the hills are alive…..

….with the sound of flute players following you along the Annapurna Circuit trails, beautiful children asking for “sweets?” thanks to travellers past, bells attached to donkeys’ necks as they carry goods up to the mountains to notify local children in the path, birds announcing the coming of spring, and Dipak (Julie and my guide on our Nepal trek) teaching us phrases in Nepali like bistari bistari (slowly slowly), ukalo (uphill), oralo (downhill), dhanyabad (thank you), dherai ramro (very nice), sundar himal (beautiful mountain), and a few journal pages worth of more…..

I guess it is a bit ironic to start this entry with the various sounds Julie and I heard on our peaceful trek, when in reality the Annapurna region provided the most silence we had encountered since New Zealand– I am writing this entry from a nice internet cafe in Chiang Mai, Thailand, just blown away by the lack of noisy traffic– because both India and Nepal constantly bombarded us with horns and salespitches and “rickshaw, madam?” and promises of friendship prices. While the noise added to the intensity of color and culture in those places, I think my back is instantly more relaxed here in Thailand, because I’m not constantly thinking I may be hit by a motorbike. Ha!

Julie and I attempted trekking in the Annapurna region, initially thinking that we would do a 6-day trek including a hike up to Poon Hill with a guide we had met at an agency in Kathmandu. We were excited to get out of the smog of the city, out of another tourist bubble like Goa (Kathmandu’s Thamel area), and to see some hilltop villagers’ farms and friendly smiles. Plans unfortunately changed a bit when Julie got ill on our second day hiking, which Dipak told us was actually more common than one would expect, especially with people coming from the low attitudes and tropical temperatures of India. I’ll let Julie expand upon the details of her symptoms, but we basically stayed up at the beautiful teahouse in the hilltop village of Jhinu for an extra day, sleeping and recuperating, before heading out along the same trail we trudged in on. Although it was slightly disappointing to not make it to Poon Hill, the variations in our journey taught me a lot about the importance of our health, of learning to be flexible for a good friend, and to just breath in the invigorating energy of that place bistari bistari. I was incredibly lucky to have my health and be able to watch the life along that trail–local people carrying chickens in metal cages, children, wood, greens, cloth, and even grandpa up the steep path in wicker baskets supported by a strip of cloth across their foreheads. Incredible. I was also lucky enough to enjoy incredible natural hot springs after meandering down beautiful moss-covered shiny stone steps to the river, only about 30 minutes from the location where we were “stranded” by sickness.

 We were also lucky to be paired up with such a compassionate, funny, and intelligent guide. Dipak was amazing. Very concerned and accomodating and full of ridiculous stories of his past 15 years as a porter and guide in Nepal…. When I return to Nepal in the future, I will definitely hire him again to accompany me in the Himalayan hills.

I shall return to my exploration of Chiang Mai. Tomorrow we head off to a Thai cooking school for 3 days of organic delicious food on a farm outside of the city–another thing I’ve been looking forward to since we started planning this trip!

Vrede,

Anne

National Pot Day in Nepal

Nepal has been, as everyone told me, one of the greatest places I’ve ever been. The people, both foreigners and Nepali people alike, are incredibly nice, everything bustles along in an amazing flurry of car honking, bright colors, and open-air shops that line the road and all sell the same things, and it’s difficult to walk anywhere without coming across a Buddhist or Hindu temple hidden among the chaos. Given that I am traveling alone for this week due to some back problems in Denmark that held me up for just long enough to miss the departure date for the trek that Julie and Anne are on, my days in Nepal have kind of fallen into my lap due to the help of some very nice, albeit random, people…

When I arrived at the Kathmandu airport, I realized it was 8:15pm and I didn’t know a single person in the country. A guy was standing near me at the baggage claim so I started talking to him about Lonely Planet books or something and then suddenly we were sharing a cab, making plans to meet for a drink, and then drinking a beer in downtown Kathmandu (in the Thamel area) in a bar called Rum Doodle. The bar was quiet except for myself, Graeme (my Scottish airport friend), and three men who were sitting at the bar- a boistrous 6′4″ tall, 35-year-old gay man from Boston who does the interior decorating for the Clinton family, his 5′ tall Sherpa friend who didn’t talk much, and a Welsh man who perked up when I asked what hashwas exactly.

The bar closed soon after we got there, however, because it was a national holiday and the streets were more crowded, and therefore dangerous, than usual. The holiday was in celebration of the wedding of Shiva, the Hindu god. Because Shiva was known for smoking a lot of pot (or so the story goes), smoking pot is legal on this one day and the Nepali government gives it out for free to the people of Nepal. The main celebration of the holiday is at a large temple on the outskirts of town, where thousands of people travel to each day to pray and be blessed. At this particular time of year, however, thousands of Indians make the pilgramage from India to this temple for a week of celebration, culminating on this final day, the day that I arrived in Nepal.

