Back to Kathmandu

The time difference in Kathmandu is like two and a quarter hours from Lhasa, so I’ve gone back in time slightly.

I’m in the hotel room and it’s about 2 pm. I’m exhausted. It’s a culture shock: Lhasa seemed so clean and orderly compared to the chaotic streets of Kathmandu. I don’t think this city is meant to have so many cars! It has lots of bikes and motorcycles, too, but it has so many more cars than an Indian city, or at least it certainly seems to. And the streets of Thamel are medieval—narrow, winding, potholed—and everything’s crowded together.

I met up with the travel agent, Naresh, and he gave me some beautiful postcards to entice me to tour Bhaktapur, and it worked—I came up with 10 am tomorrow as a good time to meet up at the hotel. What the heck, I may as well do a little more touring while I’m in Nepal. I also intend to get a statue or two for Elaine (and probably for myself!) and some Dalai Lama postcards. Elaine, as I may have mentioned, is the coworker who will be picking me up at the airport in Kansas City.

The lights all suddenly came on! I’m tempted to go to the Cybercafé but like Naresh’s manager pointed out, I should take it easy and rest today, because of the transition from Tibet to Nepal. It’s like suddenly returning to India after visiting Tibet. Just the change from “Tashe delek!” to “Namaste!” is startling. However, I might want to just lie down and mindfully breathe for, like, half an hour, because there’s noisy construction going on really close by, like next door, and there’s no way I’m going to sleep through that.

Walking from the travel agent’s office, I got lost again! It’s embarrassing to admit I could be so stupid. It seems like such a simple walk. But the streets are so chaotic and bewildering, and they have no names. After a week in Tibet, Kathmandu seems crazy, chaotic and noisy—I thought the blaring megaphones were bad, but here there’s constant honking and zooming of motorcycles! In Tibet, the steering wheel is on the left and they drive on the right side of the road, just like in America; and although they still honk more than Americans, it’s not like in Nepal and India, where they don’t get a lot of use out of breaks.

A musician showed me the way to the hotel, and I thought I should pay him, and I bought his CD; he tried to sell me his violin-like musical instrument first. He seemed nice, but I was paranoid because of my experience with the rickshaw driver last time I was here, but I’m thinking the musician didn’t rip me off—the CD was $15 or 1500 rupees—Nepalese rupees are less than Indian.

I’ve developed a cough again since arriving in Kathmandu. Clearly I can’t live in a highly polluted city; my respiratory system is too fragile, thanks to all that secondhand smoke my mother forced on me for the first nineteen years of my life. Although Tibet has so much less pollution, many people (mostly women) wear cloth masks like surgical masks. At merchants’ booths, you see them hanging in colorful clusters, for they’re made from a wide variety of colors and patterns. But then, in Tibet I can see how it would be useful against winds and dust storms—certainly, I wouldn’t expect so many germs and so much pollution there.

I spent over an hour at the Cybercafé and forgot to send an e-mail about riding a yak! I’ll have to do something about that.

Now it’s 7:27 pm and I’m thinking I’ll lie down and read Tricycle magazine some more. Oh, yeah, I haven’t mentioned: after lying down and mindfully breathing (but not actually taking a nap), I got up and went wandering to find the Naga statue that I fell in love with and that I’d decided I want to get Elaine. I originally saw it the first time I was in Kathmandu, walking past and totally not in the mood to buy anything, and I saw it again while walking to the travel agency. So I went out…and there it was, displayed on the front left corner of a table in front of the shop. The shopkeeper also had a few Nagas like it but half the size, so I also got myself one that’s half the size of the first. Mine is about five inches tall, and both metal statues are heavier than they look. While in Tibet, I was struck by how often the Nagas appear in temple architecture, as part of the elaborate carvings and murals. That’s not terribly surprising with all the water in Tibet; the Brahmaputra in particular snakes around a lot. Tibet has a lot of sand—something I didn’t think of in spite of all the sand mandalas. Ah, one of which I saw in a somewhat dark room at the Sera Monastery. It was inside a glass display case, like the one at the Tibetan Nuns Project nunnery in Dharamsala, even though normally sand mandalas are destroyed, representing impermanence and detachment.

Mindful Trek in the Himalayan Foothills

View during trek just outside of Dharamsala, India

At nine in the morning, many of members of our sangha met up with Jagdish after breakfast, in front of the guesthouse, in order to go on a Himalayan trek in the Rhododendron Forest. We took cabs down to the main square of Dharamsala, where Mc’llo’s is located, among other things. Jagdish stopped at the bakery that’s attached to that famous restaurant. He bought himself a chocolate birthday cake with chocolate icing and put it in his backpack…or somebody’s backpack. Kathy, Mimi, at least one of the two Garys, Lynn and David, David the writer, Ingrid, Paula, Stacy, and Manny were all in the group of trekkers; I may be missing someone.

