This ancient tower in the Secret Garden at Lumbini 700 km west of Kathmandu, marks the place where Siddharta, later Lord Buddha, was born. I felt a vague compulsion to visit this part of the country because a famous uncle wrote the well known book about Siddharta which was later made into a film. After a long journey on numerous unsprung buses and an involuntary stay in Siddhartanagar, I finally arrive at an unprepossessing collection of villages. Lumbini is in the Terai which is hotter and flatter than the rest of Nepal. The people here are quite different too and have long wanted to secede. Here the women wear saris rather than the loose trousers and tops which women wear elsewhere in the kingdom. They look like red hibiscus flowers as they work the fields. Many of the villages have small blue mosques topped with Islam's crescent moon indicating that much of Nepal's 15% Muslim population is concentrated here. The rest are Hindus and Buddhists. Occasionally you see elephant sh...
Practising Geographer - nature culture places people