sapling to clear a path.  Elephant became our mode of transportation and we climbed onto the palanquin every time we ventured into the jungle looking for birds and game.

Riding Champakali through the Chitwan, Amy driving

Like all wildlife trekking, looking for tigers, leopards and rhinos in the jungle is somewhat like looking for Mom’s wallet and keys, you know they’re out there somewhere but your chances of finding them in any given place are slim. That is why we were so excited we came upon a large one horned-rhino standing on a bluff. Mom says it is a sight indelibly placed in her mind. Alas, we had no camera.

While scarcity of the one-horned rhino scarcity derives from his solitary nature it also attributable to the Chinese belief that the powder of the rhino horn can cure erectile maladies and is a powerful aphrodisiac. As a result the rhino is scarcer and scarcer in Nepal. A villager can get 40,000 to 50,000 USD for one horn.


On the bright side, the population of tigers in the park, once as low as 100 or so is now steadily increasing. Perhaps the rhino does not like this news but we were happy to hear it.

Although most of the wildlife eluded us, we did get to spend an awful lot of time with Pawankali and Champakali, two of the lodge’s elephants. These ladies were 45 and 36 years old, respectively. You can tell an elephant's age by the pink spots on its trunk. Pawankali was the more joyful of the two, with Champakali being prone to mischief and frequently earning a smack on the head with a metal rod, which we were assured the elephant “did not really feel”. When they wanted them to go forward or side to side the mahoots (elephant drivers) would tickle the elephant with their feet behind the ear, a gentle prodding. We got a chance to try our skills at driving the elephant as we left the jungle. Amy even mastered a few simple commands but lost her elephant stirrups and had to cling to the neck of Pawankali with her knees to stay aboard.

One morning, after game viewing and breakfast we had a lesson on elephant care down at the elephant stables. At the end of the lecture, we got to feed the elephants football size packets of grass and grain, called coochis. They would take three of them in their trunk and hold them there, but only eat one at a time. Always the ladies.

The mahoot produced a rope and circled Pawankali’s foot with it. He then asked us if we knew how tall an elephant was in relation to the circumferance of her foot. He said the first to guess correctly would get a prize. I guessed correctly, two circumfurances equaled one elephant, shoulder to ground. Since, I’d guessed right, Amy had to guess three and lost.

The prize: riding the elephant down to the river for its bath, all by myself. I was instructed to stand in front of the elephant so I was facing his trunk, to reach up grab the top of her ears and then she arched her trunk so I could step onto it. I did so and she lifted me up into the air so I could step onto her hed and then turn around and slip my feet behind her ears.

At that point we were ready to go. I gave her a tiny tickle behind the ears and we lurched forward. Amy and the mahoot followed behind on foot. It was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life. I felt a little selfish not sharing it with Amy, but I figured she’ll come back again and ride an elephant.

Down at the river, we had elephant showers. The elephant filled his trunk and sprayed us cooling us off. It was very very humid, an oppressive, sticky heat. So it was a welcome drenching. Then Amy and I paid pack Pawanikali’s kindness by giving her a bath. This required a bit more work. She lay down on the river bank and we scooped armfuls of water up onto her and gave her a scrub. I wish I could bring an elephant home.

On our last morning we said our goodbyes to Pawankali, the hiding tigers and the majestic rhino in his silver green forest and caught the elephant-back-troop-truck-bus-mini-plane back to Delhi to meet Dad.