The Tang of Langtang

Some of you thought that it would happen.  But it didn't.  And I wasn't.  Or I shan't.  Maybe I couldn't.  But I don't remember.  And who really cares anyway?

Yes, its almost been an epic month since I last posted.  I have done so much in that time that my head has been exploding with the bloggability of it all.  Let's start at the very beginning (I have it on Julie Andrews authority that its a very good place to start).  You all thought that my friends Lauren, Jojo, Naomi, Clint and I were zipping off to Everest Base Camp for a romp in the snow before falling back down the hill again.  You'd be absolutely correct.  That's exactly what we thought we were doing as well.  However Yeti Airlines, did not appear to think that it wasthe best plan in the world.  In fact, they were so concerned with the last group of Aussies that they sent there were such a bad omen that they didn't want to send any more and cancelled our flights to Lukla (the most horrifying and probably one of highest air strips in the world) not once but twice.

Catching on that it just wasn't going to happen and obtaining the services of a very bouncy and happy little Nepali guide called Kamal (who has a very interesting life story that I will share another day) we re-organised our trip and decided to head into the Langtang range to the north of Kathmandu instead.  

You see, although Everest is very famous, the whole top third of Nepal is Himalaya and there are plenty of other places to go wandering through hills if you really feel like it. Luckily Langtang is accessible by car (well, sort of, there were roads in the parts that hadn't been wiped out by landslides or floods) and is remarkably less touristed than its sister regions Everest and Annapurna.

Day 1, Jojo on a mission to prove to himself that he can do... ummmm stuff like climbing hills almost died as the pollution in Kathmandu had basically turned his lungs into tarpits.  Determined to carry his bag all the way, by lunch time Kamal had taken over and was carrying not only Joe's but his own bag as well.  As we sat down to our dinner the rain came in and apparently brought some snow with us as it peppered the mountains above us with a beautiful little jacket of white.

Day 2, we got to the actual village of Langtang that was settled by Tibetan immigrants more than 900 years ago if I have my stories straight (which I probably have not).  There were a great many children running about our ankles as we investigated the town all with horribly runny noses, dirty faces and wind-blown cheeks.  

Apparently there's an Australian bloke that lives there who runs down and back from inside a few hours where we started 2 days before simply to check his email.  

Day 3, from Langtang village we crawled up an epic altitude that almost killed Jojo and had Clint speechless on account of altitude sickness at about 3800m from sea level.  Kamal and I were going to climb to one of the nearby peaks when a freak snowstorm blew up from Langtang and made visibility impossible.  

After a lunch sitting in a freezing dining room with no wood heater to keep us warm we rushed back to Langtang for the relative warmth of our sleeping bags only to be woken in the middle of the night by terrifying winds blowing through the cracks in the wall.

The rest of the days blurred together as I started to forget what day of teh week it was and what the outside world was like.  It was beautiful to spend time walking from  one teahouse to the next with everything I needed strapped to my back and the beaitiful mountains and jungles we walked through to see. 

We came  back down from Langtang, much to Naomi and Clint's relief as they were both very poorly from climbing so quickly the day before.  The down didn't last long before we started back up towards the east on our way to the Gosaikunda Lakes, a group of beautiful high altitude Himalayan lakes.  Lauren always led the pack, charging ahead at times about 20 minutes in front of everyone else.  Apparently she got some training in scooting up Mt Buninyong with textbooks in a backpack cos she was afraid of letting everyone else down.  In all honesty she just put us to shame.

Death threats were murmured about Kamal as he pushed us to our limits "just 30 minutes more, it couldn't be more than that, I promise" but we always took them back when we reached our destinations.  The walking was incredibly hard, but the views were spectacular and I think many of us were pushed beyond what we though were our physical limitations.  To quote Jojo "Rob, I'm having the time of my life...I can't lift my arms above my shoulders, but I'm having the time of my life".

