Kathmandu revisited

So, entering the second week in Godawari. Getting used to working with the girls now, even if the ones that I worked with last week were the Mosaic Girls, ie the girls who are employed to make mosaics, not the Project Girls, who are the one I am supposed to be working with.

Anyway we had fun and they worked very hard, producing some lovely things.

I have some company, some one I can speak English to, not just bad Hindi/Nepali. Lexa, another volunteer from the UK has joined me. She will be teaching ceramics. We went to Kathmandu for the weekend. I think I saw it with refreshed eyes, now I knew what to expect. You could say that I am falling in love with it all over again. I spent some time roaming around the maze of streets near the main Durbhar Square on Sunday. It was busy with shoppers, and not too many motorbikes. I enjoyed photographing stalls selling everything that you can imagine. It is a hotch potch of ancient temples, falling down buildings and beautiful architecture, interspersed with modern constructions and goods in plastic from China.

I found a street devoted to fabric, including some of the traditional Nepali weave (the fabric they use for the men’s hats) and one full of jewellery shops.

However, because the fuel crisis has reached a ridiculous state here, we nearly could not get back. Had to get a taxi all the way, there were no micro buses running, and there were protests in the bus station, burning tyres etc.

Thinking back a really long time now to the second day of our Char Dham, we had stayed the night in a place called Ranachatti, just near the place where we were due to head out for the first Dham, Yamunotri, source of the Yamuna river. One is supposed to take a jeep for about 9km then walk for about 6km, but on arrival there was a jeep drivers strike. A preview of life in Nepal you might say. Any way we resisted the advances of all mule drivers offers of “Horse Horse”, pronounced House! We were happy to start walking, the valley was lovely and the road not steep, plenty of chai stops on the way.

After several hours we reached the real start of the walk, a village called Hanuman chatti. More and more pilgrims were passing us now, some walking, some on Mules and some in Dollies (a kind of palanquin) carried by 4 porters. We soon learned that the correct greeting on this “Yatra” (pilgrimage route) was “Jai Mata Di”. We became “horse” ourselves from saying it, but it seemed to endear us to the pilgrims we met.

The final ascent to the temple, whilst a paved path, is steep, and it was a hot day. But when we actually saw the temple I nearly cried, not because it is an exceptionally beautiful temple, but the fact of having walked so far to get there and in fact travelled so far for this.

At the temple there are hot springs and people cook rice in them. It takes five minutes to cook rice in a small muslin bag. There were two bathing pools, one upstairs for men, a less salubrious one underneath for women. Bathing, not puja, seemed to be the main activity here. It was very exiting. Above here the river torrented almost vertically down the mountain. We realised that we had made the right decision to come on this pilgrimage, we felt ecstatic coming down. Like you do when you have been trekking but better because of the temple experience.

We also realised that an important part of the pilgrimage experience would be the people that we would meet again and again. This included the English Professor from Sangli in Maharastra and his wife who we first encountered near the top, after bathing, they were walking down drying their pants on their heads. Only in India.

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