Where 29 - Varanassi, India --OR-- How to Get Past Big Sacred Cows in Narrow Alleys --OR-- How to Speak Spanish in Nepal

I was just wondering where to start this one. How about :

Nepal continued...


I was in Kathmandu, but heading for 10 days of white water ... I say 10 days, actually it took 3 days on a bus to get there (see 'struck out' below) one day and night to get back, so we had 6 days on the river - plenty of time to get wet...


High fives
- The Karnali River in the far west of Nepal, a big river on its way from Tibet to India. The water was big, white, wetand cold; the paddlers were not so big, white, wet and cold. But when that grade 4 or 5 wave is heading straight for you, then emerging, with both the boat still the right way up and you still in it, is a triumph which no amount of cold water down your throat can dampen. The scenery was stunning too, narrow gorges, vertical cliffs and somehow superb beaches on which to camp everynight (why these are not washed away by the monsoon I'm not sure).

- On the flatter parts of the river we were allowed to use the safety kayakers boats to play in. They were very short boats (some of the rafters were too tall to fit in them) and almost impossible to keep straight but I did manage a Grade 2+ rapid and my first ever eskimo rolls (however a few times I didn't make it back up and just ended up sitting in an upside down boat thinking "I'm freezing cold, underwater, and upside down in an upside down boat - why the hell am I doing this!")

- After the rafting everyone else was heading for a wildlife park nearby, so I went as well (not to see the wildlife, just to chill out) and spent a week living in a mud hut without electric, water by pump, shower by bucket, cooking by fire and squat toilet. As this was far away from the normal touist places and deep in mousey-maoist controlled areas we were just about the only foreigners in the place. Gone were the locals asking for 'schoolpen' and money - here were the villagers who grinned and looked embarassed at being close to a foreigner. However, once they realised that they could see an image of themselves on the back of my camera, I was besieged by whole groups of people just wanting to stand bolt upright with severe faces, for their photo - getting them to relax and smile a bit was the most difficult part. If you are not good (and I work out how to do it, I may send you some examples). Walking around the paddy fields and tracks of this community was so refreshing. However the objective of taking a few pics of farmers ploughing their fields with oxen became an exercise in recording an image of just about every person I met (and several pics of each of their babies), being an instigator of civil unrest as people surrounded me on the dirt road and causing a huge power drain on my batteries. Simple living, simply brilliant. I couldn't ask for more.


Pains in the butt

- Walking into more mouse traps on the rafting trip in the far west on Nepal which is deep in mouse territory. We knew they were there cos we had a guide. We had to pay USD 20 each to be allowed to travel through the area by bus and then back be raft. I didn't see any guns this time but we were warned not to take any photos in Maoist areas as they like to take away your camera and not give it back. The rafting coy had to give other villagers paddles and stuff on the way down the river but had a note from the head mouse saying they didnt have to give them the raft that they asked for ! Its all such a circus. Both sides know the score - The army are heavily ensconced two hours bus ride from the mouses but there is no attempt to try and break the mouse control. Mind you , the army are equipped with very old (WW2 Vintage) Lee Enfield rifles, so maybe that is why.

- I only know one word of Nepali. After that, if they dont speak English then I automatically revert to Spanish (this is the only other language I can speak). This does not always help a great deal as their knowledge of Spanish may be limited too. Worked all right in south/central america though ... If only I could have spoken Spanish that well when I was actually with Spanish speaking people.

- Wildlife - since I ended up staying about 100 metres from the entrance to a wildlife park I though I may as well go and search (again) for tigers. After spending 2 whole days ( and a load of cash hiring guides, park fees etc) we had seen no rhino, one elephant a long way off, and no tigers. Then as we walked out of the park entrance at the end of the 2nd day, there was a real, genuine, actual rhino slumped against the gates - asleep! So we all posed with it, felt its rough armoured looking skin and looked at it horn ... until it started to move ... then we ran away ... real fast!

- Leeches - not the sort of wildlife I wanted to see close up. They are the most revolting creatures I have ever seen and when they are indulging themselves on my blood its simply not nice. Serve them a bit of salt and they get off pretty quick; however the blood keeps flowing for a while after.

- Squat toilets - you get used to the hole in the floor approach after a while, you have to, you cant hang on for ever. Apparently, they are better for your health than the horrible sit down western ones ... so we will probably see them catching on in western places soon - yeah right!

- Struck out - Getting caught in the strikes called by the mousists to demonstrate their power (in truth Nepal is not a democracy so I have to give them some leeway to demonstate, but it would be preferable to do it when I am not there) - once on the way to rafting, where we had to spend 2 nights in a village fairly near nowhere; then again when I was trying to get to the Buddha's birthplace; I left a day early to miss the strike (no-one knows when they are going to happen, they just happen) and still walked straight into 2 days of no buses. Luckily I was very close to the border at that point so ... despite thinking that the longer I had spent in Nepal the more I had liked it ... decided to quit Nepal and went to India instead ... what was I thinking of!!!

