Festival disturbance

Nepali festivals are kind of hard to get a grip on. This is festival season, and there are so many diverse castes and peoples that it's more a question of asking 'which festival is on today?' Hindu festivals run on a lunar calendar, so they change every year, and are usually marked by 'first full moon of the month' or some such description. In addition, Nepal has it's own calendar, and the newspapers never seem to report on upcoming events - it's always 'yesterday a meeting was held', 'yesterday this festival happened'.

I came back to Kathmandu from Bhaktapur and things were in full swing for the Hindu festival of Indra Jatra - important to the local Newars. This culminates in the full-scale ritual sacrifice of hundreds of animals in Durbar Square. Unfortunately (for the Newars, not the animals), the recently-elected communist government in Nepal had failed to allocate any money in the budget for the buying of these animals.

Nepali's might be all for a communist government (mostly because they might be a change from previous corrupt governments), but they aren't ready for a cultural revolution. The first night there were protests in the streets, people climbing up on the temple steps and hurling rocks at the riot police below.

Your intrepid reporter Alexander uknowingly slept through the whole thing. The next morning I knew something was up because of the still-smouldering fires in the streets, poles across the roads from an impromptu bandh (strike), and Durbar Square looked a mess:



That night was meant to be the culmination of the festival, and by dusk there were already groups of young Nepali guys with rocks and sticks heading towards Durbar Square. I decided that maybe I didn't want to be a war correspondent, and stayed in my hotel.

Bhaktapur

Lovely little medieval town. Guy gave me a lift in from the bus stop for free. Costs 750 rupees to enter the old town, but got in at night and avoided check points for the next few days. Stayed at Shiva Guest House, looking straight out at Durbar Square. Woke to the sounds of pigeons cooing and bells.

View from my windows, literally. Pretty darn nice when lit up at night, too:


Other views of the main square:


On the way to Taumadi Square, chariot wheels and gear for some festival. Chariot festivals are huge in India and Nepal. The English word juggernaut comes from the Sri Jagganath Rath Yatra (basically Lord Jagganath's chariot trip), where the God is placed on a huge chariot and pulled through the crowds at Puri and other places. I was at Ahmedabad for this, there were maybe a million people in the streets? In Puri several people were killed in a stampede.

Small shrine lit by devotional candles, little boy watching:


I don't know what these are. Guardian statues? If they look kinda Chinese/Tibetan, it's because Bhaktapur was a major part of the old trade route to China from India.

Big guardian lions, I guess:


Kid riding an elephant at the base of Nyataoda Temple in Taumadi Square. The temple is huge and impressive in person, but doesn't photograph well - the overhanging arches cast shadows on most of the building.


In other news, I've got another man-cold (the worst kind), the Cats lost the grand final, and I missed my Bombay friend because I was sick in bed. Yay.

The 3 P's: Pashupatinath, Patan, and...

Pos?

Not much to say about either I haven't said in my previous post. Here's some from Pashupatinath. The main temple, around the river, I avoided taking pics of:

Line of small temples occupied by a Sadhu:

I was trying to get a view through all the arches with the Sadhu at the end, but some kids kept getting in the way. Darn kids:

Some cheeky monkeys:


Patan's Durbar Square. The women are celebrating Teej: a Nepali festival where they dress up in red saris, alternately fast and feast, dance and sing and pray for their husbands long lives (or to get a husband). I asked my taxi driver what the wives do who may not want their husband to last that long, but it's a non issue. If you're a married woman in Nepal of a certain generation and status, then you're uneducated and have no way to support yourself. You want your husband to stick around and keep earning money as long as he can.



The museum in Durbar Square: fascinating and beautiful bronze statues:

Bronze breastplate:

Giant hands:

What to do in Kathmandu...

Getting into Kathmandu, the bus pulled up near Thamel, the main tourist district. The first restaurant I went into turned out to be a ‘would you like a lady with your food’ kind of place. I’d been traveling for 24 hours. I was tired, sweaty and hungry. I didn’t want a lady with my food.

