(Update from November 7, 2011)
I am writing to you from the complete and utter bedlam that is India, after having spent 2 comparatively calm (though physically exerting) months in Tibet and Nepal. If you have a bit of time to spare, an update on our most recent adventures is below.
To pick up where my last update left off, we had a marvellous time in Tibet. The nature of the Chinese government means that independent tourists are not allowed in Tibet, and as a foreigner you can only get access to the country if you go on an organised tour, and jump through the necessary administrative hoops to arrange a very important piece of paper called a Tibetan Travel Permit. We went through a fair bit of grief organising our tour from Beijing and faxing, scanning and emailing various bits and pieces of documentation to have our permits processed and granted, so it was a great relief to finally pick them up from the travel office in Chengdu in China Proper. Then, it was only a very short flight over the Himalayan mountain range, and before we knew it we were landing in Lhasa!
I was immediately struck by just how different the Tibetans were to the Chinese people in terms of physical appearance. The Tibetans have yellower skin, and higher, flatter cheekbones, and it was quite easy when walking through the streets to identify people as either Chinese or Tibetan. Also, the Tibetan language is much gentler and not as tonal, so the speakers sound much less brash and come across as quite a bit gentler. We were collected from the airport by our tour guide (it was so, so nice not to have to haggle with taxi-drivers or negotiate buses and metros), and after about an hours’ drive we got our first glimpse of Lhasa. It’s truly a beautiful city – no matter where you stand, you have epic views of the Himalayan mountain ranges, and the local people dress in a dazzling display of traditional costumes complete with ornate headdresses. Monks were everywhere, and there was a continual background noise of gentle wooden clacking as many people go about their daily business with a small, wooden, prayer wheel in one hand that they continually spin to send prayers up to heaven. Looming over the whole city is the tremendously impressive, but also infinitely sad, Potala Palace. An epic monolith of a structure, strikingly painted in deep red and white, it is the palace where the Dalai Lamas lived during the harsh winter months, and where the present Dalai Lama was forced to flee from upon Chinese invasion in 1959. Unfortunately a huge Chinese flag still flutters over it… but I am getting ahead of myself and will get to that in due course!
Although our tour didn’t officially commence until the next day we didn’t want to waste any of our precious time in Tibet, and we headed off to visit the Potala Palace’s counterpart; the Summer Palace, which is where the Dalai Lamas spent the Summer months of the year. It was our first taste of true Tibetan architecture. The rooms were all built around open courtyards that were brimming with pots of wonderful flowers. It must be said that the rooms were quite dim, and must have been even more so before the age of electricity. None the less they were peaceful and lovely – richly embroidered silken tapestries covered the walls, and bright tassels hung from the ceilings. Almost everything was built from some kind of dark wood, and wherever possible this wood was embellished with intricate and detailed carvings of flowers, animals and landscapes. The rooms themselves were filled with murals of the history of the Dalai Lamas, and with Buddhist shrines covered with trailing silk scarves in every colour imaginable (left there by religious pilgrims). There were plenty of monks working their way through the various rooms, praying in a very perfunctory manner at each of the shrines and leaving behind offerings of money. There was cash wedged in every nook and cranny. The monks were mostly very friendly and didn’t seem to mind having tourists in their sacred places at all… indeed they smiled and would stand back to let us pass or get a better view, which was a very refreshing change from the way Chinese travellers treat foreign tourists!!!!
The outdoor areas of the Summer Palace were just as lovely, featuring tranquil lakes with pagodas with meditating monks in their centre, long walkways lined with shady trees, fountains and flowerbeds that were a riot of colour. It was a beautiful way to spend a sunny afternoon.
The next morning our tour started properly. We were lucky in that we had a very small group, with only 3 other people in it. There were a great young couple from Boston USA, and an elderly Brazilian chap who was friendly but decidedly nuts. He didn’t seem to understand the concept that tour group are supposed to stay together and, to the chagrin of our guide, was endlessly charging off on his own. The first port of call for the 5 of us was, as you’d expect, the Potala Palace itself. Governmental regulations are incredibly strict in Tibet, and they insist that no tourist is allowed to spend more than 1 hour inside the palace itself, so there is definitely a feeling of being hurried through it at a charging pace, but none the less it was, unquestioningly, the highlight of our time in Tibet. To get inside the place we had to climb up goodness knows how many steep flights of steps – no joke when you’re at an altitude of 3500 metres and the atmosphere is so thin that even walking up a gentle slope leaves you panting! But eventually, short of breath and sweaty of brow, we emerged onto the Potala rooftop – the Rooftop of the Rooftop of the World, so to speak – and were infinitely rewarded with views over Lhasa and the Himalayas in every direction.
