Sanchi

Jan 30 & 31

We boarded the bus to Sanchi.  As the bus pulled away from the bus station, it was just too good to be true.  There were only about 15 people on the bus and Jeff and I both had seats.  We knew it couldn’t last and right we were.  A couple of kilometers later, the bus pulls over and we are transferred onto a an already packed full bus.  Jeff and I were both standing in the aisle for a couple of kilometers.  One gentleman ended up offering his seat to me on the back bench.  I ended up sitting on one cheek and was not able to lean back because there wasn’t enough room for my shoulders against the seat back.  As the bus bumped along and made its stops, people get on and off and Jeff was able to shuffle into a seat.  The bus arrived into Sanchi after two hours and dropped us off on the side of the road.  We gathered up our stuff and walked the couple of hundred meters to a guesthouse.  Sanchi is a very quiet little town and we spent the afternoon relaxing, reading, and drinking chai in the sun.  We walked up the street into the village and Jeff ended up playing a game of cricket with some local boys.  Indians love cricket and no matter how many times the game is explained to us, we just don’t understand it.  As Jeff was trying his luck, the littler boys of the group were sitting around chatting with me.  The only thing I really understood about the game from them is that Jeff is a bad bowler (the bowler is sort of like the pitcher in baseball).  When I told the little guy it was Jeff’s first time playing, he said it didn’t matter Jeff was still a bad bowler.

The next day, we went to the market and rented bikes for the day.  The roads that connect a lot of the towns and cities are two lane highways, that turn into four lanes sometimes.  On the roads, there are people riding pedal bikes (like us that day), some riding motor bikes, cows, goats, and dogs walking down the road,  people pushing hand carts heavy with vegetables, fruits, peanuts, and other goods and speeding cars, cargo trucks, and buses that go whizzing by.  The roads can be pretty chaotic.  The bikes we were riding had one gear, one brake, no shocks, and there were no helmets available for us to wear.   I wasn’t having a lot of fun pedaling with horns honking and feeling the wind of the speeding vehicles blow by.  But we pedaled 16 km, to the Udaigiri cave shrines.  In Lonely Planet, it says there is 20 cave shrines with statues and carvings in them.  In reality, there is only about five you can go into and another five or so that are locked up and you aren’t able to enter.  So we pedaled the bikes back to Sanchi without getting hit or hurt.

In Sanchi itself, are some hilltop stupas which are temples devoted to the Buddha.  There are several stupas, but the grandest was Stupa 1.  It is 16 meters high and 37 meters in diameter with a wall encircling it.  The wall has four entrances and each entrance has beautifully carved toranas (gateways) dedicated to the Buddha.  We spent the evening wandering around site.  The next morning we board a train back to Bhopal. The train was so much easier than the bus.  It took 40 minutes at half the cost and all four butt cheeks were sat comfortably on the seat!

Outside the cave shrines at Udiagiri



The main Stupa at Sanchi