I can remember likely around the middle of December of 1985 my family and I went to Nepal but were trying to meet a friend of ours (A Tibetan Lama we knew from Santa Cruz, California, Geshe Lobsang Gyatso) in Boghgaya. We had no idea what we were in for because the full culture shock of a place like Northern India and Bihar province we hadn't faced just yet. You know how an adventure is a difficult situation well managed. Well this was one of those for us because as a family we were completely clueless what we really were getting into. But, luckily for the 5 of us my wife and I were 37 and had both been to college so we figured it out as we went.
First I had hired a driver and a car to drive us to the India-Nepal border named Johnny which was fine because this was a good experience. However, Raxaul was not a very safe place because of many smugglers in this area so we bolted and chained our room so no one could break into our hotel room on the India-Nepal border. At this point I wondered what I had gotten my family into. The next day as we boarded the bus to Patna, a lady at random told us to stand up and then she put something under our seats. At the time we just thought the lady was rude or something. Then it dawned upon us that she was a smuggler putting something under our seats. But then, no one would speak English to us at this point not the driver or anyone else on the bus. But, whether this was a feign or not it's hard to say because English is the least offensive language to India of the 300 languages they speak locally.
But then at Patna I tried to get a train ticket and realized when the train came up to the station that this was meaningless because train tickets mean you usually hang on to the outside of the train or sit on the roof because they are usually overflowing. I hadn't learned how to rent a whole compartment yet. I learned this later from people who live in India because compartments on a train you have to get only through scalpers because this is a big business there but we didn't know that then. So, our amazingly cheap tickets were useless to us because my kids 10 through 14 I wasn't going to make hang onto the outside of a train going through tunnels even though it was steam engine powered. (Though later my two sons rode on top of buses later after we learned this was possible to do and ducked all the power lines which was a job in itself. The roofs of busses (at least then) was always where your luggage went in huge racks so if you rode the roof of a bus you rode near or on the luggage.
Also, regarding trains we needed a compartment just to store our luggage somewhere safe too as well as any one else we had traveling with us like a Tibetan Lama and our Translator and a friend we met up with from Alaska then.
So, we didn't ever take a train from Patna to Gaya but had to get on another bus instead. But, finally we made it to Gaya and to Bodhgaya nearby where Buddha became enlightened 2500 years ago under the Bodhi Tree. But after the Dalai Lama gave 500,000 of us the Kalachakra Tantra initiation we and our lama friend and his translator from Darjeeling rode the trains from Gaya to Varanasi, then from Varanasi to Agra where we visited the Taj Mahal and then to New Delhi and then after a while in New Delhi my stepdaughter got sick and then we rode a train to Pathankot and then took a bus to Dharamshala, India where the Dalai Lama lives at around 6000 feet elevation. About the same elevation as lake Tahoe in California. We were able to see a Tibetan Healer named Lady Dolma who gave healing herbs to my daughter and youngest son in Dharmshala so they got well within a couple of days from Deli Belly which is similar to Montezuma's revenge here in the U.S. visiting Mexico and eating some foods or drinking water there. (AT least it was like this until the 1970s there).
It is very beautiful in Dharamshala because you are at around 6000 feet in the Himalayan mountains and you look up to at least 20,000 foot peaks higher in the range from where you are. Imagine a mountain range where the peaks all for hundreds of miles are in a line of 20,000 feet to 30,000 foot mountains and peaks usually with some snow on them most of the year. So, it is the most impressive mountain range on earth for this reason.
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