If I was going to live in a palace, I’d like to live in one like the Potala. It managed to be beautiful and ornate without being ostentation, glitzy or extravagant the way so many European palaces are. The only gold was on the religious shrines and the tombs of the previous Dalai Lamas – everything else was beautifully decorated, but only through wooden carvings, silk tapestries, paintings and murals. Again, most of the palace is built from stone and dark wood that is worn so smooth that in some places it’s perilously slippery. The ‘staircases’ to get between levels are so steep that they are virtual stepladders, and I’m sure some tourists must have taken terrible croppers down them. The whole palace was a maze of dim passages and corridors between rooms that acted as living quarters for the various Lamas, and religious shrines. Every square inch of the wooden pillars and doorframes was deeply engraved with patters of flowers, peacocks and other images of nature, and brightly painted. Silk covered the walls and hung from the ceiling in draped tassels in every room, and khee candles (made of butter and animal fats) burned in front of almost every Buddhist icon.
We saw the throne room where the current Dalai Lama used to receive visitors of state before being exiled to India, and the small administrative room where he negotiated with the Chinese ambassadors to try and reach a compromise. We also saw the utterly immense mausoleums where the bodies of the previous Dalai Lamas are entombed in mammoth sarcophaguses of solid gold. The 5th Dalai Lama’s tomb was definitely the most impressive – he is credited with pulling Tibet together as a single nation for the first time, and his tomb is constructed from no less than 1.5 tonnes of pure gold. So as you can imagine, it’s quite the sight to behold!
The whole place, though, is permeated with an air of sadness. When you consider the history of the country, it’s impossible for it not to be. Out of respect to the current, exiled Dalai Lama, no one lives in the palace at all now – not even any of the lesser Lamas or Buddhist monks. It’s entirely a pilgrimage and tourist site by day, and is left empty each night (apart from Chinese security guards, of course). Indeed, the Chinese Government go so far as to forbid any Tibetan to have a photograph or painting of the present Dalai Lama – his image is entirely banned throughout the country, as are films like “7 Years in Tibet” and “Kondun” (though that is less surprising). We tried hard to get our tour guide to open up and tell us what life was like for his family before Chinese occupation, but he shut up like a clam and wouldn’t say a word.
We visited several other monasteries in Lhasa, and spent a very happy afternoon browsing through the Bhakhor markets at the very heart of the ancient part of the city. Basically a huge marketplace in an enormous courtyard with a monastery at the centre, it was jam packed with stalls selling traditional Tibetan jewellery, instruments, clothing, scarves, handheld prayer-wheels, religious icons, biscuits, sweets, and pretty much everything imaginable. There were also open air butcheries selling big chunks of yak meat. (Incidentally, yak was a stable of our diet during our time in Tibet… yak dumplings, yak noodles, yak stew, yak curry – it’s actually very tasty). As the streets of the marketplace formed a square around one of the oldest monasteries in Tibet, there were lots of Buddhist pilgrims gradually circumnavigating the temple in a most peculiar fashion. They would take on step, prostrate themselves on the ground, lower their faces into the dust with their arms straight out before them, stand back up, raise their arms up in the air, take another single step, prostrate themselves again, and carry on. It was always easy to tell how long they’d been at it by the state of their clothes and how dirty they were. We saw one chap who was positively black with filth, and had a big scab on the end of his nose and the top of his forehead because he’d banged them against the ground so many times. I hope he got what he was praying for!
So, once Marco dragged me, kicking and screaming, away from all the beautiful jewellery and shawls, we headed back to the hotel for our last night in Lhasa. (That was another great thing about being on an organised tour – staying in beautiful hotel rooms every night instead of sharing dormitories with smelly strangers! It was a most luxurious break, and we loved every minute.) Bright and early the next morning we headed out and left Lhasa behind us, and drove into those colossal mountains. We saw some really remarkable scenery, including beautiful high-altitude lakes that were such a vivid turquoise colour they almost looked fake. Apparently all bodies of water at such high altitude take on that colour, but we’d never seen it before and it was surreal and beautiful. We also passed lots of small Buddhist stupas set up by the roadsides, usually covered with strings of prayer flags, and small villages of flat-rooved houses with lovely carving around the doorways and windowsills, usually with more prayer flags fluttering from their rooftops.