I just realised that my list of 'pains' in far longer than the 'highs' - dont be mislead, Nepal definitely gets the thumbs up.


India

I didn't mean to go there, honest, I was just on a bus one day and suddenly ... (actually it wasn't so sudden, it was after a huge amount of time, filling in a small amout of paperwork) I was in India and everything was more packed, more dirty and much more trouble than before.

When you are the only one (foreigner that is, locals cross the border unrestricted) in the queue at the border, you begin to think why am I the only one crossing over here ...

After a 5 hour shared taxi ride, crammed into a very old 'Ambassador Classic' car, and a puncture, I arrived in Lucklow hoping to get a train out that night to Varanasi. I had no idea how the booking system worked and all the signs were in Hindi (a language nothing like Spanish), and finding someone who spoke English was more than a bit tricky - even trickier was getting two different people to agree on where I had to go to get a ticket. Eventually I found a window with a smaller than normal scrum outside and after some barging and shouting found I had to come back at 9pm to try and get on the 11pm night train. I went back before 9pm (when the magic 'spare seats and beds' printout arrives to find a huge scrum at the said window, and got stuck in. The game is simple: Fill in a train request form. Put on your biggest backpack with daysac on your front (these not only give protection and added weight, but also if the swivel move is used, causes significant damage points against the opposition). Stand in an orderly line and as soon as people from the back charge round the side the game is on - you have to get your form through the tiny gap in the ticket window, from any angle, preferably with hand still attached, and get the official to give attention to your form. I am bigger than most Indians (although not all, as the pot bellied gentleman was keen to make clear) so after 30 minutes of unsporting behaviour, and some brief reforming of the line by an official with a big stick (a sort of half-time, no oranges), I finally succeeded. My form got attention! Victory. But there were no spaces on the train! Bugger. A complete waste of time. Resigned to having to spend a night in a hotel, I asked how I could get a ticket for the 7am day train the next day -
'Come back here at 4.30am' he said.
'You're joking!'
He wasn't.

So ventured into streets in the dark amidst traffic, every vehicle of which was trying to kill me (this must be another game I haven't figured out yet), smoke from fires lit in the road, a herd of cows getting in the way of everything and people jammed in everywhere there wasn't anything else.

After spending (part of) the night at an overpriced hotel I crawled to the station along emptier streets (the cows were sitting down by now) at 5am in dense fog. There was only a small queue and 'the game' wasn't on. I got my ticket after about 10 mins. even after a female pushed-in right in front of me (yes, they really are allowed to do that - even though it doesn't really fit in with 'the game', it does keep women interested in the sport which is presumably the reason for the rule). Then I got my train, 45 mins late due to said fog, and got to Varanasi that afternoon (2 hours late arriving - due to being 45 mins late leaving).

And it was when I got to the old city in Varanasi that I found out that, so far, my introduction to India had been a gentle one. A huge area along the west bank of the Ganges (India's holiest river) is a maze of tiny alleyways threaded between 5 storey buildings, crammed with shops, people, pot bellied cows and large mounds of their steaming dung.

Question: If you are facing the backside of a large cow taking up over half the width of an alleyway and the remaining narrow gap is heavily mined with cow dung, then, bearing in mind that you are wearing open toed sandals, what do you do?
A) Wait for it to move
B) Wait for a local to push it out of the way
C) Try and push the cow out of the way yourself
D) Go another way to your destination
E) Go via the mined route but skip delicately over the dung
F) Walk through the minefield and get covered in shit, or worse, lose a sandal in it.

If you answered:
A - You are still waiting there.
B - No chance, almost all locals are Hindu and they wouldn't want the bad karma of pushing a sacred cow.
C - You will have got beaten up by the locals ('cos you are not as sacred as the cow)
D - You will get hopelessly lost in the alleys and are never seen again OR
If you do know where you are going - you end up in another alley facing the backside of a large cow taking up over half the width of an alleyway and the remaining narrow gap is heavily mined with cow dung. Then you have 6 options ...
E - Ha Ha! the cow moves as it feels you try to squeeze past and you end up covered in shit and get slammed into the wall by the cow.
F - You are a local.

Enough about cows for now!

Varanasi is an assault on all your senses including several you didnt know you had - burning bodies, dung, rotting veg - what more do you want. It is an education, even a priviledge to experience it all. Everything is in your face - all the time - and if something is clean, it wont be for long.

