The Adventures of Laura Drumm

Dear Family and Friends,

Perhaps it is unkind of me to state so, but I found Lumbini, the fabled birthplace of Buddha, jiade. Oooh, but that’s jumping ahead a wee bit so…

My mini-bus away from Kathmandu was scheduled to depart at 7:15 am. So, like any seasoned traveler, I arrived a good 45 minutes before the scheduled departure time. Conservatively early, just in case. Although I had previously purchased a ticket, the bus station lacked reassuring signs of organization such as numbered departure gates and so I was forced to jockey to the ticket counter in order to discover where my bus was actually located. Soon, a youngish man in a black Adidas jacket lead me swiftly past a row of empty, parked mini-buses before settling on a seemingly random bus and pointing me to board it. He prevented me from bringing my backpack with me, instead locking it into a teeny trunk with flimsy lock. I climbed aboard an empty bus and sat. The seats were benches and hard. Eventually, two university-aged men with melting brown eyes also climbed on and took seats, only to then restlessly exit. Soon a family of 3 boarded. And then got off. And then back on again. Finally, when a third of the seats were occupied and my watch reported that it was 10 minutes past our scheduled departure time, the Adidas man, a driver, another man (who turned out to be a second driver), and another youngish man with a Porsche scarf knotted over his head climbed aboard the bus. The driver started the engine and we were off.

We drove about 30 feet and stopped. 10 minutes later, I’d estimate (generously), we had moved another 10 feet. The 2 youngish men, who shared the job of managing the bus and hustling additional people aboard, were effectively the doors of our bus. They clutched a bar inside while their bodies hung outside. They seemed to be in charge of our stopping and going: they’d signal when the driver could let off the brake with two smart slaps on the bus’s side. Vendors of newspapers and potato chips and bottled water climbed on to and back off the bus; beggars with cards in Hindi and English (purporting to be begging for charitable purposes) dropped a card in each person’s lap on their way in and picked the same card up on their way out.

Outside the bus, a lady snuggled a presumably beloved dog under her diagonally slung neckscarf. Our bus rolled another 20 feet or so (I was beginning to wonder if I could walk to Lumbini quicker than the bus would drive) and drew up near a series of shopping stalls – obviously not for tourists – with assorted plastics, woven hats, rows of sunglasses, and dusty piles of clothing. The bus swayed and chugged around a corner onto an actual street. There, men were pulling weighty boxes to the tops of other buses. Another man rode on a livestock truck: he had planted two bare feet on the back of a huge brown bull and clutched the back of the truck. Another truck passed, its back filled with burlap bags and two brown shiny shins of a man whom I presumed (and hoped) was merely burrowed asleep. Snack stalls hung with long rows of shiny wrappers that reminded me of packaged condoms – although in actuality, condoms are not easily located in Nepal. On the buildings and rubble bordering the street, clothes were hung to dry on every possible surface; there were a surprising number of decorative potted plants amongst shoddy abodes. The city was wreathed in morning smog – or was it dust? People hurried along the streets with kerchiefs to faces, while policemen waving their arms amongst traffic had cloth masks to cover their lips, elastic stretching across the back of their heads. A girl clothed from matted hair to foot in dust, smiled at me and then turned to beg while two tight slaps to the side of the bus sounded and the bus started down the street.

But we stopped again around the next corner. Wryly, I decided that I needn’t have bothered being early for this bus, I couldn't have missed it even if I had tried!

Finally, an hour after our departure time, we stopped stopping and began to drive into hills. I concluded that schedules aren’t a priority in a country like Nepal: the priority and profit must reside in riders, ticket sales, in filling the bus and not wasting space nor gas. As we drove, a few buses passed uncomfortably near the window next to my face. Inside our bus, a few men coughed phlegmily while the engine growled and groaned. One of the youngish bus managers, who I decided that I liked much due to his gentle touch with elder people, inserted a CD into the player next to the driver’s head and loud Indian music blasted through speakers. As the bus bumped and swayed and gunned through tall Nepali hills, I began to feel very motion sick. But I was fascinated with the people crowding on to the bus. I found myself remembering that my previous home in Korea is populated with rather homogeneous-looking people; Nepal’s confluence of people and cultures shows on its people’s faces: aquiline profiles with darker skin, often wavy or curly hair, and female bodies with more heft and curves.

