India Part II (and country 18 in the last 6 months) - the most chaotic vow renewal yet

After Dehli we went to Khajuraho. This was an amazing small town near a tiger reserve. Unfortunately, we didn't see any tigers. For the entire trip the most wildlife we saw were monkeys, and I think they are mostly considered pests in India, so not terribly exotic.

Khajuraho is kind of the opposite of Delhi. The population is less than 10,000 people (Delhi was 33M), and most of the people are peasant farmers. There’s no smog, and no crowds, but still a high frequency of car horns. One startling difference is that they still strictly uphold the caste system. It was a little disconcerting, but made for a great lesson for Alex. There’s a whole other blog on this later.

We spent the morning going through some of the most beautiful Hindu temples you can imagine. The sandstone carvings were amazing. The temples were in surprisingly good shape for being built more than 1000 years ago. Granted, we were out in the middle of nowhere, and most of the tourists were Indian (we were told most white people don’t venture to Khajuraho), but they let you run through all these ruins and touch whatever you want. The Hindus would touch some priceless 1000 year old idol and pray while Laura and I cringed that they were depositing the oil from their hands all over this amazing site.

After the ancient Hindu temples, we then moved about 1km over to the ancient Jain temples. It was interesting to us that the two religions have coexisted in close proximity for more than 1000 years without destroying one another. Other religions should take a note. Anyway… Jain monks are famous for nudity. They believe that life is about suffering, which means they travel everywhere around India without any clothes. So… as you’re touring this ancient temple, all of a sudden this buck naked dude comes up to you wanting to tell you about Jainism. Turns out our guy has been a devout Jain follower since being a young boy, but only became a monk 6 years ago. Before that he was a software engineer. Interesting guy. He walked away from a successful careeer to give up everything and become a Jain monk. The funny part was there happened to be a small group of elderly white people touring at the same time we were. A couple of them got totally into the chanting and I think were ready to turn to Jainism on the spot. Maybe there is something to naked energy.

Apparently the Jains are run by a small handful of very wealthy men. As a result, a religion with only 7mm worldwide followers that calls a country of ~1.5B home has the ear of Modi. Super interesting… He visited Khajuraho earlier this month.

As we do once per year on our various travels, we decided to have a local marriage ceremony to renew our wedding vows. We’d heard much about Indian weddings, and were excited to experience one for ourselves.

Before we could marry, they were adamant we needed the proper attire. We could rent a beautiful wedding sari for Laura, but I had to have clothes made… in less than 24 hours. Even if there were groom attire rentals, I am about 6-8 inches taller than anyone within 100 miles. With Laura’s sari rental, we also got Laura’s make-up. All in all, it took over an hour for 2.5 women to dress Laura, do her hair, and make-up. My clothes were much easier… except the pants material they used had a transparent quality about it if you had white skin… more so if you were wearing black underwear! There was a dude who spent about 5 minutes wrapping my head in a turbin. Man those things are tight! With a blue shirt, tan pants, white vest, and rust scarf, I looked like a circus clown while Laura looked stunning.

The wedding was at a temple on the outskirts of Khajuraho. We expected it would be us, our guide, and a monk. Instead, two of the women who dressed Laura decided to come and invited one of their friends, our driver was like ‘Heck yeah!’ (in Hindi of course), the head of the tour office came, along with about 7-10 more random dudes I have no idea from where they came. And then 2 drummers arrived to provide music. 

Our expectation was that the wedding would be a choreographed event with a set template. Most cultures have a fairly set script for a wedding ceremony. Having been in India for a few days, we should have known better! EVERYTHING in India is chaos. Our vow renewal was no exception. First, our Monk with only two teeth could not proceed with the wedding until we gave him 3 coins. Coins are exceptionally difficult to find in India as 1 Rupee is about $.0117… meaning that coins are worthless (Their bills start at 10 Rupees). Eventually he relented and allowed us to use bills. He of course did not speak English, so all of this is done with hand genstures to us, and yelling at different members of our large and growing entourage. After the coin thing, this guy comes up and is a decent translator (which helped) and then informs me he’s been nominated to be my groomsman. “Ok random dude… you’re my guy.” 

The whole ceremony was complete chaos. There appear to be some common elements, but there was a sense that the whole thing was being made up as we went along. This was probably because we were tourists and not actually Hindi. There was tons of laughing and lots of arguing between the monk and our entourage … we assume for what was supposed to happen next, and to what degree.

Meanwhile, our driver had somehow become the main assistant to the monk … which we think was so that he could eat all the stuff that was supposed to be part of a wedding ceremony burnt offering - lots of fruit, and a whole box of Indian sweets (think: milk and sugar). After about 90 minutes and two-thirds of the offering goodies later, the sweets and the fruit decided to do battle within our driver’s digestive system. While seated in a pseudo lotus position on the hard concrete floor, he leans to one side and doesn’t simply ‘break wind’… he destroys wind! Alex happened to be standing behind him and immediately starts making frantic gestures to make sure no one thought it was him. Along with losing most of his teeth, our monk seemed to have lost a good portion of his hearing and sense of smell because he didn’t skip a beat in the ceremony. No one else in our large and growing entourage seemed to care either. 

While this is happening, the wedding party and the monk are involved in some animated discussion that now has our monk wildly laughing with both teeth on display, and half our wedding party laughing at something we didn’t understand but must hve been hilarious. After some discussion in Hindi, the monk then has me cup my hand with the open side up. He then takes some water in a fig leaf and dumps it in my hand and gestures for me to bring it to my face. I took the water and splashed it on my face and then proceeded to rub it all over like aftershave. Now the entire wedding entourage is hysterically laughing while the two-toothed monk is yelling at me in Hindi. Apparently you are supposed to only touch your lips to the water… nothing else (it was holy water apparently). The entire wedding was like this. I don’t think we’ve ever laughed so hard during a vow renewal. Like most things in India, we were completely frazzled by the end. After about 2.5 hours of three-stooges wedding antics, it was time to call it. Wedding 18 was now complete.

Us with one of the women who helped dress Laura

We should note that the group seemed thrilled to host this wedding for us and to participate. Everyone wanted pictures with us after the ceremony. When they dropped us off to remove all of our wedding finery the entire family of the people who dressed Laura showed up. They also took a ton of pictures with us. Even the mother of the makeup person gave us a 10 Rupee note as a wedding gift.

I mention this because there were a couple of people in other towns who seemed a little offended that we would do a Hindu ceremony for our vow renewal. For us, the vow renewals are about fully immersing ourselves in the culture of the place we are visiting. We are trying to be sensitive to cultural appropriation, so we try to be aware of people being offended by what we are doing.

The next day we went down below our lodge to the banks of the Ken River and jumped in a small boat for a ~90 min tour. Finally… peace. There were only birds on the river. It was serene and beautiful. The river was very low (about 15-20 feet higher in the monsoon season), but there was just enough water for us to paddle around the river grass and rocky islands. It was a great way to end our time in Khajaharo. There was a tiger sanctuary there that we missed (tickets sell our 6 months in advance). Tigers were once native to this region of India, but were devastated by encroachment. They’ve worked hard to create a sanctuary that re-introduced tigers to the area. They had to work with the villagers about how to live alongside wildlife, but the tigers are now thriving.

Alex has now been on 5 continents. Only Australia and Antarctica to go.