The only mode of transportation to Lumbini is via car or bus. There is no airport here. We chose to have driver/car as this was the most efficient way to travel the eight-hour ride on the Siddhartha Highway through the mountains, rather than taking a bus and stopping regularly to pick up passengers.
The driver was able to get us there to Lumbini in five and half hours. This is amazing, given the narrow (one and half lane)roads which were not always the best and the traffic of sometimes cars, motorcycles, people, goats, etc.
Luckily for us, our driver was a very experienced one and knew how to negotiate the narrow roads, passing other vehicles and avoiding any dangerous situations. We made one pit stop along the way both times. To a quaint little store on the mountain side offering one toilet, different kinds of alcohol and juices and water and, I suspect cooked food, if we had wanted it, as we could smell something very delicious in the back kitchen.
The Siddhartha Highway is very dramatic as it winds through a series of landslide-scarred valleys with spectacular Himalayan views. It is regarded as one of the finest and most scenic motorcycle journeys in Nepal. It is often blocked by landslides and floods during the monsoon. Luckily for us, it was not monsoon weather/It is sometimes unnerving to see a bus travelling along with people on top of the bus, or sometimes a goat standing on top of a car, or a woman on the back of a motorcycle with no helmet, sitting side-saddle, or a family on a motorcycle with the child of sometimes two/three years old sitting in the front behind father and a child in between father and mother, while mother is on the back.
Later on in the day on April 12th, we found out that the Strike had been
cancelled. We were not able to find out why. However, we did talk to
many people who rearranged their travel plans to accommodate the Strike.
Arriving in Lumbini, a small rural Terai town, it felt like arriving in an
old western town in the movies, where time had stood very still and the
cloud of dust in the heat of 38/39 degrees C. remained making it extremely
hot.
We expected it to be very easy to find a hotel room in Lumbini. However,
we were very disappointed. Gerald described the hotel rooms he looked at
as being the worse he had ever seen. We decided to go to the hotel, our
driver had suggested, after discovering that the most expensive hotel in
the area was $60.00 a night. This seemed somewhat steep for our budget.
In our travels, there is always one hotel room experience that stays with
us for many reasons. The hotel room that we choose at the Siddhartha
Guest House was this hotel, this trip. We hope this is he only one this
journey.
It was in Lumbini, in the year 563 BC that one of history's greatest and most revered figures, Siddhartha Gautama, better known as the Buddha, was born. It is no surprise to learn that the World Heritage listed Lumbini as being of significant religious importance. It attracts Buddist pilgrims from around the world.
garden in front of Buddha's birthplace
The spiritual heart of Lumbini is the Maya Devi Temple, which marks the exact spot where the Buddha was given birth to under a Bodhi tree. In the adjoining sacred garden we found a sea of prayer flags decorating the sprawling Bodhi trees paying homage to the Lord Buddha. Maya Devi is set in the middle of the large 4km by 2.5 km park gounds known as the Lumbini Development Zone. Designed by Japanese architect Kenzo Tange in 1978, it is a work in progress that steadily follows the design of the 'master plan' as donations trickle in. This Zone is landscaped with lakes and monasteries that have been constructed by Buddist communities from around the world, with a vision for the sacred garden to be entirely surrounded by water and only navigable by boat.
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