We spent the last three nights in Lumbini, the birthplace of Siddhartha Gautama, better known as Buddha. The town was quite small and there wasn't much to see outside of the large temple complex that houses The Maya Devi Temple among several other ones. Maya Devi Temple is the main attraction as it covers the stone recognized to be the exact spot where the prince was born. The temple is surprisingly crude, especially from the inside, where large steel beams support the entire structure. Supposedly there are plans to raise a prettier temple over the site, but so far those are only plans. The other temples inside the area are much larger and grander, at least from the outside. We didn't venture inside any of the others since that would have taken the whole day. As a side note, by the way, they say that you need a bicycle to move around the complex because it is too large to walk from one end to the other. We found it quite easy to walk through, even all the way to the World Peace Pagoda and back. We were supposed to walk around the crane sanctuary also, but the weather was pretty cloudy and cold, and there weren't any birds to be seen from the Pagoda, so we decided to walk back instead.

We spent three nights in Lumbini, but two would have sufficed perfectly. We stayed in Lumbini Village Lodge recommended by Lonely Planet, we found it to be quite average. The room was clean enough and reasonably priced at 700 NPR/night. Water was sun heated, so it was pretty cold on the cloudy days. The restaurant we liked the best was the Three Visions, that seemed to get all the backpacker action of the city. We met a bunch of other travelers and got some great tips for India.

And then to the point: getting to Sauraha. There is no direct connection between Lumbini and Sauraha, which lies at the doorstep to the Chitwan national park. The only option seemed to be to take a Kathmandu bound bus and to get off at Narayanghat and to work it out from there. The options for "working it out" seemed to be either to take a taxi for the rest of the way or to take a public bus and then a jeep. For the first part of the trip we chose a Sakura Travels tourist bus that left at 6:00 in the morning and cost 800 NPR per person (they wouldn't negotiate on the price, which was more than we paid for Pokhara-Lumbini tickets - 750 NPR/person). Public bus would have been cheaper, but I wouldn't dare to take one of those, mainly because they seem to be crowded to the extreme and lack the legroom I desperately need. Our bus trip turned out to be kind of a tourist/public bus hybrid, since we seemed to stop all the time to pick up people. We even made a U-turn at one point to go back to get more people. There was more hassle than on the tourist bus from Pokhara to Lumbini, but all in all, the trip to Narayanghat went pretty well. We arrived at 10:08, ahead of schedule, who would have guessed? Things turned out to be even better than that too, as we met a Danish couple who was also going to Sauraha. We agreed to share a taxi, which ended up costing the four of us a total of 1200 NPR, so only 300 NPR per person. It was about half an hour drive and we were there, without any hassle at all, at before 11 o'clock.

Apparently it is very possible to go from Lumbini to Sauraha, even though there seems to be very little information about this on the internet. Now there's this post at least. We plan to spend four nights in Sauraha before returning to Kathmandu for our flight to India. We've already filled out the online visa applications and gotten the permission to enter India. Hopefully we can find somewhere to print the paperwork…