Adventure part 2

Second half of our adventure has begun! Met up with Malin on Wednesday in Agra, after a 9 hour train journey. I was quite happy I got sleeper class in the end so that I could at least lie down and sleep and read. Although it was pretty dirty, and the train got really full after about 2 hours. Thankfully I had the top berth so had that to myself, while the bottom ones got crammed with people sitting there. Got stared at quite a lot as usual of course, as I was the only foreigner there too - but wasn't too bad.
Oh and the best part, the guest house in Agra had a working shower with lots of super hot water!! First non-bucket, standing up shower in a month! And I could even just stand in the hot water for a while after I had rinsed my hair without it going cold. Oh the small pleasures in life.

Anyway, saw taj mahal on Thursday morning, it was absolutely beautiful!! Looks like a painting even in real life. But despite that Agra doesn't have much else to offer and we were happy to leave early next morning.

The plan was to get the train to Lucknow and spend the afternoon and night there, then catch a train the next morning to Gorakhpur and then the bus to cross the border to Nepal.
However, Friday was Holi festival which means it's a holiday but what we didn't realise was that even some hotels in Lucknow were closed. After dragging our backpacks around in the heat for way too long we decided to go back to the railway station and get the train to Gorakhpur straight away instead. We were pretty exhausted and really hungry at this point as all restaurants were closed too. Had a kinda disgusting meal at the train station and got on the train, which was quite nice and relatively empty. We were really looking forward to getting to a hotel and have a shower and sleep, but turns out Gorakhpur hotels close to train station are disgusting and very overpriced. We basically ended up sleeping in our clothes and just got up at 5 to get the bus to Nepal.

Now we're finally in Lumbini, and FINALLY had a shower and changed clothes. Needless to say we've been feeling pretty gross wearing the same clothes and no shower, with long travels for the past two days.

Lumbini is really nice, this is where Buddha was born and there are just lots of temples in a kinda gated area like a national park. We are staying at the Korean Buddhist monastery, so peaceful. Very simple (back to bucket shower, and a cold one at that) but we love it. After dinner there was 30 mins worship and meditation, the monk leading it had the most stunning voice, was so beautiful to listen to him sing the chants and prayers.

Tomorrow we are spending the day here, looking around all the different monasteries and temples and just recovering a little from the past days of travelling and no sleep.

It's 8 o'clock and we have just had showers and are ready for bed. Breakfast is served at 5.50 after 50 minutes of worship and meditation. We love it here and are really hoping we can find similar monasteries/ashrams to stay in for the rest of our travels too.

Anyway, end of this long update. Will hopefully be able to publish it tomorrow as we don't have WiFi in the room.

Good night from beautiful Nepal!