Passing the lakes on the coldest night yet we started to see a pattern in the weather.  We would get beautiful morning with sunshine fresh snow underfoot and time temperatures.  But come 1 o'clock the cloud would set in bringing snow, hail, rain and misery.  Our moods always plummetted in the afternoon.  At one point I think I was carrying around an extra kilo because of the snow that had accumulated on my pack.

We had two porters, a 19 year old called Subas and a 50 something called Krishna.  Both were absolute guns.  Carrying Lauren, Naomi and Clint's packs they were absolute machines.  Charging ahead of us in the mornings, and always having our rooms ready and waiting for us by the time we arrived of an evening.  Krishna was a very pleasant old man, but he really kept to himself.  Subas was the real entertainer "Subas?  Do you know where the toilet is?"

"OK Mr Rob Daai"

"Yeah, OK.  But do you know where the toilet is?"

"OK, OK, OK"

Climbing the Pass after the lakes was the hardest except possibly for coming down them afterward.  That's where Clint had an innovative idea.  At one point he said "Rob, hold this" and promptly gave me his stick, sat down on his raincoat and toboggoned down the hill.  The man is a genius.  He even caught up to Lauren who had made a massive head start on us.  She turned around at one point to see a large man coming down the mountain at her on his belly screaming like a yeti.  Not before he got this cracker of a video of Kamal coming down after him.

There are plenty of other notables, including the Almost But Not Quite Nearly Snow Leopard Sighting (which I swore was really a Yeti), everyone was sick on something except for me, however I made up for that by trying to knee cap myself on a rock whlie walking down a mountain side over what was probably mainly ice.  There was the epic Middle of the Night Toilet FAIL (its supposed to go in the hole dufus) among others.  But that's enough for now.  

Enjoy the photos, and wish jealously that you took up a 12 month volunteer assignment in Nepal.

[for those of you receiving this by email - don't be lazy, visit the blog and actually see the photos, they're wicked!]

Shooting Fish In a Barrell

A book with a title linking it to a rather epicly cynical life lesson. The Himalayan Book Club's latest effort was:

Unfortunately, again I found this book to be quite disappointing. When I say "again" its not that I read it twice and expected it to be better the second time around, but that this is not the first time I have been disappoo-inted in the promises set forth in a Himalayan Book Club book.

Fantastic premise.

In a "note to the reader", the author describes how she stumbled into an odd section of the library. Here ghosts had communicated stories through mediums (sometimes in languages never previously understood by the medium) about their lives. Saving Fish From Drowning was supposedly a story based on the actual tellings of Bibi Chen, a famous art-critique / collector / or something. She was to be going on a trip to China and Burma with some friends. Unfortunately, she was gruesomely murdered first. And that's where the story starts off. Bibi narrates the story as her friends continue to Burma without her. And, that "note to the reader" was just a pile of horse poop.

The grumpy and disparaging main character, Bibi, I found myself liking in spite of her prickly personality. She was a 60-something American immigrant who fled Shanghai with her family when the Communists took over. Initially narrating the story in a way only a ghost could, she ultimately had difficulty in having a lasting role throughout the later parts of the book.

She told us about the leadup to her death. And discussed rather amusingly how annoyed she was as she watched over her own funeral and was concerned for the welfare of her puppy Poochini. Normally, I would instantly annoyed with a person whose dog's name was Poochini, but that's probably not the first contradictive thing I have ever said. I found her dry wit and disdain for her "friends" very entertaining.

There were flashbacks to China, where she talked of the only character possibly more cantankerous and interesting than Bibi herself, the evil step-mother Sweet Ma. Probably the highlight of the book (a shame as it was in one of the first few chapters) was where she described how she had been paying for her hideous step-mother to stay in an old person's home described as "Death's Waiting Room".