We saw several more monasteries, including one that had the famous Tibetan mandala artwork on display. Mandalas are intricate designs of brightly coloured sands that the Buddhist monks create on the ground using special tools to make elaborate patters with the sand. It ends as a large spreading design that is immensely rich in both colour and texture. If you’re at all familiar with the film “7 Years in Tibet”, you may recall the scene where soldiers walk through the painstakingly created mandalas of the monks in the Potala.
The second major highlight of our Tibetan tour, though, was our night sleeping in tents at base-camp at Mt Everest. To be honest, our ‘tents’ were made of yak-leather and had yak-dung fires burning at the centre of them to keep us cosy and warm so it wasn’t exactly reflective of the experience that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay would have had on their way up, but it was fun none the less. The weather was a little bit cloudy but with some patience we managed to get a fairly good glimpse of Everest itself, glowering away up there above all the others. I tell you what, though… it’s a mean-looking mountain! Steep and snowy and scary; I can’t believe people actually make it to the top on a regular basis now. You’d have to be crazy to look at the thing and think “Yep, I can take it!”
It was frigidly cold when we went to sleep in our yak-skin tents at base camp, and when we woke up it was to discover that there had been a pretty significant fall of snow during the night, and the snow was still coming down pretty heavily. The tents, cars, roads, prayer-flags… everything was weighed down by a heavy swathe of snow. Being fair-weather Australian dorks, Marco and I got all excited taking photos of each other as the snow piled up on our heads and shoulders. The Bostonians on our tour with us, who are obviously completely used to snow, were much more mature about the situation. I learned one valuable thing that I’ll share with you, though – for a girl, having to do a wee behind a bush in those conditions is no joke!
Things got trickier once we left Base Camp. The snowfall at that time of year was quite unseasonable, and as a result many of the roads were blocked and there had been several landslides so our path to the Nepalese border was blocked. We ended up having to unexpectedly spend a night in a small town near the border while we waited for one landslide to be cleared, and then sat in queues in our van the following day as we waited for the next section of road to be opened. So it was tedious, and at times butt-clenchingly terrifying as we inched our way around enormous craters that had opened up in roads, with nothing between our van and a tremendous drop into valleys.
But eventually we made it to Nepal! Once we went through the usual chaos and rigmarole at the immigration offices to get ourselves stamped out of one country and stamped into the next, it was another wild ride from the Nepalese border to Kathmandu. In this section of Nepal there were no paved roads at all… just treacherously slippery muddy tracks winding around the edges of incredibly steep mountain sides. Again, because of the snow and rainfall, much of the ‘roads’ were covered in fast-flowing water that we had to drive through, hoping the current wouldn’t sweep us over the edge! We had to stop and wait a couple of times while excavators pushed the mud that had been swept away back into something resembling a road, but eventually, inch by inch, hour by hour, we made it to paved roads, and eventually to Kathmandu. And for all my bitching and moaning, it was a spectacularly beautiful drive. We worked our way through spectacularly huge mountainsides, with countless long, narrow ribbons of waterfalls gushing down into the river in the very bottom of the gorge below us. Lush and lovely.
Once we made it to Kathmandu we found ourselves a fabulously cheap guesthouse ($2.50/night each!) and settled in to kill time while we waited for a friend of ours to arrive from Australia. Luckily Kathmandu was a pretty entertaining city to spend time in; loads of cheap little places to eat, and endless small shops selling scarves, clothing, jewellery, and endless trinkets. We explored Kathmandu reasonably thoroughly, and the highlight was definitely visiting the sacred cremation area of Pashupatinath, where the Nepalese Hindus go to burn the bodies of their family members and cast their ashes and bones into the Bagmati River. The site is covered in temples and shrines and has big concrete steps leading down to the river (which, needless to say, is pretty scummy-looking and choked with garbage). The bodies of the Hindus are carried down wrapped in vivid orange shrouds, and placed on flat sections of concrete built to jut out over the river itself. Once they are laid out, bright flowers (mostly orange marigolds) are tossed over them, and they have more wood and straw piled up over them. A group of men (we presumed they were family members) walked around the body 3 times chanting prayers, and then set it alight. There were quite a few of these funeral pyres in various states of burning, and as you can imagine the entire place was covered in smoke and the smell of burning flesh. It was a truly fascinating ritual to watch.
