A similar feeling of wobbly limbs delivered us into Kathmandu Valley, after what turned out to be about a ten hour bus ride on the rickety bus from Lumbini. The bus never emptied out but it was frequently packed to overcapacity for hours at a time as we stopped often on the windy road to pick up and drop off passengers on more local trips. The wild-eyed ticket-taker whistling and pressing his own honking switch and sometimes climbing from the open door up the luggage-laden roof to take what seemed like catnaps while the bus sped along at whatever speed it's huffing engine could take us. The rock hard seats took at toll on our tailbones but the drive was gorgeous, on a road that hugged the curves of a turquoise mountain river banked in sandy white, and bridged by the occasional unfathomable hanging wooden footbridge strung high over the river from one mountain side to the next. We arrived safely that evening at the reliable and wonderful Dragon Guesthouse in Boudha (one of the more famous Tibetan neighborhoods of Kathmandu) and then treated ourselves to what seemed like a Western dinner of fish and chips and a few beers at a fancy restaurant facing the Boudhanath stupa.
The next day we walked up to Pullahari Monastery, seat of Jamgon Kongtrul Rinpoche, about an hour walk through outlying villages, rice fields and what seems like a dirtbike course and small everygreen forest where truent teenagers and young lovers hang out. There we ran into Tom and Jacquie Bell, old friends of my parents (Jacquie was also my third grade teacher) who are there doing a Buddhist studies course.
While we were having lunch with them we recognized (or were recognized by) a British Buddhist nun named Ani Chudrun whom we had seen at the Karmapa's teachings in Bodhgaya and who had also been at the Karmapa's teachings in Seattle last year where she introduced herself to Michael by saying that she recognized his voice from The Lion's Roar (a documentary about the previous Karmapa) which includes interviews with Michael's dad, who apparently had a very similar voice. After lunch we got a great tour from the Bells of the astoundingly artful grounds and facilities, and meditated in the shrine room with heartbreakingly beautiful the gold and jewel encrusted stupa where the previous Jamgon Kongtrul was apparently cremated.
Changing gears from being Buddhist pilgrims to being book researchers for our ongoing project about social entrepreneurs and innovators, we spent the next few days meeting, interviewing and photographing the brilliant people at ECCA Nepal. In true acronym-emracing Nepali style this stands for Environmental Camps for Conservation Awareness, and was started by a group of young friends twenty-one years ago to promote environmental education and practices for young people and communities around Nepal. We were drawn to want to profile this group after we read about their Solar Tuki project with makes available solar lamps (named after the traditional kerosene tuki lamp) as well as other simple solar powered appliances through entrepreneurial and community based micro-finance systems to mainly rural villagers who do not have electricity and suffer great expense, health, sanitation and social costs when they do not have an alternative to kerosene. But although this project is amazing in itself, we also found out about a whole world of other programs the people of ECCA have successfully fostered, from drastically improving school environments to spearheading nationwide river monitoring and environmental clean-up. Their own office building runs on solar and uses rainwater reserves and recycles gray water runoff. The people we met at ECCA were knowledgeable, kind, insightful, impressively dedicated and completely inspiring.
Hopefully we can post some more photos and interview snippets here soon...
(Angel Chitrakar showing us the solar appliances on the roof top of the ECCA building.)
(The staff of the Old House Cafe using the SOlar Tuki in their kitchen in Patan.)The Solar Tuki really could benefit not just rural villagers but every office building, shop, restaurant and household in Nepal that is now operating on a rotating schedule of 16 hours without electricity every day. The effects of this were hugely mitigated at our luxurious digs at the guesthouse, where the lights, waterpumps, etc. ran off generator power for a few hours after dark, but there is no doubt that life after sundown is fairly shortlived and we were early to bed almost every night, carefully planning out our next day around the power schedule.
On one day with very few useable hours of power, but what turned out to be some sort of religious festival day (and, it should be said a day that Michael just wanted to take it easy), I suggested that we take a taxi a few kilometeres out of town to visit an ancient Vajrayogini shrine. We didn't find out that it was a festival day until we ran into a huge traffic jam on the rural road to Sankhul (the town at the base of the temple's mountain). We decided to get out and walk along with whate seemed like every other person from every other vehicle on the road and then just meet our taxi the town to get a ride on the way back. We walked the 4 or 5km just to get into the town with huge throngs of people on their way to some other riverside temple; the road packed with exhaust spewing cars buses, tractors, and motorcycles, and people of every age pushing down the narrow road through rice fields and little towns.
Then we finally got to the town and the Vajrayogini temple turned out to be 2km up the mountain, mostly by a steep set of stairs. It being Saturday and this somewhat mysterious holiday, the stairs were heavily trafficked with families, teenagers, pilgrims, old men and women in highheels. The actual temple turned out to be somewhat strange, an old stupa style building with a small door into a dark room with a super old effegy of what looked like a round girl with a red-painted face. Everyone was making puja offerings of colored powder, marigold flowers, incense and money, throwing it into the door at Vajrayogini's face while a young man with a stylish bandana on his head inside the door seemed to be helping make sure the thrown offerings were making it to where people wanted them to land. Outside there was lots of Newari men singing and hitting drums unmelodically and people lighting butter lamps. All very strange and then we went up some more stairs to discover a very workable teashop seemingly in the middle of nowhere where we had tea and potato chips some sort of fried donut thing. We did eventually find our cab driver back in Sankhul who told us that it had taken him 2 hours to get there from where we had gotten out to walk. Yikes. But getting back went smoothly and with little traffic. All that and Michael had wanted to take it easy...
All in all it was heavenly to be in Kathmandu with its hubbub and intricately ornate architecture and interweaving of cultures and ethicities. And Boudha was a little haven for us, a little cobble-stone village becoming ever more modern and commercialized (both conveniently and heartbreakingly). Although we may actually became just a wee bit complacent or even bored there I think we were both a little sad to leave. We finally got a look at the breathtaking snowcaps of the jagged Himalayan peaks over the cloud and inpenetrably hazy pollution cover as we flew out over the Kathmandu valley and south west, back to Delhi.
As of yet, we still haven't been able to find enough bandwidth to upload any of the many photos we have to go with these posts. (I did try to provuide some visual accompaniment with the links here) Hopefully Dharamsala, the town where you seem to be able to get anything, will provide...
1 comment:
Wow the photo with all the prayer flags and meditating person is amazing.
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