HHDL and the Ganges

So. His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama himself...I could hardly sleep with curiosity (well, that and my extremely hard pillow). Is it weird that I get excited about great spiritual leaders and politicians as opposed to pop stars? We got up at 6.30am to get to the teaching nice and early (it was meant to start at ten). You must remember that this is the day after a 40 hour train ride (with 2 melodious 5.30am wake up calls to the sound of 'CHAI! CHAI! COFFEE! CHAI!' blasting in my ears - 'chai' being tea, by the way). I was pretty damn knackered. But it's hardly an opportunity you can miss, right? So up we got and off we went.

MASSIVE queue for the gates...it seemed to be one line for the monks/ nuns and one line for everybody else (though of course, as with everything in India, this rule was promptly ignored as soon as the devout queue was noticed to be moving much more quickly than the pleb queue). An hour and a half later, we get to the gate - only to find that we need a special pass to get inside. PANTS. Having chatted with a few of the Tibetans in the queue and realising he was staying in Saraneth all week, we decided to come back the day after to try again. I was feeling very dejected (not to mention sleep deprived). To cheer ourselves up and do a little mental preparation, we wandered around Saraneth looking at the architecture of the different Buddhist temples (Thai, Burmese, Tibetan, Japanese, Chinese...no Indian one, strangely enough) and visited the place where the first Buddha preached his first sermon and met his first disciples. Also, a random deer park...not so many deer but we did see alligators.

After visiting the architectural museum (we were busy little bees! - please note tone of ironic sarcasm) we accidently (incidentally?) met some of our hostel buddies for lunch. They informed us that all you needed to get the HHDL teaching pass was a passport and a photocopier - both available! Additionally, there was another teaching starting at 1.30pm! Huzzah! An hour later (thank God there were only 3 people in the queue! Frickin' Indian bureaucracy) we were in! He was sat on a large platform surrounded by monks with gold sashes, reading from a huge scripture book, not dissimilar from the ones in the Sikh temple. The teaching was in Tibetan, but there was an FM frequency you could tune into to listen to a live English translation...it was pretty hard to understand unfortunately...the translator wasn't very fluent. Nevertheless, it was amazing to wander around a huge tent with 50,000 people in it (so I'm told - someone said 80,000!) listening to the dulcent tones of Tibetan. HHDL laughs quite a lot. Got quite a few curious stares from the monks...not sure they knew what to make of me!

Our auto-rickshaw home drove slap back into the middle of a Muslim festival on the way home. It seemed to be about sword dancing and polystyrene wedding cakes. The incredibly bumpy detour took an extra half an hour, slowed further by a bribing policeman and a truck trapped in the middle of the road by a cow who decided to have a little sit down there. The cows really lord it over the road here...indeed, everywhere. Nearly been headbutted by several of the horned ones and been tutted at by locals for potentially damaging the cow!

We got back in time to take a complimentary boat ride along the Ganges. Our boat rower tells us he drinks a cup of the holy water each day. Please note that the Ganges has 240 dead bodies immersed in it every day, and about 5 corpses that are deemed particularly holy are left to rot at the bottom each year. Not to mention the usual additions of Indian bathing, laundry, and raw sewage run directly into it (both from pipes or the more immediate route). We went past the burning ghat where 8 open air funeral cremations seem to be going on at any one time, slap back in the middle of everyday life. Nobody cries. We saw one man matter of factly folding over the blackened skull and backbone of a family member with a stick, to stop it falling off the pyre. A little further down we see the nightly prayer ceremony to the Ganges, 6 young adolescents moving in perfect synchrony with various candles and incense sticks, all in time to music (for 35 minutes!). A small boy hops nonchalantly between the boats selling chai, with a bucket of glowing coals attached to the bottom of his kettle to keep it hot. 'Good chai madam, 5 rupees'. It actually was good chai too.