Although we enjoyed Kathmandu it did get a little claustrophobic at times as the traffic is horrendous, and the cars, rickshaws, buses and motorbikes all blast their horns continuously. We escaped for a few days to venture out into the Kathmandu valley to explore some of the nearby towns, most notably Bhaktapur. Bhaktapur is an ancient Newar town that, in the 15th century, was Nepal’s capital. It’s a romantic, honey-coloured city absolutely stuffed to the gills with ancient temples and crumbling but intricately carved wooden buildings, all with balconies bulging precariously out over the narrow streets. Interestingly, the day we visited Bhaktapur happened to be the climax of one of the major Nepalese festivals. This turned out to be both good and bad. The good aspect was that all the locals were kitted up in their brightest, most sumptuous outfits with elaborate makeup and jewellery, so they were particularly spectacular to look at. The down side was that a major feature of this festival was slaughtering kid goats to ensure prosperity and good luck. So everywhere we looked there were the decapitated remains of baby goats with their heads hacked off, and more live baby goats tied up just waiting their turn. Poor little things!
After killing a week in this way, my good friend and former flatmate Jane Munro arrived to meet us in Kathmandu – bearing, bless her soul, TIM TAMS! It was lovely to see her and to catch up on all the news from home, and after showing her the main sights of Kathmandu we headed off to the city of Pokhara in central Nepal. Although the city of Pokhara itself is a little bit tacky and touristy, the beauty of the surrounding countryside more than made up for it. The city is centred around a tranquil lake, and the lake is ringed by lush, green mountains which are in turn ringed by the monumental, snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas. In fact, 3 of the world’s 10 highest mountains can be seen from Pokhara, and it’s quite something to be sitting in a bar in summery weather, sipping at a cocktail in your shirtsleeves, appreciating the beauty of the Himalayas.
Jane and I actually unintentionally caused quite a stir in Pokhara by deciding to go for a dip in the lake. We’d hired a small rowboat, and spent a happy afternoon paddling about in the lake admiring the scenery and listening to the cacophonous monkeys in the nearby jungle. There were plenty of folk out and about in boats on the water, and lots of the men were swimming but apparently it’s something that women just don’t do. Happily ignorant of this, Jane and I leaped in the water and swam about. I must say that we swam very modestly (fully dressed) but it made no difference – we immediately had a steady stream of boats rowing past us full of Nepalese men with their eyes agog. I can only imagine what would have happened if we’d been brazen enough to swim in actual togs or – heaven forbid – bikinis!
Anyway, after a merry few days in Pokhara we headed back to Kathmandu to meet, I’m excited to report, my Dad! (As you can see, we’ve been absolutely spoiled with visitors on this section of our trip). So although we were sad to say goodbye to Jane, it was great to see Dad and we didn’t lose any time in getting ourselves organised with maps, boots, permits and trekking gear and heading off to the start of the Annapurna Circuit. Dad has been trekking in Nepal quite a few times before and is as strong as an ox and as fit as three fiddles, so with him to inspire us we decided to be brave and not hire a porter but to carry all our gear ourselves in our big packs for the entire 2.5 week trek.
It was exhausting but satisfying. At first we walked through verdant green mountains, with hillsides covered in rice paddies and little farms, the snowy mountains peeking up in the distance. Days passed and we climbed higher and higher, winding our way through valleys and crossing narrow suspension bridges that swayed in the breeze. We ate our meals in tiny little villages inhabited by only a handful of people, and watched as gradually those snowy mountains got gradually closer and closer, until eventually we woke up one morning and it was snowing!
The climax of the trek was definitely getting up and over the Thorong-La pass, which is at an altitude of 5500 metres. To put that in perspective for you, that is two and a half Mount Kosciuszko’s on top of one another and then some! To get over this beast we got up way before daybreak and began climbing in the freezing cold and darkness. We went up and up through the snowy mountains, gradually shedding layers as the sun came up and we warmed up a bit. Eventually we reached the summit, and triumphantly had our photograph taken with the sign that congratulates trekkers for making it to the highest pass in the Annapurna’s. It was a great moment!
All together we walked for almost 200 km, carrying all our own gear and much of it at high altitude, meaning the atmosphere held much less oxygen and was more difficult to trek in. Feel free to call me superwoman! The greatest reward of all? My legs have never been so toned and shapely!
Once we arrived back in Kathmandu, we left my Dad to do some more trekking on his own in different parts of the Himalayas and we headed off to India, where we are now. But our time in India has only just begun, and I will save it for the next travel update!
In the meantime, as always, we send much love to you all and hope you are happy and well.
Hugs all round from Jenny xxxx
I am writing to you from the complete and utter bedlam that is India, after having spent 2 comparatively calm (though physically exerting) months in Tibet and Nepal. If you have a bit of time to spare, an update on our most recent adventures is below.
