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In 1978 we entered Nepal from Lucknow at Lumbini, where Buddha was born around 566 BC. There is a pillar made by the ancient Chinese monk-pilgrim Xuanzang in the 7th century A.D. An inscription on the pillar gives evidence that Ashoka, emperor of the Maurya Empire, visited the place in 3rd-century B.C. and identified it as the birth-place of the Buddha. We were the only visitors that day, but it has since become popular with tourists and pilgrims from many countries, and several monuments, monasteries and a museum, have been constructed within the holy site. There is even a saurus Crane sanctuary nearby (Siddhartha Gautam is supposed to have rescued a wounded crane and saved it from his cousin Devdatta). It is the world's tallest flying bird.
After our short stop in Lumbini, it was a 12 hour bus ride to the east, and we were at Nepal's capital, Kathmandu:
Bathing at Pashupatinath ghats, in the Bagmati River, Kathmandu. It is built on an area of 246 hectares (2,460,000 m2) and includes 518 mini-temples and a main pagoda house. It is the largest temple in the world.
About 8 miles east of Kathmandu, Bhaktapur is a city full of temples (See above). Unfortunately many of them were heavily damaged by the April 15 Nepal earthquake, which killed 9,000 people and injured 22,000 more (Thank You, Wikipedia).
The Boudhanath Stupa outside Kathmandu, one of the world's largest.
South of Kathmandu, in the Terai lowlands, is Chitwan National Park, Nepal's first national park, known expecially for its tigers (the Terai is one of the best tiger habitats anywhere in the world) and rhinocerous. If you pay the big bucks, you fly in (we walked) and are met at the airport by elephants to ride to "Tiger Tops", where they put out bait to entice tigers to visit. We didn't see any tigers (we were too cheap to stay at Tiger Tops), but we did see a rhino: the one above is in the process of raising himself out of the mud and charging us (he stopped short).
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