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wedding and a walk in the hills I was invited to the wedding of my nephew Tom to a Nepali lady, Subi, in October 2009, and a walk in ‘the hills’ afterwards. The Himalayas! I did some serious training and flew out to Delhi, spent a night there and caught our connecting flight to Kathmandu the next day. Delhi, the capital city of India and one of its oldest. In the street, wherever you looked, wherever you walked, there were people, people. People, huge numbers of motorbikes and cars moved together in the crowded streets, missing each other by inches. Motorbikes are cheaper than cars, they can get into narrower spaces, a whole family can ride on one, and in a warm climate just as useful. There were no rules, nothing near the British ‘flashing on’, more like ‘I dare you to crash into me!’ But speeds are low and death is unlikely. Business was done in the street. Grain in sacks was unloaded, sold, carried away on a barrow so overloaded you could hardly see the barrow. At the end of the day the traders gathered to settle up. I found I was noticing features which I wouldn't have before. Our hotel was near the Red Mosque, and around that the men wore white lace skull caps and the women wore shalwar kameez. They were Muslim. Only a few hundred yards away the men were bareheaded and the women wore saris. They were Hindus. The newspapers
were a fright. China is harassing India along the borders and trying to
trip it up diplomatically. Generals wrote in the newspapers about the
possibilities of war. Surely this is fantasy! The Chinese might take a
border pass here, a valley there, but to try to take the main body of
India would surely mean world war and we all know it. Tourism is a very big business. The Durbar squares are public places, but foreigners are charged for going into them, and it always is clear that you are a foreigner. Likewise there is a charge for going into the national parks. Two days before the wedding there was a ‘meet the family’ party. The bride and groom's friends, childhood friends, and adults who had influenced them. Among them were people from only five miles away from my home who I found interesting. All these miles away! Before the wedding itself, dancers came to warm up the party. They were women, in calf-length saris; they pulled the crowd into the dance. They would recognise English Morris dancers as colleagues. The bride and groom went and sat in their places, a paved hollow in the ground, which we sat and stood around. It was a Hindu ceremony. Candles were lit on the ‘altar’ to mark the start of the ceremony. Plenty of tikka, the red forehead colouring, was put on the bride's head. Various pujas (acts of worship) were performed which I could not follow. But I did follow the exchange of rings and the eating from the same plate. And after ‘a day of rest’, and a knees-up with a local band, playing unfamiliar instruments, but they quoted intelligently from J S Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor. A jolly good evening. Our hotel was on the Durbar Square, that is ‘Palace Square’ of Patan. Patan is a former independent city, but it is now engulfed by Kathmandu. There was a big Hindu temple right outside our hotel. It is a traditional religion, like the religion of the ancient Greeks, Vikings and Romans. These religions produced art and literature which has to be respected, though the actual stories are muddled: was a certain Goddess the daughter or wife of a certain God? Or both? But the impact on me of actually seeing that temple was unexpected. I suddenly saw statements that a certain hero had ‘sacrificed to the Gods’ or consulted a sacred oracle as black, black superstition and irrationality. First thing in the morning, the temple bell was rung. Then the congregation, mostly women, sang, accompanied, strangely, by a harmonium. An Indian version of the harmonium has become established in Indian music. There were little shrines along all the streets. A statue of the God looks out from his niche, but he is of stone, he is asleep. The worshipper rings a bell to wake the God up, he says his prayers, throws a little offering, often a few grains of rice, puts his finger to his forehead, his chest in gesture which looked like the sign of the cross. Surely not! I looked again and of course it wasn't. The streets were crowded, but the press was not as heavy as in Delhi. It was plain that women were much freer (Do Muslim and Hindu want not to be seen as laxer than the other in their treatment of women? There are very few Muslims in Nepal.) The women wore a wide variety of dress, they rode scooters and motor bikes, and unlike in Delhi, even carried a man on the pillion, unlike Delhi where I saw only one women rider in thousands of men riders. In Delhi there were beggars and pesterers. There were many fewer in Nepal, even fewer out of Kathmandu. It could be difficult to separate the pesterers from those with honest interest. Many times I heard behind me a voice saying insistently ‘hello, hello’, and then I realised it was somebody speaking into a mobile phone. They ask ‘Which country are you from?’ Often they simply want to say ‘Hello’ to the foreigner, and maybe to practise their English, but they struggle to think of something to say. Parents brought their children to me to get them to talk and overcome the child's fear of foreigners. We went around the sights. There was the Great Stupa at Bodnath and many Tibetans walk round it and turn the prayer wheels. Another religious and ethnic group to recognise by their dress! There has always been Tibetan influence in Nepal, but it has been greatly strengthened by the refugees. There was Swayambunath, a group of Buddhist temples on a hill just outside the city, there were the Durbar squares with their temples and museums and the tourist shops and shops for ordinary people and all the variety of an Eastern city. It changes fast; I am told that the roadside food stalls, which look so natural, are new in the last 2 years. Nepal is a Hindu country. Like India it has its ghats - a tourist attraction!? Indeed they are, and the usual fee is charged to get in. The dying are brought to hospices and when they are just about to die, they are brought out, wrapped in their cremation wrappings, laid on a ramp on the riverside with their feet in the water, and when they have actually died, their face is covered, they are lifted out and laid aside for the cremation tomorrow. There are several ‘living Goddesses’. A girl of three or four is chosen, by competition, to be a living Goddess, which she remains until she menstruates. She is kept in a special house: there are all sorts of taboos around her; for example her feet may not be allowed to touch the ground. Late at night the Patan ‘living Goddess’ was brought out in her palanquin to do her stuff in Patan Durbar Square. The procession, with a band singing sacred texts, brought her to the temple. She was carried by her mother(?) to an entrance, stood on soggy newspaper while ceremonies were performed, taken into the private parts of the temple and brought out and put back in her palanquin. She gave out tikka, the red forehead mark of Hindu holiness. I was beckoned forward to take it, but I declined. Then she was carried away home. Throughout, her face was oddly impassive. Was she in holy rapture, bored, contemptuous or simply a girl well past her bedtime? The Nepali government insists on education for these girls, and some of them go to school in the usual way. Education is a big thing in Nepal. Everywhere you see adverts for private schools, and there are state schools with western-style school uniforms. You wouldn't think it possible to dress a schoolgirl to look frumpy, but in Nepal they achieve it! And will there be jobs for these bright, keen, educated young people? Ah, there's the worry! I found the food a trial. Back home, I avoided Indian food, and Nepali food is heavily influenced by Indian taste. The chillies made my lips sore. It took me a while to make my party realise that I meant the flesh, the thickness, of my lips and not just the red surface. Another spice attacked the back of my palette, different parts of the mouth have different sensitivities. The standard meal is dahl baat, served on a stainless steel dish divided into sections. The largest is for the rice, and refilled as you eat (it is obviously the main meal, the filler) and three other segments, filled with spices and the meat. The spices were far beyond my taste, and the ‘meat’ was usually the gristly bits, often ‘chicken’, though the bones didn't look like the bones of any chicken I've eaten. A real trial. And a worry. Omelette, which is cooked on the spot, is safe. There is European food, but ironically that led to disaster. I had an ice-cream sundae in an expensive European-type restaurant. I noticed that there ice crystals in it, but I ate it, and I shouldn't have. A friend of the bride's parents ran a trekking company and she organised a trek and provided two guides, for the ‘Annapurna circuit’, a walk round that mountain at heights which ordinary people can do. Tek and Razza were our guides. The Nepali government has a grading and qualification system for guides and Tek was qualified. Razza was his number 2. The Nepali government offers courses to guides in European languages other than English. Tek and Razza were very friendly and attentive, but they absented themselves for mealtimes. With