Jai Maata Ji!

If you had come to India this past weekend, you would have found me on a 100 kilometer pilgrimage. You didn’t, so come take a walk in my shoes. And you just walked the distance of almost two and a half marathons in 48 hours with a total sleep time of 6 hours. You’re kind of exhausted.

Let’s start from the top.

It’s that time of year when pious Hindus make a pilgrimage to the temple of the goddess Ashapura in the village Mata Nu Madh. They take on the strenuous journey to thank and give offerings to Ashapura for fulfilling their wish or to ask that she grants them one. You journeyed with four friends from the office not for religious purposes, but because:

a) You’re not one to turn down once in a lifetime experiences

b) You liked that it coincided with Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year

c) You loooove to walk

So you and your friends leave Friday night at 9pm from Bhuj with all the energy and enthusiasm in the world. One of them is fairly certain that you are the first foreigner to do this pilgrimage, but she was also pretty sure that America was part of Europe. Either way, over the next 48 hours you won’t see any non-Indian faces among the 700,000 on this journey.

You walk all Friday night without sleeping, a little drowsy but happy the darkness comes with stars, privacy from curious eyes, and cool temperatures. Along the way, thousands of people are helping you reach the temple … water and snacks are being handed out almost every 30 minutes, camps are set up for sleeping, eating, and sometimes even for wrapping your feet in bandages. A service you will need to avail yourself of come kilometer number fifty. (Why are these people spending their time and money to help? It’s their offering to Ashapura. Or, god points). You rest your legs at some of these camps at midnight, 3am, and 4:45am. When the sun begins to invade the night around 6am, you dread the heat and your bright visibility as a foreigner. But it’s okay.

Around 9am and 30 kilometers (18.6 miles), you take a detour to your friend’s cousin’s house. They are opening their home for you to rest. The five of you pile into a room, and sleep four glorious hours on the floor. At 2pm (it’s Saturday), you groggily wake for lunch. Avoiding the heat of the day, you don’t mobilize to leave until 5pm.

That your legs already ache, that your feet are COVERED in blisters, and that you’re only one third of the way done, feels a bit demoralizing. But it’s nothing compared to how dreadfully drained you feel at the half way point. Which you reach around 10:30pm.

It’s a big camp, and you are so grateful for the doctors (were they doctors?) that take needles to your blisters to drain blood and puss and then wrap your feet in so much bandage that they look like mummies. But you’re not complaining. It could be a lot worse. And each of the tens of thousands of people around you has the same pain. Most are even walking in flip flops or barefoot and have bags balanced on their heads. You don’t know how.

Thanks to the rest and bandages, you’re feeling recharged. The low-point is over. You keep walking until 2:30am when you finally stop to sleep. You’ve been going a fairly good pace because fast or slow, the pain is the same. You’re exhausted and don’t mind sleeping like sardines with 50 other men and women on [a fairly filthy] ground. At 4:00am, you wake up and note the irony that when you looked at your watch you thought, ‘ooo that was a lot of rest.’

Walkers Sleeping Along the Way

Here you carry on without the group, eager to cover a lot of distance before the sun and the heat ambush you. With your second sunrise, you wonder where the hell you’re going to go to the bathroom. On the side of the road is fine, but you don’t have a friend to keep watch and cover you, and you’re not going to risk having the staring eyes follow you behind the bushes. So you stop drinking water for a bit. Meanwhile, you don’t realize how slow your friends are moving today, and the distance between you and them keeps increasing. But for now, you’re enjoying the solitude and mostly adjusted to the curious stares and commentary.

Foreigner?!

What is your name please?

Jai Maata Ji! (roughly translating to ‘long live the goddess,’ it’s shouted a lot along the way)

At noon, you stop at a big camp for a power nap and for your friends to catch up. An hour and a half later, you are all reunited and feeling pretty good. There’s only fifteen kilometers to go. You wait out some of the heat and start walking again around 3pm. In another five kilometers, you’re going to stop for a bath at a water pipe. It’ll be one of your most interesting shower experiences, topping the time you accidently showered in the men’s bathroom in Sydney. But anyways.

The last 10km are fantastic. You’re all in good spirits, joking around with each other, and laughing at the hobbling that’s taken the place of walking. Because sometimes all you can do with pain is laugh at it. Your friends are making fun of all the people who try to talk to you. And you love them more than ever.

The arrival at Mata Nu Madh around 9pm Sunday night is chaos. 15,000 people have ascended the tiny village and temple that night, and it’s a mad house. The collective spirituality of the journey gave way to an individualistic selfishness of pushing and shoving to reach Ashapura. The experience includes walking your blistered, sore feet barefoot (because no shoes in the temple) through the muddy, filthy village, being herded like cattle, the worst [barefoot] bathroom experience ever, and then standing in line for two hours (after 62 miles of walking) waiting for a bus back to Bhuj.

But you made it. And for whatever reason, the chaotic culmination doesn’t take away from the experience, it only adds to it. Maybe it’s the feeling of accomplishment, maybe it’s the camaraderie, or maybe it’s Ashapura and your earned god points, because you feel gooood.