Last Days in Nepal - Jim 12/23/08

Since we might not get back to the Internet in the next few days we want to wish everyone reading our blog Happy Holidays. We will be spending most of Christmas in Bodhgaya, a small town in Bihar State in India which Buddhists believe was the site of the Buddha's Enlightenment. Late in the day we will be moving on to the nearby railway station to board an overnight train to our next stop, Varanassi.

Now back to Katmandu and our last two days there. Sunday. This was the day that we had arranged to go out and see some sights with the two monks we had met a few days earlier. As usual we got up fairly early and went to Saturday Cafe for breakfast, then back to our guest house to grab a backpack and call our monk friends to acknowledge that we were heading off for the prearranged meeting point. We met them at the main gate to the Stupa circle, they negotiated a cab for the four of us, they can get a better price than foreigners can, and off we went to our first stop, the Buddhist temple of Swayambhunath, if you can pronounce that your better than I. The temple is located on top of a hill just west of Katmandu and is approached by what seems, at the start anyway, and endless stairway which is dominated by troops of monkeys. After many rest stops we made it to the top and walked around the Stupa there a few times and visited the many other temple building there. In Nepal Buddhism and Hinduism coexist pretty comfortably and there were Hindu as well as Buddhist Temples on the temple platform on top, though the big round Buddhist stupa dominated. (More info on Swayambhunath click here) As usual with our monk friends English lessons were always in session since it was our only language of communication. Slowly we learned a bit more about them, they had both been sent to Katmandu by their monestary, the famous Sera Monastery,now located in southern India, to run a small prayer center. They were both originally from the Kham area of Eastern Tibet but had been in India or Nepal most of their lives, one was a Geshe, the Tibetan name for those who have their Doctors degree in Buddhist Studies and they were both in their late thirties or early forties. Before we left the top of the hill we stopped in a little tea shop for a cup and then it was back down the stairs and a cab back to Boudanath. There we separated for lunch, they had an appointment they couldn't change, and agreed to meet in mid afternoon for our next exploration.

At about 2 PM we met again and began a hike to the nearby, about 3 or 4 K, monastery of Kopan, a site I had read about in a number of books as the place where many foreign travellers of the late 60's and 70's first began to take lessons in Buddhism from a friendly Lama who spoke a little English. It was always described as a simple place on a hill way out in the country surrounded by rice fields. Well things have changed, there are still a few rice fields but the urban sprawl is surrounding the hill and as for simple, the monastery has done very well, possibly due to its many early foreign students, and is now a mecca for foreign students wanting to study Buddhism on the subcontinent. It was a very pleasant walk and visit and when we got back our friends came to our room to talk a bit more and trade addresses. A good day, we ended it with a good meal in one of the local restaurants and a good nights sleep.

Our next day, Monday was to be our last in the Katmandu Valley and we decided to spend it touring the nearby town of Patan, formally as separate town and Kingdom but now just a continuation of the Katmandu sprawl. I am not going to spend to much time on Patan both because of the quantity of ancient sites there and my need to get this finished to meet Adam for lunch. You can read a lot more about the details of the buildings in Patan by clicking on the Link above and elsewhere on the web, but what impressed me the most was the way the town was broken up into interlinking squares. Every group of houses and shrines and temples had their own home square around which their life mostly revolved, probably more so in the old days than now, it seemed to me an ideal way to give the sense of village life to a fairly large urban center. Patan, of course, had its main square, where the Kings and nobles lived which was beautiful. The craftsmanship that went into the stone and wood buildings was amazing and they must have taken a long time or a huge number of craftsmen to build. It was a very pleasant city to wander around in and we ended up having lunch there, getting back to Boudanath by mid afternoon. We wanted to get back early so we had a chance to pack and get ready for our trip the next day, it was time to travel back to India and our first stop would the British Raj summer retreat and tea center of Darjeeling.

Tuesday morning we were up early for breakfast, paid our bill at the guest house and grabbed our packs to head for the airport and what was to be our first domestic flight since arriving on the subcontinent. The day started lucky we didn't have to walk all the way to the main road to find a cab to the airport and we got a fair price without to much haggling. The airport, like all airports was a lot of hurry up and wait, but finally we were ready to board our Yeti Airlines flight to the city of Bhadrapur in eastern Nepal. The main reason we were flying was that a key bridge to eastern Nepal was out and there were also rumors of a transport strike in the region. The flight was more than pleasant, we were treated to an amazing view of the Himalayas, Everest was probably among the mountains we saw. During the flight we got to talking to another American on the plane who was from Oregon, it turned out he was a former Peace Corps Volunteer from Nepal and had married a Nepali woman. He, his wife and teen age son were on their way back to visit her family in Eastern Nepal, they were very nice and ended up helping us get reasonable transportation to the border, a rented jeep. The border crossing was pretty easy, once again the Nepali check point didn't have electricity. After leaving Nepal a sign said it was 100 m to the Indian entry point, I don't know how they measured but both of us think it was more like 2 K. We got our passports stamped to reenter India and went in search of a jeep that would take us to Siliguri, a three or four hour ride, where we would catch our last shared jeep to Darjeeling. Soon we had filled up the jeep and were off through a rural part of India that was, more and more covered with tea plantations. A couple hours into the ride the jeep blew a tire, not surprising given the condition of most of the tires on these jeeps. The driver didn't have a good jack to change the tire and eventually got a pile of stones stacked under the jeep to sort of hold it up while he changed the time - spare wasn't much better than the original, but it got us to Siliguri. There we were able, after a bit of searching, to find the share jeep stand for jeeps going to Darjeeling, a ride that was variously reported to take anywhere from 3 to 5 hours. We still had light for the first hour or so and the countryside was beautiful, especially as we began to climb into the mountains, Darjeeling sits at just over 7100 feet. Somehow our jeep got there in just over 2 1/2 hours and dropped us in the market part of the town. It was cold in Darjeeling at 7PM, dark and cold. After several false starts and a lot of help from locals we found our hotel among the streets and paths that wind up the mountain. We checked and after a long day of travelling eagerly went to bed.