Temples and mountains

Temples and mountains
Our cultural activity this week was a visit to Pashupatinath, an important Shiva temple and cremation site. It resembled a school outing as we were bundled into taxis to take us across the city to meet in front of the huge temple complex, with the usual array of stall holders, souvenir sellers, flowers, fruit and young men wanting to act as guides and be suitable rewarded afterwards. The Bagmati river is to Nepali Hindus what the Ganges is for Indians. A filthy trickle (it’s the dry season) flows through the temple site. Our arrival coincided with a coffin, and the body was then ritually bathed in the water before being taken to a burning platform, Several bodies were already smouldering. The burning ghats to the left of the entrance are traditionally reserved for the royal family, but last week a leading Maoist was burnt there, a symbol of the new ‘democratic’ Nepal. (We heard today that the election scheduled for June 20 will be delayed.) We climbed up through rows of stupas, where saddhus sat and monkeys frolicked and sat and watched what was happening below, with explanations from our teachers and the young men we hadn’t managed to shake off. While everyone else went to lunch, we walked on with Laura, newly arrived from VSO Rwanda to Boudhanath, a huge Buddhist stupa with surrounding monasteries. After a brief diversion to a Tibetan carpet factory, we followed the monks and Tibetan women in their striped aprons clockwise round the stupa, then sat overlooking the stupa and drank many cups of coffee before wandering through the back lanes to the Senchen monastery for supper. The evening music and chanting was wonderful, with big drums, long horns and conch shells. Hundreds of kilos of chamal (uncooked rice), kilos of fruit and packets of biscuits were donated and shared among the monks at the end of the prayers.
On Friday, having successfully survived our ‘mid-term evaluation’, we left school a bit early during a riotous and highly competitive game of pictionary in Nepali, devised by our teachers for the 9 of us still fit and well (diet and dust are taking their toll). A nearby hotel provides a free shuttle to their hotel at Nagarkot, perched on a high ridge 35km from Kathmandu, and gives a VSO discount . We were given the feature room Sagarmatha (Mt Everest) with spectacular views over the Kathmandu valley to the Himalayas beyond. What luxury! A long hot bath (the first since leaving England), listening to music on the MP3 and speakers (thanks Richard!), delicious dinner, moon, stars and a silent night. We got up (briefly) at dawn for the sunrise, and tried to make out the mountains, but decided that the snowy peaks were clouds. After breakfast we walked to the centre of the village, and saw many buses heading uphill, full of women, children and old men, with far more young people on top, waving huge red hammer-and sickle flags and cheering. A Maoist picnic outing! We caught the local bus, which wobbled precariously down the hairpin bends, as far as Telkot. Biswas, a young student on the bus, showed us the way to Changu Narayan, and we enjoyed a wonderful ridge walk, through steeply terraced fields with ripening wheat and barley, soon to be harvested, and replanted with rice after the monsoon rains. The village houses are 3 or 4 storeys tall, with intricately carved wooden windows; animals and an eating area downstairs, sitting and sleeping above, and kitchen and a prayer room at the top. Changu Narayan has apparently been a World Heritage site for the last 10 years, but there are no signs to indicate this, and it appeared to be an adventure playground for local children eating lollies. It’s a curious fusion of north Indian Hindu temple architecture and the Buddhist temples of Laos. Ominous thunderclouds were building and huge spots of rain started as we found the way to the bus. We were able to get a seat, but after a couple of kilometres, David had acquired a small girl on his lap and I had an old woman and a sack of potatoes on mine. We managed to extricate ourselves on the outskirts of Bhaktapur, where we had been told we would find the Nagarkot bus. We didn’t. However, after 20 minutes of walking and asking ‘Nagarkot janne bus kahaa chha?’ we were successful and managed to squeeze onto the back seat with Bishal and his mother Laxmi. Bishal is nine, and grew increasingly confident as he corrected our Nepali pronunciation and verb endings, and encouraged by his mother, practised his English. The 15km journey took 1½ hours through thunder, lightening and heavy rain. After a restorative bath and dinner, we slept through the storm until woken by a cuckoo at 05:10. The spectacular sunrise turned the cloud filled valley apricot – but still no Himalayas. I have just written an account of our weekend in Nepali. I think Bishal would have done better.