the guides, my brother, his daughter, her boyfriend and I took a car to Besisahar on reasonable tarmacked road through ‘rolling’ countryside. Well, ‘rolling’ in Nepali terms, not high, but steep! And tummy trouble, though not yet too severe. Then a ‘jeep’ (of uncertain manufacture) over a really rolling ‘road’ throwing us side to side at little more than 10mph from Besisahar to our first stop. We went on on foot. It was a very beautiful walk, but very steep, along a valley side. Everywhere there was greenery, birds of all sorts, butterflies so big that at first I thought they were bats. There were rice paddies and orchards and shops and lodges along the way. What is the visual challenge, the excitement, of such landscapes? To my surprise I remembered I felt the same the other way round. When I went from the rolling Cheviot hills of home to University in the completely flat landscape of Hull, I found it exciting. That might seem a very modest excitement, but I'm not the only one to feel it. Cowboy films are sometimes shot in such a way as to play up the effect. This very steep landscape was exciting, what was this excitement? Partly that I could see buildings, people, trees, from angles which I always knew must exist, but I had never seen before. Partly that I could see somebody at my own level, across the valley, quite close by line of sight, but a long way away by foot. Partly the knowledge that there were dangerous drops not far away. Is this all? These things are part of the reasons people come to such places. I felt worse, emptying myself at both ends: humiliating and worse, weakening. The rain got heavier, it was a ’late monsoon’. Reluctantly we agreed that I probably could not get over the top, the Thorong pass. So the rest went on and I stayed at Syange lodge till the rain stopped. On the trekking routes there were all sorts of foreigners. Europeans of all kinds, except, strangely, Scandinavians. Americans, Indians, Japanese, a very few Chinese, and of course Nepalis trekking in their own country. In the evenings there were interesting and surprising conversations. I met a man who found to his own surprise that he admired the American military's behaviour in Afghanistan. There was one last night of heavy rain, and then it cleared. I set off down the valley with other foreigners. The road had been built three years before, but it had now been blocked for three months. It was now used for mule trains, carrying up rice, fuel oil to the lodges, and household goods, pots, pans, that kind of thing, and very little down. All for the tourist trade. There were porters carrying the more awkward things. I had mixed feelings about men carrying things which really an animal should carry. There was a Nepali army barracks only a mile down the valley from the lodge and they had a big earth moving machine. It could have kept the road open, but the only time I saw it used was to move small stones for building an outhouse for the barracks. Huge stones blocked the road, they had obviously fallen the night before. We came to a landslip which had cut the road. A whole hillside had fallen, the earth face was at an angle of 70 - 80°. A mule train was waiting to come up. Three or four local men with spades were digging a ledge to make a path across the face of this landslide and placing stones to make some kind of path. The mule train came up - if the path took their weight, it should take mine. If I fell on that slope, there would be no way of stopping my fall before reaching the bottom, several hundred feet down rolling all the way. The multiple injuries would kill me. Kill me slowly! I took a deep breath and started down. I lived to write this. The road-menders asked for money, I paid them 200 rupees. Well earned! But I wasn't out of danger. Stones started to roll down the hill. The guide rushed me out of the way. Later I heard that a young European trekker had been killed by a stone falling on his head. Trekking in Nepal is not very dangerous, but it certainly isn't risk-free. And so we got to a ‘jeep’, then an actual ‘road vehicle’, as distinct from an ‘off-road vehicle’ and on to Pokhara, where I stopped at very nice hotel, for £50 for two days, breakfast and evening meal. We stayed mostly at rather cheap places; my brother had been to such places when he was younger and they were what he was used to. When I got back, I found that I had spent less while I was away than I would have done at home. Pokhara is a place for lazing around and looking at the landscape. Hanggliders and birds soared in the upcurrents on the hills. In the distance, towering above it all, was a mountain, white with snow, so unexpectedly high that at first I saw it as clouds until I realised it was