Lumbini

Lumbini is much closer to the Indian Border and therefore about another ten degrees hotter. It is also suffering, like all of Nepal, from a limited power supply. At best, the power comes on in the evening to operate fans and air conditioning. Here in Lumbini, it is smotheringly hot and the power is not due to come on until about 7pm. We arrive at 5pm to a hot and dirty room and spend some time negotiating for a room for Binud. He ends up sleeping in one of the rooms we’ve booked and we drag a mattress into ours and sleep together.

His accommodation and food is apparently provided by the car company but it doesn’t seem to include air-conditioning which is pretty essential right now.

I’m completely overwhelmed by the heat and things only get worse when we turn the lights out later and tiny black bugs start jumping all over the bed. The power switches on and off all night, sometimes the generator kicks in and sometimes it doesn’t.

I hate feeling like a disgruntled traveller, especially in the face of the lack of infrastructure here in Nepal but being charged full price for dirty guest-houses with no power is starting to piss me off.

Little black bugs are not so scary in the morning but regardless, we decide to leave Lumbini a day early.

We spend the morning visiting the birthplace of Buddha where we queue for some time inside the Maya Devi Temple, to see the stone that marks the spot where his mother, leant on a tree and gave birth. The other people around us, mostly Indians, ask how we are enjoying India. Wait a minute! Aren’t we in Nepal?

There seems to be some rivalry about Buddha’s birthplace and later we see many buses with slogans reading “Buddha’s birthplace is in Nepal”. Well it feels like India and we go back into picture posing mode with numerous families who are walking with us through the grounds.

We meet these funny boys along the way. With rigorous prompting from their father, they sing for a full 5 minutes, before reciting to us what they would like to do when they grow up. The one on the left would like to be a space engineer and the one on the right, a Doctor MD. The father seems quite enamoured by Jasper and asks him what he would like to be. Jasper says “Be a homeless person”. Roger says, “come on boy’s do the Haka or something”. It all ends rather badly with a family argument about how Roger always tries to put us up to entertaining followed by a five-minute rant from me about the importance of having life goals.

At least we don’t make our children wear bonnets and diamanté broaches, although their outfits were quite fetching.

I secretly feel like a bit of a failure as I’d like my children to perform on cue and have lofty life goals. But perhaps it is freeing that they don’t. After all, they are lucky to have the leisure to decide what to do in the future. Education is a huge deal in India and Nepal and one of the first things that people talk to us about. “In which class are you reading” with means, what year are you in at school.

Apparently, like NZ, India has a high rate of youth suicide, particularly around the pressures of schooling and education.

I hope these two sweet boys become a space engineer and a doctor and I hope that Jasper is not a homeless person.