To pick up where my last update left off, we had a marvellous time in Tibet. The nature of the Chinese government means that independent tourists are not allowed in Tibet, and as a foreigner you can only get access to the country if you go on an organised tour, and jump through the necessary administrative hoops to arrange a very important piece of paper called a Tibetan Travel Permit. We went through a fair bit of grief organising our tour from Beijing and faxing, scanning and emailing various bits and pieces of documentation to have our permits processed and granted, so it was a great relief to finally pick them up from the travel office in Chengdu in China Proper. Then, it was only a very short flight over the Himalayan mountain range, and before we knew it we were landing in Lhasa!
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| Beautiful Tibetan lady in the Bhakor Marketplace, Lhasa |
I was immediately struck by just how different the Tibetans were to the Chinese people in terms of physical appearance. The Tibetans have yellower skin, and higher, flatter cheekbones, and it was quite easy when walking through the streets to identify people as either Chinese or Tibetan. Also, the Tibetan language is much gentler and not as tonal, so the speakers sound much less brash and come across as quite a bit gentler. We were collected from the airport by our tour guide (it was so, so nice not to have to haggle with taxi-drivers or negotiate buses and metros), and after about an hours’ drive we got our first glimpse of Lhasa. It’s truly a beautiful city – no matter where you stand, you have epic views of the Himalayan mountain ranges, and the local people dress in a dazzling display of traditional costumes complete with ornate headdresses. Monks were everywhere, and there was a continual background noise of gentle wooden clacking as many people go about their daily business with a small, wooden, prayer wheel in one hand that they continually spin to send prayers up to heaven. Looming over the whole city is the tremendously impressive, but also infinitely sad, Potala Palace. An epic monolith of a structure, strikingly painted in deep red and white, it is the palace where the Dalai Lamas lived during the harsh winter months, and where the present Dalai Lama was forced to flee from upon Chinese invasion in 1959. Unfortunately a huge Chinese flag still flutters over it… but I am getting ahead of myself and will get to that in due course!
Although our tour didn’t officially commence until the next day we didn’t want to waste any of our precious time in Tibet, and we headed off to visit the Potala Palace’s counterpart; the Summer Palace, which is where the Dalai Lamas spent the Summer months of the year. It was our first taste of true Tibetan architecture. The rooms were all built around open courtyards that were brimming with pots of wonderful flowers. It must be said that the rooms were quite dim, and must have been even more so before the age of electricity. None the less they were peaceful and lovely – richly embroidered silken tapestries covered the walls, and bright tassels hung from the ceilings. Almost everything was built from some kind of dark wood, and wherever possible this wood was embellished with intricate and detailed carvings of flowers, animals and landscapes. The rooms themselves were filled with murals of the history of the Dalai Lamas, and with Buddhist shrines covered with trailing silk scarves in every colour imaginable (left there by religious pilgrims). There were plenty of monks working their way through the various rooms, praying in a very perfunctory manner at each of the shrines and leaving behind offerings of money. There was cash wedged in every nook and cranny. The monks were mostly very friendly and didn’t seem to mind having tourists in their sacred places at all… indeed they smiled and would stand back to let us pass or get a better view, which was a very refreshing change from the way Chinese travellers treat foreign tourists!!!!
The outdoor areas of the Summer Palace were just as lovely, featuring tranquil lakes with pagodas with meditating monks in their centre, long walkways lined with shady trees, fountains and flowerbeds that were a riot of colour. It was a beautiful way to spend a sunny afternoon.
The next morning our tour started properly. We were lucky in that we had a very small group, with only 3 other people in it. There were a great young couple from Boston USA, and an elderly Brazilian chap who was friendly but decidedly nuts. He didn’t seem to understand the concept that tour group are supposed to stay together and, to the chagrin of our guide, was endlessly charging off on his own. The first port of call for the 5 of us was, as you’d expect, the Potala Palace itself. Governmental regulations are incredibly strict in Tibet, and they insist that no tourist is allowed to spend more than 1 hour inside the palace itself, so there is definitely a feeling of being hurried through it at a charging pace, but none the less it was, unquestioningly, the highlight of our time in Tibet. To get inside the place we had to climb up goodness knows how many steep flights of steps – no joke when you’re at an altitude of 3500 metres and the atmosphere is so thin that even walking up a gentle slope leaves you panting! But eventually, short of breath and sweaty of brow, we emerged onto the Potala rooftop – the Rooftop of the Rooftop of the World, so to speak – and were infinitely rewarded with views over Lhasa and the Himalayas in every direction.
