Our original plan for India didn't include a visit to Bodhgaya. In fact, we'd never even heard of the place before the damned "tourist information" in Delhi (blog entry Everybody Lies). The small town of Bodhgaya is known for the Buddhist temple built on the site where Siddhartha Gautama, later known as the Buddha, sat meditating under a bodhi tree and eventually reached enlightenment. Since we'd already visited Lumbini, where the prince had been born, and were going to go to Varanasi, where he'd preached for the first time, we thought it would be a nearly mandatory part of our accidental Buddhist pilgrimage.

I already covered the arrival to Bodhgaya on the last blog entry, but I left out the part of us both feeling a little sick. We got a room in Rama Guest House for 400 rupees per night. I stated earlier that it was next to a construction site, later to realize that the guest house itself was a construction site. It wasn't quite completed yet. It was nice enough though, big clean room with ensuite bathroom and water that was even a little too hot. The bed was comfortable, a good thing too, since we spent most of our time in the room. Beforehand we had wondered if two nights would be too much to spend in such a small place, but with those we ended up getting into good enough shape to face our last train ride. We did work up the courage to visit the temple once, it was free of charge and as plain as the other Buddhist central sites have been.

We asked the management of the guest house if we could pay half the price of one night to have a very late checkout, and they agreed. With that we spent our last day comfortably until we realized that we hadn't made any arrangements for the ride back to Gaya, where the train station was. It was 8 p.m. when I got out to look for a rickshaw and found only three parked to the spot where they have dozens during day time. I found a driver from a nearby café and negotiated for him to pick us up one hour later and drive us to Gaya for 250 rupees. It was way more than we paid for the ride there, but there wasn't much of a choice. And we didn't have three monks to share the price with…

We got to the station OK enough, only to find that our train, which should have left at 23:06, was running two hours late. Not so much shocked as annoyed, we went to the upper class waiting room (not that different from the lower class) and took out Sini's yoga mat to sit on. When we checked the schedule, the train was running later still. And later. And later. We took turns sleeping and watching our backpacks, but after a couple of days of being sick it was hard keeping the morale up. The train didn't arrive before 4:50. To make things even better, we found people sleeping in both our three tier AC beds. The guy in my 54 left without any fuss what so ever, but the woman under Sini's bunk 59 more than made up for it. She had a pile of kids with her, one of which was sleeping in Sini's place. The mother tried to get us to go to beds 11 and 14, both upper as ours, but only 11 would have been hers to begin with. 14 was empty at the moment, but for how long?

We felt bad for her. Not enough to yield though. Our berths, 54 and 59, were separated by a wall instead of being in the same compartment as usually. That was annoying enough. Secondly, we'd been pissed on so many times during our stay in India that I didn't really care a rat's furry butt about where her kids slept. As long as it wasn't in our bunks. We ended up getting our own places eventually, got our stuff up there and went to sleep.

The ride was long and as uncomfortable as the ones before, but at least the train didn't lag much more on the way. It was supposed to arrive in Kolkata at 6:45, but wasn't there until 13:30. We hadn't made reservations in any guest house because none of the ones we found on booking.com or hostelword.com were reasonably priced (all were over 2000 rupees per night). We'd tried to look up places from our guidebook, but none of them had their own webpages and hardly any had email-addresses. Those we emailed were either full or didn't answer at all. So upon arrival we were forced to take a 130 rupee prepaid taxi to the unknown. Unknown even to our driver, who couldn't find the traveler hub Sudder Street, let alone the side track Stuart Lane we were aiming for. That's not uncommon though, the drivers here seem to always count on the passenger to know where they're going. In Helsinki, the taxi drivers seem to know every back street or if they don't, they have either GPS or a map. We gave our guidebook's map to the driver, who couldn't read it any better than written text… We eventually spotted where we were and guided us to Stuart Lane successfully.

After that it was just a simple matter of finding a guest house. They were all full. By the time we found one that had a double room with ensuite bathroom for 600 rupees, we were too tired to continue on even though it didn't seem like a very nice place. And what did 600 rupees buy us in Ashok Guest House? The worst s*** hole we've been to so far, which is saying something, since we haven't been that picky. The claustrophobic little dungeon had an ensuite sure, but the western toilet didn't flush, pressing the k*** only made the water run to the floor from somewhere behind. Judging from the holes in the wall there had been a sink, but it was gone. The flush bucket was as broken as anywhere else, but so was also the faucet that filled it. That k*** just spun in its place without affecting the flow of water in any way. There was no glass in the window of the toilet, meaning that the large hole was covered with only a curtain. Inside the room we had a fan that took its power from two wires stuffed into the holes of the outlet on the wall. Under the bed there were the trash of at least a few dozen people who stayed before us: newspapers, plastic bags, empty water bottles and a liquor bottle. The last one might have been left by the staff too, the guy who led us in was so drunk he couldn't tell our passport photos from one another. The last bit was when the sun went down and we realized that there was no light in the room. After having carefully and methodically switched all the switches on and off a few times our manager was also of the opinion that the light didn't work. He called in a boy with a hint of hair on his lip. After some time and a couple of electric shocks the lamp was back on the wall, hanging by one screw and a piece of string. But it worked.

Nearly needless to say, the next day we opted to look for better accommodation. Our notion as we first arrived had been that many of the places were full, and that was true also in morning time. There were a couple more expensive ones, doubles starting from 1500 rupees, but we weren't willing to go that high. A queer thing about our search was that it revealed that in Kolkata's Sudder Street the standards for guest houses are significantly lower than in the rest of the places we'd visited. Only a few had internet, only some of it was included in the room price, most lacked running hot water and one place didn't even have bucket hot water! Seriously… The s***hole had charged 20 rupees for about as many liters of smoldering hot water, it was ridiculous, but at least they had it. The place eventually found charged 700 rupees for a room far cleaner and a little more spacious than the first one. But it had wifi in the lobby and bucket hot water that you could carry to the room yourself when you wanted it.

I at least wasn't completely recovered from the sickness that had struck us both, so we didn't end up seeing that much of Kolkata. We walked the streets around the New Market next to Sudder Street a few times and sold our Footprint travel guides. We'd bought a Footprint Focus Delhi to Kolkata at home, it was a nice little book easy to carry around. However, we also had the big India edition that we bought used in Kathmandu. They were pretty decent books and we were looking forward to selling them for maybe 600 rupees or more, but the bookstores wouldn't have it. The books were too old and too little known, they don't sell like Lonely Planet or Rough Guides. We only got 200 for them, still more than nothing.

The only real sight we saw was the zoo. We tried to take a tram there since Kolkata is the only city in India with a network of those, but we never figured out where they traveled and where to. So we took the metro instead and got a little lost on the way, but managed to get there anyway. The entrance was only 20 rupees a piece and you do get your money's worth. There are many species to be found there, but not in large quantities. There was one rhino, one hippo, one ostrich, you get the point. The grounds are not very well looked after and the place seems to be going to ruin… None the less, we enjoyed. We took a taxi back to the hotel for 150 rupees, too tired to face the subway again.

After that we were just about done with India! Our flight to Bangkok through Delhi was leaving at 6.45 in the morning so we asked the hotel to arrange for a taxi to take us there. We paid the 400 rupees up front and got some sleep before our early wake up time. Almost as to sum up everything we've experienced during our stay in this vast country, the driver apparently tried to trick us to part with some extra money. At the entrance of the airport he said he needed 60 rupees more for the drop off area. We told him he wouldn't get any. As he didn't race a fuss, he'd probably realized that we weren't as green as we'd been when we first arrived. India had schooled us hard.

And now it was time to go.