When she became infirm, I put her in the best of senior residences, at great expense to myself. She was not grateful. She called it Death's Waiting Room. For years, I told myself to be patient, knowing she would soon die. Surely her explosive anger might cause a similar effect on the blood vessels or her brain or heart. She was nearly ninety-one and I only sixty-three when I passed her by and flew out of this world.

Oh, how she wept. She recalled our past together as such a rosy relationship that I wondered if she was more senile than I thought. Or could it be that she had actually had a change of heart? When I discerned the answer, I changed my mind about her as well. Whereas I once looked forward to her end, I now wish her a long, long life. Let her not leave Death's Waiting Room and join me as her companion in the afterlife.

Haha, oh dear.

Unfortunately it seemed as if it was all down hill from there. That was pretty much the last of the interesting insights to Bibi and the person she became as a result of Sweet Ma's love and affection.

As a ghost she followed her frineds through China and Burma as they made one horrible cultural faux-pas after another before getting themselves abducted in a forest by a tribe of jungle people hiding from the Burmese military regime. To summarise, the characters were boring and sex-obsessed. Quite disturbing when one of the couples to get it on in the jungle had an age gap of about 40 years. And if they didn't I only thought Heidi was in her mid-twenties because she was as equally immature and dopey as I am. Moff, her sexual deviant in crime was late 60's as far as I could tell and some kind of hippie trapped in the wrong decade.

The jungle people mistook young Rupert (a 15 year old) for a reincarnated Jesus in their bizarrely warped version of Christianity because he was carrying a book - they took to be the bible - and could perform card tricks. The rest whinged about their marriages, their incompetence, their lack of significant others or were simply forgotten by the author who, at points, seemed to also forget that Bibi was actually narrating the story. Bibi's insights and understanding of Buddhism, Chinese and Burmese culture all appeared to dry up as the book progressed. It became more and more frustrating and dull as the main characters made one appaling decision after another.

There was one or two references (in various forms) to Saving Fish From Drowning. One was totally literal, where a fisherman claimed to be actually saving them. The other (one paragraph later) was an argument about the US' role in the world, and how it goes in to save people from themselves but does as much collateral damage as it helps, but the book never really came to a head on the issue.

I think rather than save these from drowning, it might have been less painful to have just shot them in their barrel. Stay tuned for more book club rants...

Good Intentions

So, the much heralded trip to Boudnath temple was a failure amidst a victory.

After doing a few laps of the stupa we (somehow) managed to get about 10 of us onto a rooftop restaurant. The problem with a group of more than 5 people is that they don't tend to act like sheep except for when you don't want them to. So when you are a hungry shepherd, and you just want everyone to follow you they may not. In the end you might just say "screw you all" and hope they work out where the rest of you are.

Anyway, the reason that we had to do a few laps of the stupa is because you must walk around a stupa clockwise, for fear of the gods or God, or something, smiting you. Now although the idea of seeing something smiting brings a smile to my face (as I imagine it's not exactly something you would see every day) it also wasn't soemthing I wanted to risk for fear of being labelled culturally intolerant or, more importantly being trampled. I did see one guy trying to go anti-clockwise on a bicycle. I think it would have been faster for him to do 10 laps clockwise than to travel 10 metres.

There were THOUSANDS* of people - tourists, Buddhists, Hindus and tourist Buddhists (complete with whacky clothes) out doing the walk. We were there because supposedly the stupa is lit up like a runway every month at the full moon. After the sun setting, and still nothing happening but many local shopkeepers setting up tables and lighting thousands** of candles on laying them out on tables in front of their shops. A ceremony was taking place with some monks chanting and blowing into conches (Lord of the Flies style) and horns while passing people threw food onto a pile (that they had bought from the entrepeneur who set up a shop next to the pile). I'm not sure what happens to it after, but I hope it goes to someone needy (it was a VERY big pile of food).

