Crasia, Nepali Style

Rice festival in Nepal

I arrive in Kathmandu after an uneventful flight to find myself back in the hustle and bustle of Asia. The airport approximates a garden shed and I begin my reacclimatisation from the stiff state of luxury of the Gulf. People jostle and yell at me as I grab a taxi which, like all taxis in Nepal, is a tiny old beat-up suzuki that can barely move - and every truck and motorbike that drives by vomits clouds of thick dark smoke through my open (and unclosable) window. Despite knowing myself - this level of chaos is not usually my cup of tea - I feel a thrill of exhilaration; it feels great to be back in crazy Asia!

First views in Kathmandu

Boudhanath stupa

I enter my guesthouse and look around - the monsoon season is beginning and so I am almost the only westerner this side of the tourist area of Thamel. I start my solo explorations of Kathmandu trudging the dust-choked streets through approximate suburbs to reach the first couple of religious pilgrimages on my tourist list: Boudhanath, a grandiose Tibetan Buddhist stupa, and Pashupatinath, a massive Hindu temple complex devoted to the god Shiva. These two sects define the religious flavour of the whole of Nepal - a very strange mix indeed. Hash smoking Sadhus lurk around the Shiva templettes selling their enlightened faces for tourist photos; bloodthirsty temples perch atop misty mountain peaks where monkeys prance and the stone stairways are stained with the blood of daily animal sacrifice. Sober and precept-observing red- & saffron- robed buddhist monks zip about on scooters or circumambulate the stupas, spinning dharma wheels for the enlightenment of all beings. It’s an odd mix to say the least, but quite a beautiful example of how religions can get along without a hitch if they set their minds to it.

The Shiva Lingam: genital combo

Holy Cow. If you accidentally kill a cow on the roads of Nepal,
you go to jail for the same length of time as for murdering a human...

The local Sadhu holy-man pot-heads trying to swipe my wallet

My guide through Pashupatinath temple regales me with stories from the Hindu religion as we wander amongst thousands of little structures housing Shiva’s penis-in-vagina iconography, the Shiva lingam. He tells me the story of how one day Shiva took off to the mountains and left his missus behind. She felt a bit grubby and decided she needed a scrub, but being hotter than a Bollywood starlet she was concerned that one of the 30 million other gods might try to jump her bones in the process, so she recruited her son to stand guard while she showered in the open. So along comes Shiva and, as jealous as any divine being has the right to be, flies into a rage when he sees some guy standing by his showering nudey bridey. He flies down the mountain side and gives his son a thorough smiting, tearing his head right off. As it rolls to his feet he realises it was his own son, and so feeling a tad guilty he grabs the nearest elephant he can find and beheads the beast, sewing it Game-of-Thrones-style onto the body of his son, thus resurrecting the chap as Ganesh, the elephant-headed god we all know and love today. The moral of the religious parable is COMPLETELY lost on me, but it does seem to me that Hinduism must be the original soap opera par excellence for the masses. Those gods (which number more than their Hindu followers I understand) basically go around humping each other and then getting into murderous rages, and I can’t help but feel like they might all benefit from a bit of Zen practice…

Strolling the dusty streets of Kathmandu, Michael Jackson style.

Relief just a few hours drive out of town!

Kathmandu is a proud capital of respiratory infections and hypertension due to the constant hectic traffic and horn blaring, so three days is plenty for me; I jump on a bus for the cable car station that will transport me to Manakamana temple, a pilgrimage site for Hindus not reachable by vehicle. As I arrive there’s a line going from the temple and extending maybe 200m up the hill, all barefoot hindus, some of them cradling chickens awaiting blessing or murder depending on the day. The next day I awake at 5am with the sun (and the rest of Nepal) and head off on my solo trek down the moutainside to make it to the next road-head bazaar town and bus-stop. It’s a beautiful walk through forests and quaint villages, with helpful villagers that speak no English, marred only by the tendency of the villagers to drop all their plastic rubbish on the ground anywhere they go. 3 hours later I reach the bus-stop area, and catch a rickety and tiny local bus to my next destination, Gorkha. Another climb to another temple and a scenario hugely reminiscent of an Indiana Jones film - misty monsoon mountains drift out from beneath the temple grounds, and I find bells clanging in furious discord, incense rising thickly through the cracks in the tin roof of a lower chamber that's forbidden to all but the priests. Then with a final crash of a gong - silence. The daily animal sacrifice appears to have been made.

Pokhara from above

Best Coke truck ever

Nepalis "probably" aren't capable of western-level marketing lies just yet.

Good shanti shanti momo karma.

Next stop: Pokhara, and after a harrowing trip on another local bus where seats are so cramped together as to deny access to all western folk barring the newly born, I stretch my cramped frame and head for the Tibetan Buddhist centre that I’ll call home for the next couple of weeks. Beautiful and verdant, aside a large lake slowly choking in green water hyacinth, it’s in Pokhara that I finally start to make buddies with the fellow travelers that seemed so conspicuously absent in all the towns I’d passed through ’til now. I hang up my shoes here and take up daily residence in a nearby eating shack that seems to draw people to itself almost magnetically: hippies and crusties, labradors and preachers, trippers and askers, lovers and dreamers, all reclining in hazy hash clouds eating momos and chatting while watching the world go by. Days roll by lazily and my various achievements include learning to ride a geared motorbike for the first time on hectic Asian pot-holed roads in monsoon storms, taking a 3-day course to learn the differences in Tibetan Buddhism from my own beloved Zen practice (vast differences it seems), and climbing a nearby mountain to overnight at the village above with one human and 2 companionable street dogs picked up in Pokhara. On the other hand, I decide to not take up either of the more usual Nepal-tour activities: trekking or jungle safari. It’s my loss, but the monsoon rains make these activities slightly impractical, and besides this is definitely the right place to just chill.

Buffalo stew

On the 17th I’ll leave Nepal and all the great people I’ve met in along the way here. Until then...

Companion up the mountain