Coolies in tattered red shirts with armbands carried our five 70 pound bags on their heads – even the large rolling one. They took them up two flights of stairs, across the footbridge over six sets of tracks, and down to platform #7. The train was pulling into the station. As we walked the length to our first class car, we could see something trickling from beneath a few coaches. The smell of urine was strong.

There are signs in the bathrooms asking people not to use them in the stations. Everyone does. Through the horizontal bars of our open windows we could see and smell human feces on the neighboring track as we departed.

We passed piles of garbage that collects throughout the city. There must not be many landfills, almost no public garbage cans, no trash collectors. Sara wants to dig one for them and hand everyone a trash bag.

In our secluded cabin, away from prying eyes, the discussion turned to litter in our own country. On the rural roads where Christy and I live, people dump white garbage sacks of kitchen trash because they don't want to pay the seven dollars a month for collection. Others drive through in the evening throwing out their McDonalds sacks and cups with straws from dinner. The sides of the roads become littered with empty beer cans on the weekends. On our farm, strangers dump things over the small bridge into Sandy Creek, just like the massive piles of trash clogging the streams we saw as the train continued to pick up speed heading towards Mysore.

We have "Do Not Litter" signs and fines for doing so. Most of us remember the tearful Native American in the TV commercials. Public garbage cans are everywhere. A system is in place to deal with waste, and our culture has come to value environmental cleanliness.

Children grow up in India differently. Do they know there is a better way? We know and make bad choices. Is it so much a choice for them? Individuals in the crowded cities have few alternatives.

As we head towards the countryside, there is fresh air and fewer people. We stop at a small station, as does another train heading in the opposite direction. We are side by side. Brown eyes peer inside our car, curious about our white faces. They come from brown ones, lots of them. There are two or three on each step with the door wide open. They are crammed onto benches, almost on top of each other, some standing without seats. They are almost overflowing from the cars.

What will happen as the burgeoning population continues to grow without basic infrastructure? What will happen to the cities without better trash collection, all that paper and plastic continuing to collect everywhere? What will happen without adequate sewer systems and freely available public drinking water? How can India have just given Sri Lanka millions of dollars in tsunami aid money to help rebuild that country’s infrastructure when they have so much inadequacy in their own?

As the train rolls on, everything outside the window turns green. Neatly terraced rice fields, some with dark freshly turned earth, outlined with palm trees and spotted with women working in brightly colored sarees, drift by. Two white oxen with curved horns, yoked to a weather beaten wooden plow, are directed by the man stumbling in the clods behind with the reins. Two others walk nearby, directing, all working together on the tiny plot. At the edge of the their field stands a shoulder high white washed cement temple with blue and yellow paint decorating the round dome that makes the top. Religion and harvest are tightly entwined.

We pass women on dusty dirt roads with baskets balanced on their heads, no hands. Others we see at a stream washing clothes and dishes from the bank. A black oxen swims alone in another. The countryside between Bangalore and Mysore is beautiful. It seems peaceful and calm, idyllic and full of charm.

Labsong, the Tibetan driver from the monastery, easily found our white faces at the train station and took us to a hotel/restaurant in Mysore. Daniel surprised us as he was there with his wife, Kris, who is also a physician. They were eating with two friends. One was Carol, a successful artist from California who was studying Tibetan at the monastery, and a Tibetan Buddhist nun, just out of yoga class across the street, who was uncharacteristically out of her robes.

They felt warm and comfortable. Daniel described he and his wife as gypsies, Americans who had lived a rather nomadic life for the past several years. They had been at Sermey’s health clinic for two with their thirteen-year-old son, Zubin.

After a thali meal and some fried puri, like elephant ears from the fair without any powdered sugar, Labsong took us to the police station to register our permits for the restricted Tibetan refugee area. From there, the drive to the Sermey Monastery’s guest house was two hours.

The rooms were the nicest of any place that we have stayed in India. They were still humble, but clean with fresh sheets, flushing western toilets and twenty-four hour hot solar heated water. But the best part was the atmosphere. Gone was the pollution, the constant honking on the streets until late at night, the crowds of people everywhere, the trash. It was like being in another country. Bylakuppe and the area surrounding the monastery felt more like home, relaxed with fields and smiles. Many of the Tibetan buildings had fresh, cheerful coats of paint with trim of bright reds and yellows, greens and blues. There seemed to be a sense of community, and of a pride in that community. Signs were up to discourage littering and big green trashcans were visible along the roads. People seemed to be nicer to each other, friendlier than in many of the Indian communities where centuries of the caste system seems to have deemed it okay to be rude to some people, where the coldness just spills over everywhere in the public sector.

We all made a collective sigh and settled in for the night, maybe for the week, and looked forward to exploring the following day.