We retreated to our rooftop balcony to have some drinks and dinner. After about an hour, it occurred to someone to actually ask why the stupa was not lit up yet. Completely baffled, we asked the waiter, who suggested (in that "I'm answering even though I don't think I understood your question" kind of way) that it "might" have happened yesterday but he wasn't sure. Someone (it might have been me) suggested that he thought that the full moon was on the Wednesday. This was all devastating news to poor Mike, who had been planning this expedition since Monday with email trails a million*** miles long from volunteers trying to avoid doing work.

It did leave a few riddles.
1. Why on earth had they lit all of these candles just to have them sit on tables outside shops?
2. Why were there so many people walking around if it wasn't a special occaision?

Someone suggested that perhaps, unlike many Christians, Buddhists and Hindus might not especially wait for special occaisions to go to worship or meditate, or do what they do. I think we'll have to wait for the next full moon to find out.

The night was still claimed a success from the good food, company and that anticipatory feeling you get when you know something cool is about to happen (even though it didn't).

This is something like what we missed:

* OK, maybe hundreds
** no, this time there actually were thousands
*** not actually "millions" - maybe one million****
**** probably not though

Kopan Monastery

I haven't yet told you about last Saturday, my most recent riding adventure. Lindsey (another American, this time from work) asked if I was keen to checkout the Kopan Monastery. She said "we'll ride up", I said, "I'll be there!".

A much shorter ride than the weekend before, but with good portions of it being directly uphill, by the time we reached the monastery we were about ready to drop dead as it was quite possibly the hottest day since my arrival. Along the road we were passed by a monk riding a motorbike at breakneck speeds downhill and at the gate there was another having a chat on a mobile phone. I don't know why these were things I didn't expect Buddhist monks to be getting into, but I was surprised all the same.

There were many sayings, prayers and suggestions up around the walls of the monastery, but this was the funniest one, just near the entrance.



The monks here mainly seem to be influenced by Tibetan Buddhism- as I understand, there are many flavours - although the general concept is the same. The Dalai Lama and his exile were popular topics on all the notice boards, with plenty of advice from the old guy. A few protest posters about the Beijing Games, or perhaps Beijing itself but in general it was a very peaceful and happy place.

Whlie we were there the monks were having some kind of session with very deep singing, unfortuantely there was no one there to tell us exactly what was going on. But I got a photo of an old lady and a young boy watching the ceremony together. Very cute! He's a serious little guy though.

We wandered around the gardens, very tranquil, and observed that you can go on a retreat there for a measly $US200, where you will sit in silence for 2 weeks "without the tiresome bother of everyday chitter chatter". While I value the concept, I think the tourists might be losing out...

We checked out their library, that not just only had Buddhist Dharma but interesting "think about your life" type books and everyday novels. It's definitely the place you want to go for a day away from the city.

Leaving the monastery behind, we headed for a "nearby" Hindu temple. The Gokorna Mahadev temple. When we asked for directions it seemed to be very hit and miss with some people knowing exactly what we were talking about, and others not while still others just pretended that they knew.

Lindsey had a little moment we she couldn't decide whether to be riding or walking. Stuck behind a group of people on a narrow path she was struggling to keeo her balance on the bike. Eventually decided to plant one foot on the ground, the particular part of ground she decided on collapsed beneath her and she found herself tumbling down the side of the mountain. Now, by "down the side of the mountain" I actually mean about 2 metres, but it was both horrifying and hilarious to watch, as she kept trying to push herself back up and slipping further down the side of the hill. After helping her up nd determining the only damage was to her pride, we pushed in front of the slow meanderers in front of us.

The scenery was once again breathtaking, exactly the kind of place where you want to go on a weekend picnic with someone special.

We got to the Mahadev temple only to discover almost the entire place deserted. We weren't even sure we had gone to the right place. Maybe next time it will be a bit more interesting. There was however preparation for a cremation/funeral going on by the river bank, but as it was only preparation I will have to fill you in with more detail when I actually observe one, for now though, pheri beTaau:la!