Since it was only about 10:30pm, our odd group decided to head to the temple to see the excitement. When we got there, it was overwhelming (especially since I’d been in the country for less than 3 hours so far)- thousands and thousands of people, marijuana everywhere, many temples that filled an entire park area….we basically just wandered around in a tight group with our mouths hanging open in complete awe of the chaos.

One of the more odd things that happened that night was that every now and then our group would stop and sit down to take everything in. Before long, a few men would stop and start silently staring at us. Then more men would gather, until finally at least 15-20 men would be crowded around us, all blatantly staring, a silence falling over us. It wasn’t until we’d been at the temple for at least an hour before we realized what was going on- out of the thousands of people there, I was, from everything we could see, the only woman there and they were stunned to see me.

Another thing that was happening at the temple besides rampant pot smoking was cremations. The temple is on a river that connects to the Ganges River, the holy river in Hinduism, and so whenever someone in Kathmandu dies, they are brought to this river with 12 hours of the death, covered in cloth, wood, and straw, and cremated. When the cremation is complete, the ashes are swept into the river and the pedestal is cleared away for the next person. It all revolves around the Hindu belief that humans are made up of 5 elements (earth, air, fire, water, and….I forget the other one) and so this form of cremation returns each part of the human back to where it came from. The fires burning along the river were a cool addition to the chaos of the temple.

 That random night was to be the beginning of an exciting, and just as random, week by myself wandering around the Kathmandu Valley…

-Luthien

What to do when a monk falls asleep on your shoulder and other cultural musings

While on a bus from Kathmandu to Pohkara today, a young Nepali Buddhist monk sat next to me. He and his fellow monks had come to one of the main monasteries in Kathmandu, Swayambhunath, for training and were now headed back to their home monastery in the mountains. Our driver was actually quite good and cautious, so without the normal sounds of horns and screeching brakes to keep one awake (driving here is really a bit tame compared to India, but that’s probably a good thing), one by one the passengers slowly fell asleep as the sun rose higher and the bus temperature rose with it. The monk next to me drifted off, and as the bus turned on every sharp right mountain curve, he would lean over closer and closer to me in his sleep until finally he rested on my shoulder, still sleeping. What to do? In Nepal, men and women do not touch in public. Women can hug women and men can hold hands, but inter-gender contact is rare and frowned upon as it is seen as being sexual. If this were any other man, I would have just moved him off of me, but since he was a monk I wasn’t quite sure what the unspoken cultural rules were. I didn’t want to embarrass him by waking him up, but I also wasn’t sure if it was right to leave his head on my shoulder. Unable to decide, the eight-hour journey continued on, with the monk swaying away from me on each left-handed curve and then back to rest on my shoulder with each right-handed curve. Nepal is a land of hills and mountains (“a little bit up, a little bit down, Nepali flat,” they say), so the road was constantly curving. Every once in a while the monk shook himself awake and sat up, but then a few minutes later he was asleep and falling over again. I guess if it didn’t bother him it shouldn’t bother me . . .

Travelling in Nepal and India has given me a greater appreciation for just how complex human cultures are. By that I mean that there are so many intricate, rich, and unspoken patterns in every society that are quite foreign, and often baffling, to the outsider. Children from those societies grow up surrounded by these norms, whether it be that when you share a drinking vessel, your lips should never touch it (even amongst couples), or that tucking in your sari a certain way means you are from a particular region of India. And I haven’t even mentioned much bigger issues such as trying to understand gender roles or the thousands of Hindu gods! Even if I lived here for years and years, I wonder if I could ever truly understand it all. I discussed these thoughts with a Nepali friend, Narayan, in Bhaktapur yesterday, but I’m not sure that my ideas were communicated quite right. He told me that if I dyed my hair black and wore Nepali clothes, I would fit it quite well as a very pale Nepali woman! In any case, I am continually fascinated by what I can learn just by watching people and talking. It also is interesting to reflect on how many and which unspoken cultural norms we have at home that must seem crazy to visitors to the US.

I will leave my musings here, as we have just arrived in Pokhara and it is time to explore the town. Anne and I leave tomorrow for a six-day trek in the Himalayas. It is part of the Annapurna circuit, a loop called Ghorapani (Poon Hill) to Ghandruk. We are going with a Nepali guide named Dipak, who seems to be filled with more calm and happiness than I thought possible. We’re gearing up for spectacular views, meeting mountain villagers, and eating lots of dal bhat (stewed lentils and rice, a Nepalese staple). Should be great!

Never Ending Peace And Love (NEPAL),*

Julie

*Acronym courtesy of Narayan.  He has many of them, some even more amusing.