It all happens down at the river which is lined with ghats (platforms) where everything happens. If you are cremated here you go straight to moksha (Nirvana) escaping the cycle of life, death and rebirth (the aim of Hindus) even if you have had a bad life ( seems a bit easy to me). So 150-200 people are cremated on the ghats of the ganges every day, in public with crowds of onlookers. It is sobering watching bodies burn, educational, thought provoking and very hot. Thinly covered bodies and laid on 200kg of prime wood and burnt. It takes about 3 hours, during which the skull is smashed to release the soul and the remains are chucked into the ganges. Within spitting distance are the top bathing spots for Hindus - this is both ritual bathing and to get physically clean, although whether you are actually cleaner when you get out is anyones guess (I didn't give it a go). And in amongst all this are the dohbee-wallahs who are responsible for the city's laundry, and this is where they wash all the clothes. If this wasn't enough this slowly moving river is where most of the garbage is chucked. Thank god I am here in the winter and not the even hotter summer when the place must really stink.


Some more plusses
- The food and drink are great. Marvellous thalis (curries), dhosas (pancakes) and masalas (mixed spices). And then there are the sweets - they are very sweet but after trying a few (not all at once) I have managed to pick a few which are tasty without being sickly.
- There is a Hindu festival here just about every day.

Some more Minusses
- There is a Hindu festival here just about every day. And they really are getting a bit the same. Exactly the same in fact, except as the festival reaches its climax there are more participants and more people watching. And then there is a huge crush and - well it very nearly ended up in bad news last night when whilst waiting for ritual to start there was some major pushing (reminds me of the terraces of English footy matches in the early 1980s).
- There is no alcohol served in the old town - it all to do with the holy influence.
- Hygiene? One restaurant even advertises itself with the slogan 'Yes, We are less dirty...' and fearful of the lack of hygiene I am moving rapidly towards vegetarianism.
- The Scams - Everyone is out to scam any foreigner. Well almost everyone, but trying to sort out the 10% of people who are making casual conversation or genuinely trying to help from the 90% who protest their innocence but are really rolling out a scam to e.g. get money for non-existant lepers, is very difficult.

So fearful of another scam or another Hindu festival starting tonight I am on the night train out of here - heading south ...

Bye for now
Pete

Where 28 - Kathmandu, Nepal --OR-- How to Make a 'Voluntary Donation' at Gunpoint... And Get a Receipt

Part of the idea of coming south over the winter was to avoid all that cold weather and snow. Maybe when I thought that, I had forgotten that the Himalayas in Nepal are actually pretty high (8 of the world's 10 higgest peaks are in Nepal) and the word himalaya means 'abode of snows'.
A bad start. Also the Annapurnas (the mountains I wanted to walk around) reach over 8,000m high ( there are only 14 peaks over 8,000m in the world), so maybe I had picked the wrong spot. Fortunately the trekking route doesn't go up to the top but gets up to 5,416m - and surely no chance of snow at that level during the early autumn peak trekking season!

Sally joined me for the first month cos she wanted to walk round snowy mountains as well (or something like that). The trek took us 18 days to complete. The first 8 days were almost constant uphill, but not too steep, passing through numerous Tibetan influenced villages (Tibetans came across from Tibet in 1959 after the Chinese strengthened their control there). These were often medieval villages crammed with traditional stone houses and topped off with numerous tall, colourful (prayer) flags fluttering in the breeze like an encampment of knights in armour preparing for a joust.

There are no roads, or motorised transport (everything is transported by mule or human) but plenty of rivers to cross, so the first few days are spent taking photos of mule trains and narrow, usually insanely wobbly, suspension bridges. Then I realised that I had taken pictures of nothing else but mule trains and narrow, usually insanely wobbly, suspension bridges and never took any pictures of either mule trains or narrow, usually insanely wobbly, suspension bridges ever again.

Once we reached 3,500m we stopped for a day to acclimatise and then restricted ourselves to 400m vertical increase each day to try and avoid getting AMS (acute mountain sickness). We reached the heights where no one lived but fortunately, enterprising locals had built tea-houses where we could stay the night. The prices of food increases with the altitude as everything has to be either grown locally or brought up the track by mule, and at the furthest point we were 9 days walk from the nearest road, and apparently it is difficult to grow beer and coke at altitude.