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| Marco and me at the Potala Palace |
If I was going to live in a palace, I’d like to live in one like the Potala. It managed to be beautiful and ornate without being ostentation, glitzy or extravagant the way so many European palaces are. The only gold was on the religious shrines and the tombs of the previous Dalai Lamas – everything else was beautifully decorated, but only through wooden carvings, silk tapestries, paintings and murals. Again, most of the palace is built from stone and dark wood that is worn so smooth that in some places it’s perilously slippery. The ‘staircases’ to get between levels are so steep that they are virtual stepladders, and I’m sure some tourists must have taken terrible croppers down them. The whole palace was a maze of dim passages and corridors between rooms that acted as living quarters for the various Lamas, and religious shrines. Every square inch of the wooden pillars and doorframes was deeply engraved with patters of flowers, peacocks and other images of nature, and brightly painted. Silk covered the walls and hung from the ceiling in draped tassels in every room, and khee candles (made of butter and animal fats) burned in front of almost every Buddhist icon.
We saw the throne room where the current Dalai Lama used to receive visitors of state before being exiled to India, and the small administrative room where he negotiated with the Chinese ambassadors to try and reach a compromise. We also saw the utterly immense mausoleums where the bodies of the previous Dalai Lamas are entombed in mammoth sarcophaguses of solid gold. The 5th Dalai Lama’s tomb was definitely the most impressive – he is credited with pulling Tibet together as a single nation for the first time, and his tomb is constructed from no less than 1.5 tonnes of pure gold. So as you can imagine, it’s quite the sight to behold!
The whole place, though, is permeated with an air of sadness. When you consider the history of the country, it’s impossible for it not to be. Out of respect to the current, exiled Dalai Lama, no one lives in the palace at all now – not even any of the lesser Lamas or Buddhist monks. It’s entirely a pilgrimage and tourist site by day, and is left empty each night (apart from Chinese security guards, of course). Indeed, the Chinese Government go so far as to forbid any Tibetan to have a photograph or painting of the present Dalai Lama – his image is entirely banned throughout the country, as are films like “7 Years in Tibet” and “Kondun” (though that is less surprising). We tried hard to get our tour guide to open up and tell us what life was like for his family before Chinese occupation, but he shut up like a clam and wouldn’t say a word.
We visited several other monasteries in Lhasa, and spent a very happy afternoon browsing through the Bhakhor markets at the very heart of the ancient part of the city. Basically a huge marketplace in an enormous courtyard with a monastery at the centre, it was jam packed with stalls selling traditional Tibetan jewellery, instruments, clothing, scarves, handheld prayer-wheels, religious icons, biscuits, sweets, and pretty much everything imaginable. There were also open air butcheries selling big chunks of yak meat. (Incidentally, yak was a stable of our diet during our time in Tibet… yak dumplings, yak noodles, yak stew, yak curry – it’s actually very tasty). As the streets of the marketplace formed a square around one of the oldest monasteries in Tibet, there were lots of Buddhist pilgrims gradually circumnavigating the temple in a most peculiar fashion. They would take on step, prostrate themselves on the ground, lower their faces into the dust with their arms straight out before them, stand back up, raise their arms up in the air, take another single step, prostrate themselves again, and carry on. It was always easy to tell how long they’d been at it by the state of their clothes and how dirty they were. We saw one chap who was positively black with filth, and had a big scab on the end of his nose and the top of his forehead because he’d banged them against the ground so many times. I hope he got what he was praying for!
So, once Marco dragged me, kicking and screaming, away from all the beautiful jewellery and shawls, we headed back to the hotel for our last night in Lhasa. (That was another great thing about being on an organised tour – staying in beautiful hotel rooms every night instead of sharing dormitories with smelly strangers! It was a most luxurious break, and we loved every minute.) Bright and early the next morning we headed out and left Lhasa behind us, and drove into those colossal mountains. We saw some really remarkable scenery, including beautiful high-altitude lakes that were such a vivid turquoise colour they almost looked fake. Apparently all bodies of water at such high altitude take on that colour, but we’d never seen it before and it was surreal and beautiful. We also passed lots of small Buddhist stupas set up by the roadsides, usually covered with strings of prayer flags, and small villages of flat-rooved houses with lovely carving around the doorways and windowsills, usually with more prayer flags fluttering from their rooftops.
