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
Posted by luthienlee 