After getting showered and changed in a hotel, I went out to see if I could find a cheap meal. I accosted some Americans and asked if they knew anwhere. They were very concerned that I was standing in the middle of the road oblivious to traffic while they huddled on the sidewalk. They took me to a restaurant where I had the best meal in about 6 months, for 700 rupees (14 times the value of a cheap meal). But it was worth it.

Later that night, wandering through the streets of Thamel in the rain, I couldn’t keep the grin off my face. Café’s, restaurants, beautiful lighting and rickshaws, funky music coming out of bars and great food (it was a fabled food-stop for overlanders in the hippie days).

But Thamel is a time vortex – I spent two weeks here without realizing I hadn’t done anything. It also has a money reality distortion field – you don’t know how much you’re spending. On the other hand, it takes a while to figure out how to live cheaply in a new place.

The old city of Kathmandhu itself is lovely – quiet, temples everywhere, medieval, lots of little flats surrounding a central courtyard with, probably, some 10th Century stone inscription and a statue in it.

I went to Swayambhunath, a very nice temple complex surrounded by a small park. It used to be completely surrounded by farms, now the urban sprawl comes right up to it. No pics though.

I hung out at the Kaiser Mahal Library – a colonial relic with dark wood panelling, dead animals on the walls, and books about the British Empire that haven’t been updated since the 1940’s. Great stuff.

I met a tourist I’d last seen in Bundi – this is completely normal by now.

I went to Pashupatinath, the main Shiva temple in Nepal (Shiva is big here). It’s a big temple complex on the Bagmati River, where a lot of Nepali’s go to be cremated. I didn’t take photos of the temples by the river – there were a few cremations going on. The main temple is banned to non-Hindu’s – tourists used to stomp around in it in their shoes, use flash photography and generally create a fuss.

I went to Patan, Kathmandu’s old sister city that is now joined by the spreading cities. This is my recommendation for staying in Kathmandu - much quieter.

While getting a new Indian Visa I met two German Tibetologists who were going to a casino the next night. We got dressed up, enjoyed (great) free food and drink, watched a show and gambled away 1000 rupees with a bunch of drunk Indians (Nepali’s aren’t allowed in – a Maoist thing?).

Here are some pics.

Public baths in the old city, most of them still in use:



Kathmandu’s Durbar Square (every major city’s got one, I think it means Royal Square). The pagoda-style architecture was created in Nepal, exported to China then spread to South-East Asia:

My friend Narayan:

A guy meditating on some temple steps:

A closer look – his eyes are rolled up (Tantric?):

Kids fly kites all over Nepal, like in The Kite Runner. It’s a competitive sport though: the string is covered with abrasive material and the aim is to cut the other guy’s kite out of the sky:

Stone inscription, interesting bronze doors, little shrine, Shiva lingham and yoni inside. The old city is littered with monuments like these:

I was used to riding the waves of my Indian travel Karma, and it took me a while to get into the swing of things in Kathmandu.

Vedic Maths, Part 1

Recently I read in a newspaper article how some Indian schools are reintroducing Vedic maths to the syllabus. The benifits apparently are lightning-fast calculations in your head, and when you get to a more advanced stage, ability to do things you can't do in Euclidic geometry, for example. Now this could sound all airy-fairy new-age-a-dairy, but these are the guys who gave us Arabic numerals, decimal notation, the number 0, sine and cosine, so I decided to check it out.

I went to a bookstore (excellent selection in Kathmandu) and bought myself an easy introduction to Vedic Maths and Max Mueller's India, What Can It Teach Us? (highly recommended, btw). The Vedic Maths book was printed by Motilal Banarsidass Publishing, the company my Mum went to work for in India originally. It turns out she went to do a translation of Max Mueller's book. Wierd.

Anyway, here's lesson one:

In Vedic maths all arithmetical operations are carried out from left to right. This makes it easier for getting ballpark figures sooner rather than later (you don't end up with the last digit first), and because we read numbers from left to right.

To multiply numbers by a single number:

237 x 2

2 by 2 is 4
2 by 3 is 6
2 by 7 is 14

In your head you remember the results as you go, so the answer is:

4, 46, 474 (carry the one).