We saw several more monasteries, including one that had the famous Tibetan mandala artwork on display. Mandalas are intricate designs of brightly coloured sands that the Buddhist monks create on the ground using special tools to make elaborate patters with the sand. It ends as a large spreading design that is immensely rich in both colour and texture. If you’re at all familiar with the film “7 Years in Tibet”, you may recall the scene where soldiers walk through the painstakingly created mandalas of the monks in the Potala.
The second major highlight of our Tibetan tour, though, was our night sleeping in tents at base-camp at Mt Everest. To be honest, our ‘tents’ were made of yak-leather and had yak-dung fires burning at the centre of them to keep us cosy and warm so it wasn’t exactly reflective of the experience that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay would have had on their way up, but it was fun none the less. The weather was a little bit cloudy but with some patience we managed to get a fairly good glimpse of Everest itself, glowering away up there above all the others. I tell you what, though… it’s a mean-looking mountain! Steep and snowy and scary; I can’t believe people actually make it to the top on a regular basis now. You’d have to be crazy to look at the thing and think “Yep, I can take it!”
It was frigidly cold when we went to sleep in our yak-skin tents at base camp, and when we woke up it was to discover that there had been a pretty significant fall of snow during the night, and the snow was still coming down pretty heavily. The tents, cars, roads, prayer-flags… everything was weighed down by a heavy swathe of snow. Being fair-weather Australian dorks, Marco and I got all excited taking photos of each other as the snow piled up on our heads and shoulders. The Bostonians on our tour with us, who are obviously completely used to snow, were much more mature about the situation. I learned one valuable thing that I’ll share with you, though – for a girl, having to do a wee behind a bush in those conditions is no joke!
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| Mt Everest base camp, Tibet. Ridiculously excited by the snow! |
Things got trickier once we left Base Camp. The snowfall at that time of year was quite unseasonable, and as a result many of the roads were blocked and there had been several landslides so our path to the Nepalese border was blocked. We ended up having to unexpectedly spend a night in a small town near the border while we waited for one landslide to be cleared, and then sat in queues in our van the following day as we waited for the next section of road to be opened. So it was tedious, and at times butt-clenchingly terrifying as we inched our way around enormous craters that had opened up in roads, with nothing between our van and a tremendous drop into valleys.
But eventually we made it to Nepal! Once we went through the usual chaos and rigmarole at the immigration offices to get ourselves stamped out of one country and stamped into the next, it was another wild ride from the Nepalese border to Kathmandu. In this section of Nepal there were no paved roads at all… just treacherously slippery muddy tracks winding around the edges of incredibly steep mountain sides. Again, because of the snow and rainfall, much of the ‘roads’ were covered in fast-flowing water that we had to drive through, hoping the current wouldn’t sweep us over the edge! We had to stop and wait a couple of times while excavators pushed the mud that had been swept away back into something resembling a road, but eventually, inch by inch, hour by hour, we made it to paved roads, and eventually to Kathmandu. And for all my bitching and moaning, it was a spectacularly beautiful drive. We worked our way through spectacularly huge mountainsides, with countless long, narrow ribbons of waterfalls gushing down into the river in the very bottom of the gorge below us. Lush and lovely.
Once we made it to Kathmandu we found ourselves a fabulously cheap guesthouse ($2.50/night each!) and settled in to kill time while we waited for a friend of ours to arrive from Australia. Luckily Kathmandu was a pretty entertaining city to spend time in; loads of cheap little places to eat, and endless small shops selling scarves, clothing, jewellery, and endless trinkets. We explored Kathmandu reasonably thoroughly, and the highlight was definitely visiting the sacred cremation area of Pashupatinath, where the Nepalese Hindus go to burn the bodies of their family members and cast their ashes and bones into the Bagmati River. The site is covered in temples and shrines and has big concrete steps leading down to the river (which, needless to say, is pretty scummy-looking and choked with garbage). The bodies of the Hindus are carried down wrapped in vivid orange shrouds, and placed on flat sections of concrete built to jut out over the river itself. Once they are laid out, bright flowers (mostly orange marigolds) are tossed over them, and they have more wood and straw piled up over them. A group of men (we presumed they were family members) walked around the body 3 times chanting prayers, and then set it alight. There were quite a few of these funeral pyres in various states of burning, and as you can imagine the entire place was covered in smoke and the smell of burning flesh. It was a truly fascinating ritual to watch.
