Bandhas of wedding and road

In Lumbini we reunite with Rob and Aranka, who cycled here from Pokhara after their Annapurna trek. The end of the afternoon, when the worst heat somewhat abates, we take a walk through the ancient village, consisting mainly of mud houses. The vegetable gardens around it are irrigated by ingenious foot pumps.

We witness a local wedding of which the festivities will last a couple of days and is enlivened by a noisy drum band from neighbouring India. A transvestite dancer, popular with Indians and Nepali alike, spurs on the band members with his/her voluptuous movements. The father of the groom proudly and somewhat relieved tells that his fifth and last son has been taken care of now, for the nice price of two hundred thousand rupees.

The French Violette treats us to a great foot-reflex-massage during which she recognises our vulnerable spots: the kidneys, damaged in Africa and Asia due to many bumpy cycling kilometres. At Buddha's birthday many ceremonies take place around the Maya Devi temple, his birthplace. Monks dressed in red recite mantras; seven lamas of the Peace pagoda dressed in traditional colourful vestments with golden crowns make mysterious movements with their hands (mudras) whilst singing their prayers. Groups of monks, Buddhist tourists, school children and some foreigners join the Peace March to the Eternal Flame.

Since the eighties of the last century dozens of monasteries and temples have been built around Lumbini. Buddhists from all over the world seem to combat to build the largest, loveliest, richest adorned and most imposing monastery. Most monasteries and temples are still in scaffolding, the finished ones look like majestic palaces where neither pain nor expense is spared. Materially and financially Buddhism is doing alright and the appearances remind us of Christianity, Islam and Hinduism. Is this good or bad, considering the Buddhist message of soberness?
Back in the village we're startled by fighting and yelling men. The commotion is huge and goes on for hours. We ask for the reason of this mini-war: the groom has fled! Yesterday we saw how local women decorated his hands and feet with delicate henna-paintings; his facial expression was indifferent then and he didn't radiate a lot of happiness or hope. Today he has vanished; to the dishonour of the village and the grief of bride and family.

It is May third 2007, five o'clock in the morning. We have planned a beautiful route leading through fields and passing tiny Terai-villages, far from the Mahendra Highway . A list of village names has to ensure the right path, but after about five kilometres the four of us feel like we're going around in circles. The route is beautiful though and there is a lot to see: bathing water buffalos, ponds filled with lotus flowers, fishing women, schoolchildren stuffed into closed bicycle carts, marabous, polders with humped oxen toiling. We pass villages with difficult names: Taulihawa, Kapilavastu, Tilaurakot and Vopowo, where the local people stare at us in disbelief.
After four hours of cycling in all directions we end up fourteen kilometres from our starting point; the beautiful route doesn't really progress a lot. So we head for the Mahendra Highway , where we arrive at the hottest moment of the day. The Nepali visa force us to hurry up, but the western border with India is still over four hundred kilometres away. We cool down under a hand pump and discuss the rest of the route. The local bus provides the solution: bags and bicycles are tied to the roof and three euros per person bring us two hundred kilometres further in just a couple of hours, in the sweltering heat of the level landscape.

Halfway, near to the village of Lamahi , we're confronted with the Nepali protest mentality. The through road is blocked with stones and boulders, nobody can pass through.
Reasons for a bandha (blockade) vary from political to personal. This time a group of villagers is angry because of brutal police behaviour after a traffic accident. The street vendors and shops of the village do good business for a couple of hours, but the driver of a truck full of living chicks sees over half of his load go to waste in the suffocating heat.

The next day, we're back on our bicycles, there are bandhas everywhere; this time for political reasons. Except for cattle, pedestrians, monkeys and some cyclists, who are allowed to pass the blockades, it is dead quiet on the road, which makes cycling quite festive.
We cycle through the Bardia National Park and hope for another confrontation, one with wild animals. But Asia isn't anything like Africa : apart from some distant relatives, bee-eaters, bright green parrots and rollers the only things we see are trees.
Then the third kind of bandha announces itself, one that really pleases us. The humidity is driven away by a hefty thunderstorm, within ten minutes the mercury sinks from 38 to 21 degrees Celsius and we are soaking wet when we cycle into Chisopani. Except for Rob, who suffers from a bandha of the fourth kind: a puncture.