My motion sickness became bearable only after I opened my bus window. The window kept falling closed and so I had to keep re-propping it open with my elbow. I recalled another drive, a year earlier in another country, when I spent an entire drive with my head stuck into the breeze. After that drive, friends noted that my face had been speckled and darkened. This drive was not much different – 13 hours later, in Lumbini, I wiped my face and ruined my face cloth.

A guesthouse proprietor discovered a tired, dirty me near the Lumbini bus “station” at sunset. He inquired into whether I wanted to see his place (“it is just across the street, madam”) (just across the street turned out to be 2 miles away via motorcycle!) but the place was clean, family-operated and seemed to a decent place to sleep. Well, seemed decent until the dark dreadful hour of 5:45 am the following morning when raucous Indian music began blasting from the neighbor’s house. Horrified, I sat up in bed and felt a strong craving for Starbucks crash over me: I almost broke into tears imagining a soothing soy latte accompanied by a cinnamon scone. I would’ve happily settled for either Starbucks or throttling the neighbor – but I was meters away from the birthplace of Buddha and while Buddha was all about alleviating human suffering, I didn’t think that he’d approve of neither my materialistic nor violent impulses. (Although truly, is it ok on any level to blast dancing music at 5:45 am???) (I think not.)

At breakfast, the hotel proprietor’s good cook of a son inquired if I wanted to rent a bicycle for the day. Finding the price agreeable, I decided that I did. The bicycle had a puzzling lock built into its back wheel (it took me 5 minutes and a patient tutor to master the lock), was too high for my short legs, had poor shocks, and took me a good 2 hours to get comfortable maneuvering. And after my day on the back of a bike, I had the strangest bruising on the palms of my hands. But peddling was a great way to tour Lumbini, a place that somewhat accurately, LP describes…

As the historical birthplace of Gauama Siddhartha Buddha, Lumbini is one of the most important religious sites in the world. The man who would later a achieve enlightenment under a Bodhi tree, inspiring a global philosophy of peace and reflection, was born under a sal tree in Lumbini in the month of May in 563 BC.

Despite an important destination for pilgrimages, Lumbini is nothing like Haridwar, Mecca or Lourdes. Pilgrims here come in a slow, respectful trickle and many stay on to meditate in the monasteries surrounding the sacred site. That said, Lumbini has undergone a major renaissance over the last few years, and new monasteries are springing up here faster than you can say ‘om mani padme hum’ [the famous Buddhist mantra].

The centre of Lumbini is the Maya Devi Temple, which marks the exact spot where Queen Maya Devi of Kapilavastu gave birth to Gautama Siddhartha. Surrounding the temple is a sacred garden containing the pillar Ashoka as well as the ruined foundations of dozens of ancient stupas and monasteries. Extending for miles around the sacred garden is a huge park known as the Lumbini Development Zone, designed by Japanese architect Kenzo Tange in 1978. It’s a work in progress but the grounds are already full of landscaped lakes and Buddhist monasteries, constructed by Buddhist communities from around the world.

Lumbini sounds like a lovely place, does it not? However, the key phrase in this description is “it’s a work in progress.” The Development Zone is 3 miles by 6 miles (so I was told), surrounded by a brick wall crowned by already rusting metal designs. Cows and rickshaws and children wander along the dusty roads; monkeys do not look both ways before crossing.

The Maya Devi Temple is indeed the center of the complex; monasteries are scattered throughout the grounds. But – and there is always a but! – although the grounds had a comfortable number of visitors, the Development Zone is piles of sand yet to be smoothed into roads, scaffoldings absent of workers, lakes half filled with water, and even a museum filled with pictures of, not actual, artifacts. In his book Oracle Bones, Peter Hessler uses the Chinese word “jiade” to describe fake imitations of genuine objects. For me, Lumbini was a holy place devoid of holy – and I don’t believe that I felt this way because I’m not Buddhist. During my 7 hours of tooling about, I saw only 3 monks. While the monasteries (erected by countries such as Korea or China or Myanmar or Germany) did indeed contain Buddha statues big and small, laying or seated lotus in lotus position, the statues were made of plaster, or worse, plastic. Not one monastery that I visited (mind you, I didn’t visit them all), had the required atmosphere for paying respect, mantras, meditation or study. No doubt, once upon a time Lumbini was a beautiful, holy place but today it is an under-funded, unrealized dream. A jiade. Almost more sad than beautiful.

But, for me, Lumbini was a detour not a destination. And so, after I was awakened by raucous music at 5:15 am the following morning, I soon found myself propping open another mini-bus window while on my way to the Nepal/India border.

Yours,
Laura