We began the amazing trek when Jagdish was done with his purchases and we were all ready to start walking. We went up a road that was among the several roads connecting at the lively square, and from there we walked up a path at an incline. It was flanked on both sides by tall and very green trees, and Jagdish indicated a tall tree with large red flowers growing on it and said, “Those are rhododendrons.” Wow! When I pictured a rhododendron forest, I had imagined a forest full of bright flowers in numerous colors, but mostly we saw green. However, I love hiking and the scenery was quite beautiful.

We continued climbing the slowly winding path through the woods. Eventually, we saw lumps at the side of the road…and the lumps became monkeys, some of which were babies and others were quite large. They were all pink-bottomed brown monkeys, and they simply sat at the side of the road and at most looked at us, but in some cases they didn’t even acknowledge our presence. We kept walking, walking, past the monkeys and past many trees.

Sometimes through openings in the trees, we could see in the distance shiny silver-looking stones that make mountainsides glisten. Later, after we had climbed very high, we looked down at the ground and saw these shiny stones up close, and they indeed have a metallic silvery sheen. But long before we came that close to the silvery stones, we were still down in the woods and the trail became rockier and rockier. Soon the path consisted primarily of very large stones that we had to climb up and down. I’m tempted to call it limestone; all the stones were that light grey. I was constantly looking down at the unbelievably rocky path and watching my every step. This was not the first time that I practiced mindful walking as a survival skill in India.

On the rocks, the group spread pretty far apart. Paula and Stacy were up ahead of me, and I passed them because Paula wasn’t so sure-footed and was experiencing back pain. I was behind most of the group by the time I came to a grassy and rocky mountainside that I had to climb up despite its steepness. I could see several people on a path up above, but unfortunately I hadn’t seen where exactly they had climbed up this slope that did not appear to have an obvious path. I picked the most obvious route I could, and even that was very steep and involved crawling on my hands and knees at times. But eventually I caught up with the group on a path that ran perpendicular to the slope I had just climbed.

Eventually we came to a café where we could see snow-capped mountains in the distance. Much closer up, we saw a couple of charming stacks of rocks, Tibetan-style offerings that reminded me of beehive-shaped monk’s cells in Ireland. Some of the trekkers stopped in front of the café to look at tables full of merchandise, where a few men stood behind the tables hoping to sell some of the merchandise, which consisted mostly of small statues and malas of various different colors; it was much like merchandise that we could buy down below on the streets of Dharamsala. I personally wasn’t interested in shopping but stopped to look at the merchandise anyway, while I waited for the group to all catch up and get organized.

Jagdish led some of us (including me) further up on the path, and it was trickier. We were so high up that we passed yak turds and shortly after that some snow, not more than a few inches deep. Jagdish started a snowball fight, but I’ve never liked snowball fights or any kind of fight, for that matter, so I just dodged the ball he threw at me. Oh, coming to think of it, I scooped one up and threw it at him, but it was the wrong kind of snow and it turned into a snow shower instead of remaining a ball. I then turned and kept walking.

Someone pointed out footprints, and I said, “It’s yeti footprints!” and let out a cackle. Actually, it looked rather like elk or deer footprints; it was certainly something with hooves, and yetis are monkeys. I believe in yetis, but I think they’re simply a type of timid monkey rather than a supernatural being.

A couple times we walked on a ledge scarcely more than a foot wide. When I first came to this, seeing such a narrow path in the snow, I took a deep breath but moved on; I had no intention of turning back and wimping out. Walking along the ledge, sinking my feet into footsteps in the snow, I felt frightened and shaky at first but didn’t hesitate to keep going. No balking, I just did it mindfully, cautiously, and pretty calmly. Below me, the slope plunged sharply down and was covered with brown little bushes and many trees.

We went back to the café, where less daring (or less suicidal) members of the sangha hung out, sitting on stone or concrete ledges in front of the café. We all had Jagdish’s luscious chocolate birthday cake and a lunch of very spicy Tibetan chili ramen with rather Western crackers that tasted similar to Ritz. I ate quite a few crackers, because the chili peppers were burning my lips. We also drank delicious chai.

After that, we headed back down the way we came. We approached a little chai shop that sold Cadbury cookies and odds and ends. It wasn’t a stand made of sticks but rather a full-size shop in a real building with a garage door up, giving it an open front like so many Indian stores. Like the café up above, it was not surrounded by other businesses; however, a pretty white stupa stood on a slightly higher precipice nearby. We had stopped at the little shop on the way up and had drunk chai. This time around, we met up with some other members of the sangha, including Enid, and we hung out for a little while. A couple of donkeys came along and amused us as they stood in front of the little chai shop.