A Pilgrimage Special - Traveling The Buddhist Circuit

There are four holy places of pilgrimage namely Lumbini, Bodhgaya, Sarnath and Kusinagar. These places are rather far apart from each other and each journey often entails a journey of over a hundred or two hundred kilometers, and takes at least more than five hours of traveling. Our journeys passing through hamlets and paddy fields were rather interesting and on one of these journeys from Lumbini to Kushinagar, we had stopped at a school uninvited to do dana and in others from Kushinagar to Patna for instance, we had to bring along packed lunch and eat in the bus or in the case of the journey from Varanasi to Agra, in the train. The packed lunch of fried rice, eggs, fruits which we got while traveling to Patna was rather big and some of the pilgrims kindly gave them away to little Indian boys who swarmed them on our stop for the toilet, only to discover later, that the rice were discarded. The boys took the eggs and fruits though and we concluded that rice was not their type of food and maybe, they were not even as hungry or poor as we supposed. Patna is 280 kilometers away from Kushinagar and I for one, was rather beat when we reached Patna where we had dinner and met our guide's son.

Views along the way...






Surrounded by little kids out for a handout ...



Patna, outside our hotel...


Our guide, Kumar's son...