Although we enjoyed Kathmandu it did get a little claustrophobic at times as the traffic is horrendous, and the cars, rickshaws, buses and motorbikes all blast their horns continuously. We escaped for a few days to venture out into the Kathmandu valley to explore some of the nearby towns, most notably Bhaktapur. Bhaktapur is an ancient Newar town that, in the 15th century, was Nepal’s capital. It’s a romantic, honey-coloured city absolutely stuffed to the gills with ancient temples and crumbling but intricately carved wooden buildings, all with balconies bulging precariously out over the narrow streets. Interestingly, the day we visited Bhaktapur happened to be the climax of one of the major Nepalese festivals. This turned out to be both good and bad. The good aspect was that all the locals were kitted up in their brightest, most sumptuous outfits with elaborate makeup and jewellery, so they were particularly spectacular to look at. The down side was that a major feature of this festival was slaughtering kid goats to ensure prosperity and good luck. So everywhere we looked there were the decapitated remains of baby goats with their heads hacked off, and more live baby goats tied up just waiting their turn. Poor little things!
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| The ritual goat-slaughtering at Bhaktapur. It is meant to bring a year of good luck. |
After killing a week in this way, my good friend and former flatmate Jane Munro arrived to meet us in Kathmandu – bearing, bless her soul, TIM TAMS! It was lovely to see her and to catch up on all the news from home, and after showing her the main sights of Kathmandu we headed off to the city of Pokhara in central Nepal. Although the city of Pokhara itself is a little bit tacky and touristy, the beauty of the surrounding countryside more than made up for it. The city is centred around a tranquil lake, and the lake is ringed by lush, green mountains which are in turn ringed by the monumental, snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas. In fact, 3 of the world’s 10 highest mountains can be seen from Pokhara, and it’s quite something to be sitting in a bar in summery weather, sipping at a cocktail in your shirtsleeves, appreciating the beauty of the Himalayas.
Jane and I actually unintentionally caused quite a stir in Pokhara by deciding to go for a dip in the lake. We’d hired a small rowboat, and spent a happy afternoon paddling about in the lake admiring the scenery and listening to the cacophonous monkeys in the nearby jungle. There were plenty of folk out and about in boats on the water, and lots of the men were swimming but apparently it’s something that women just don’t do. Happily ignorant of this, Jane and I leaped in the water and swam about. I must say that we swam very modestly (fully dressed) but it made no difference – we immediately had a steady stream of boats rowing past us full of Nepalese men with their eyes agog. I can only imagine what would have happened if we’d been brazen enough to swim in actual togs or – heaven forbid – bikinis!
Anyway, after a merry few days in Pokhara we headed back to Kathmandu to meet, I’m excited to report, my Dad! (As you can see, we’ve been absolutely spoiled with visitors on this section of our trip). So although we were sad to say goodbye to Jane, it was great to see Dad and we didn’t lose any time in getting ourselves organised with maps, boots, permits and trekking gear and heading off to the start of the Annapurna Circuit. Dad has been trekking in Nepal quite a few times before and is as strong as an ox and as fit as three fiddles, so with him to inspire us we decided to be brave and not hire a porter but to carry all our gear ourselves in our big packs for the entire 2.5 week trek.
It was exhausting but satisfying. At first we walked through verdant green mountains, with hillsides covered in rice paddies and little farms, the snowy mountains peeking up in the distance. Days passed and we climbed higher and higher, winding our way through valleys and crossing narrow suspension bridges that swayed in the breeze. We ate our meals in tiny little villages inhabited by only a handful of people, and watched as gradually those snowy mountains got gradually closer and closer, until eventually we woke up one morning and it was snowing!
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| Tea-break on the Annapurna Circuit. |
The climax of the trek was definitely getting up and over the Thorong-La pass, which is at an altitude of 5500 metres. To put that in perspective for you, that is two and a half Mount Kosciuszko’s on top of one another and then some! To get over this beast we got up way before daybreak and began climbing in the freezing cold and darkness. We went up and up through the snowy mountains, gradually shedding layers as the sun came up and we warmed up a bit. Eventually we reached the summit, and triumphantly had our photograph taken with the sign that congratulates trekkers for making it to the highest pass in the Annapurna’s. It was a great moment!
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| Reaching the top of the Tharong-La Pass, at an altitude of 5,500 metres. Success! |
All together we walked for almost 200 km, carrying all our own gear and much of it at high altitude, meaning the atmosphere held much less oxygen and was more difficult to trek in. Feel free to call me superwoman! The greatest reward of all? My legs have never been so toned and shapely!
Once we arrived back in Kathmandu, we left my Dad to do some more trekking on his own in different parts of the Himalayas and we headed off to India, where we are now. But our time in India has only just begun, and I will save it for the next travel update!
In the meantime, as always, we send much love to you all and hope you are happy and well.
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