Addition:

Again, from left to right:

187 + 444

5
5,12 = 62
62,11 = 631

That's it for today, go do some calculations in your head.

On the road to Kathmandu

If you're thinking about getting to Kathmandu from Bihar (one of India's poorest states, and recently flooded to all heck), don't. The bus from Bodhgaya to Patna was ok. I found my way to the right station in Patna at about 9pm, ten minutes before the last bus for the border town of Raxaul left. Weaving my way through the buses, almost there, leaving India, the only white face.

"Hello, hello!" Damn, spotted.

He came over to me, eyes shining. "What is your name? Where are you from?" Another one of these conversations. After giving my details, including my job and how much I earn, I begged (literally) my leave.

"Please, spend time, this is special for me". Special for him but one of 100 conversations I could have like this every day. A quick chalo, a dissapointed Indian, and I'm on the bus. Twenty curious, funny and happy Nepali faces stare at me from the back, loaded with all their possessions. These are boys going back home after working in hotels and restaurants in India. They make room for me in the very back of the bus and the chattering starts again.

These guys were cute, friendly, ferocious and kinda small (but stocky). They reminded me of Ewoks (the Nepali Gurkha's won 13 VC's in battles I imagine as similar to the Battle for Endor's Moon). It was noticeable that the four Indians on the bus were the assholes. Two got into a fight over their seats (the Nepali heads all popped up to watch), the guy next to me had the corner seat but refused to move over more than an inch, and the driver was a speed-demon who didn't believe in slowing down for potholes.

Since the road to Raxaul is basically 12 hours of continuous pothole intespersed with bits of road, this meant everyone in the back occasionally flew up and slammed our heads into the roof. I had a spring sticking into my arse from the chair. Even with our shirts off we were drenched with sweat. I went from thinking to hoping I was about to die, to hoping I was. I'm not trawling for sympathy here, I just narrate in my head in bad situations. I got to Raxaul, one last baksheesh for the customs official to say goodbye to India, and it was a rickshaw ride into Nepal. I felt like Hemingway making it to Switzerland in A Farewell To Arms.

The customs guy. I had to wake him up:


Towards the border by cycle rickshaw: I had to hunt for the office to get a visa - the border is open with India. No one in Nepal has checked it since.


Across the border, things were immediately more relaxed. Nepal customs consisted of a few guys in a little bungalow, chatting. There were a few new hand gestures to decipher. People looked like they were from all the ethnicities of Asia - Polynesian, Chinese, Indian, Afghani. The Terai is the lowest and most fertile part of Nepal, and since malaria was eradicated recently it's been populated by different people from the hills, looking to make a living. Ethnic Indians who speak and identify as Nepali make up a large part of the original population of the Terai.

The landscape was the same as it had been for miles and miles since Bodhgaya - flat green rice fields. A few weeks later the Koshi river burst it's banks and flooded the whole area.

I got on a bus heading for Kathmandu, thinking I'll catch up on some sleep from my 16 hour journey on the way. Ahahahaha. There was a strike on the main road, so we decided to take the little-used (except, perhaps, by extreme motorcyclists) village roads. If the bus from Patna was a sweat box, this was a sauna on Mars. Half way through the Terai we were stopped at a village by a queue of buses and trucks. Village strike. With the Maoist recently in power people in Nepal have gone strike happy. We couldn't go back or forwards. Strikes in Nepal are much more calm and relaxed than they would be in India though - one guy complained that the villagers weren't offering enough food for those blocked in. I sympathised - it's hard to get good food at a strike these days. We eventually started moving and I fell asleep, looking forward to Kathmandu.

Four hours later I was back in Birganj, the Nepal side of Raxaul. The Lonely Planet accurately describes it as "unlovely".

Here's a storm front coming in:


A few minutes later, the road was a dustbowl:

I got a bus the next day, heading up the beautiful Tribhuvan Highway:

Birthday roundup

Happy 20th, 18th and 40th birthdays to Frances, Isabel, and Mmm Pos.

And here's a pic a friend sent me from Goa

For my 100th post...

I thought I'd get everyone involved again. So here is a two-part quiz:

1. Where was Will Smith Born?



2. Where did he spend most of his days?