a mountain. Everywhere I looked, there were signs of glaciation. There were moraines, raised shorelines, stepped alluvial fans, U-shaped valleys, glacial erratics. You expect to see these thing in Wales, Scotland, Scandinavia and Switzerland, but it was unexpected to see such a landscape covered with tropical vegetation. And such vegetation! Bedrock shows in places, but most of the land is glacial debris; sand, clay and rock, as left when the ice melted. So you see steep slopes, not of rock, but of this glacial debris, the slopes are as steep as the materials will stand. On the wet side of the mountains, the slopes have been reduced by land slips, on the dry side the slopes are very steep. And they are not rock, just dry mud! Dangerous to climb on. I was amazed at what very steep slopes I climbed on, and the guides climbed on steeper. The glaciers ripped stratified rocks (the Himalayas are the bed of the former Tethys ocean) so the people dig into the glacial debris, and pull out stones which are flat on at least two sides. They knock the excess off the other faces to get stones which are fairly block-like and these are stacked up ready for use. Everywhere along the route I saw stones being got out of the glacial debris like this for building new ‘lodges’ as tourist hotels are called. I saw lumps of slate over a metre thick which had been cut very cleanly across the grain by repeated blows with small hammers. Huge work. But bricks are hundreds of miles and many donkey-train days away. That is true of cement too. In such a landscape you would expect other stone-building skills to grow up, but their dry stone walls were very poor by British standards. My brother's party was still going round the Annapurna circuit, and I went round the other arm of the circuit to meet him. I took a flight from Pokhara to Jomsom. These are small twin-engined aircraft, non-pressurised, seating about 20 passengers, run like buses. The flying time is 20 minutes. I dread to think what the land journey is like, there are six flights each morning before the wind changes and flying becomes impossible. It might not be possible anyway if the clouds are low. The aircraft flies well below the mountain tops; it only just clears the ridge that separates the two valleys. Many passengers are nervous. On the return flight my brother's daughter took off her glasses so that she couldn't see. I enjoyed it. So, Jomsom. It is a one-street town and it has the feel of a cowboy town. It has government offices and the Nepali school of mountain warfare, ready to give the Chinese a bloody nose if they should ever try it on. I took a ‘jeep’ up to Muktinath. A very jolty ride and about 12 people in seats for eight. And some on the roof! I had time to wait for my brother's party. I wandered about. This is the ‘dry side’, a ‘rain shadow’. It is a completely different world to the wet and greenery of Kathmandu and Pokhara. The land is dry brown mud covered with small stones. There is one tuft of green every metre, except where water flows down from higher places. Earlier on the trek I had become a little annoyed by the way the walk pressed on, taking no time to turn aside and look at interesting things and getting to the next lodge long before nightfall. So, now I had time to look around. I looked at these little tufts of green. Even in this bleak place tiny bumblebees went round the flowers. An Austrian tourist stopped and asked whether a plant was the same as the Edelweiss (‘Noble White’) of his homeland. I looked at the Muktinath shrine. This is the source (well, not quite, the water comes down from higher up the mountain) of a holy river, and Hindus come to bathe in the waters. Beastly cold! It is also a Buddhist shrine. Buddhism and Hinduism are closely linked in Nepal and this is a joint temple. I looked round the system of little channels which bring water to the fields. In Muktinath there is a new Buddhist monastery, or rather a nunnery. I saw these nuns, mostly young, in their dark red robes, carrying earth in back-baskets to build a new garden. They treated it as girlish fun. The next village down, Jharkot, has a large shrine, said to be home to 40 monks, but I didn't see any of them. These monasteries and nunneries are rather large in relation to the size of the lay population. Muktinath is an important pilgrimage centre and monasteries and nunneries may also be the white collar section of the community, but I did wonder how many of them would be there if they had a free choice from as wide a range of choices as we have. And so my brother's party came over the top and down the hill and met me. After celebrations we went back home to Blighty. Why do we call it that? First published in VISA 89 (Feb 2010) |