The weather had been great - clear blue sky mornings, sometimes becoming cloudy in the afternoon. It got a bit 'misty' at about 4,000m but no chance of snow.
A bit of a shock next morning then to awaken to a white out. It was still gently coming down, but we decided to trek on as long as we could follow the path, and if it did get dangerousl we could always turn back. Trekking higher up a snowy mountain with only trekking poles (I now understand why they look so much like ski poles) seemed a bit insane but there were other people with guides to follow (Sally and I decided we didnt need a guide or porter). Then we met a whole herd of yak coming the other way. A yak is a cross between a cow and a woolly mammoth, with a huge coat and big horns; very similar to a Yeti in fact. We were going up the mountain whilst the animal that has eveolved over millions of years to cope with such conditions was going the other way! Worst still, the yaks were coming down the only path straight at us. Now the path was only about 'this' wide, whilst a Yak is at least 'THIS' wide! And you dont want to stand in the way of a yak in full migratory mode. So us less intelligent beings scrambled up the hillside and let the more intelligent beasts pass.

We made it to 4,500m that day and waited for the snow to stop. Fortunately it had by 4am the next morning when many people left to ascend the (vertical) 900m to the top of the pass and then (vertical) 1,600m down the other side. We left at 5am - still dark - and followed a trail of lights up the mountain. It was very steep and the snow was up to 30cm deep. It had been -4C in the tea house bedroom and was -11C on the mountain, so it didnt take long for my fingers and toes to go numb. I was praying for the sun to warm me up a bit. By 7am we were in sun, stumbling slowly upwards. The air is very thin at this altitude and it was very hard work especially carrying up to 20kg of stuff on my back. The snow was perfect - I have skied in far worse snow than this - but here I was walking in it! Mountains everywhere, blue sky, white snow ... and an enless upward trudge - well for Sally it was endless, I spent most of the time waiting for her every few metres as she seemed to be suffering a bit with the thin air. It took us 6 hours to get to the top and what an effort it was. Ater an hours rest, at midday we zoomed down the other side (now skies would have been good) helped by the ever thickening air and the knowledge that if we didnt get down by 6pm it would be dark, and there was no way I could have stood the cold on that pass for a night. We made it by 4pm to a place with 'hot showers' - unfortunately solar panels covered in snow do not hot showers make. I did get my nose badly sunburnt though - very silly.

The pass was about halfway so we still had a large part of the 230km to trek, but at least now it was getting warmer as we went, prices getting cheaper, beer back towards a pound a pint, we were nearly back to civilisation. And then we walked into a Maoist trap; not a mouse trap, although that is similar, I mean a trap set by an admirer of chairman Mao. The Maoists have been engaged in a civil war for 8 years and control 80% of the country (mainly the uninhabited bits!). He was just sitting casually on a wall, though he did have a big scar on his face, and politely enquired if I would like to contribute to Maoist funds. I said not and then a walking conversation ensued with he saying I should and me not being absolutely keen. Then he produced a handgun, not a very sophisticated gun, but it was a gun. Suddenly the Maoist cause seemed to have an indefinable appeal, a very worthy cause in fact. Luckily he accepted about GBP8 for the two of us and gave me a receipt to show that this was not in fact robbery but a genuine donation, and in case I came across any other Maoists, so I could prove I had already paid. Very thoughtful!


Other (Natural) Highs
- Tiger hunting - a 2 days in the National Park looking for Tigers. Unfortunately we were on foot. Fortunately our 2 guides were heavily armed with small sticks! Fortunately we didn't see any tigers. We did see a sloth bear, which I was expecting to be a small cuddly bear, but it was enormous - bigger than me - big, black and and dangerous although it did have a cute nose.
- Elephant trekking - sitting on them, looking for rhinos. Very bumpy it was as well, but we did get to see some Greater one horned rhino. They look like they are covered in sheets of armour, but it is just thick skin folded over to make it look like they are covered in sheets of armour - Oh it works! Impressive though.
- Kathmandu, capital and largest city, is like the traffic of London in the narrow streets of York. Tiny streets crammed with cars, motorbikes, people, bikes plus occasional cows. How they all get passed each other is a mystery, but it doees seem to happen, although if they miss you by more than a cm then they consider that a wide margin.
- Old Stuff - Kathmandu and around has squares crammed with 14th to 18th century temples and palaces, all still in use. They are in great condition and laced with erotic carvings (positions from the Karma Sutra) sometimees involving elepants and tortoises; Oh, and of course they are of great religious significance. Some of the temples have fierce guardians to protect them - normally small tortoises or monkeys. Many of the backstreets are untouched by time (buildings dont geet knocked down here, they either fall down or just stay there); narrow streets with ancient wobbly 4 storey buildings holding each other up, and tiny courtyards; people crammed into such small spaces, living so close together - like walking through London before the great fire of 1666 perhaps. Such history they have here, but there is so much of it they dont give it a second thought (except to charge foreigners if they want to see it!)
- Oh, and most Nepali trucks are covered in huge Union Jacks. Haven't been able to find out why yet though.


Other Confusing bits
- Religion is a bit confused (well I find it confusing) - most people are Hindu, but many of the temples are Buddhist (Buddha was born in Nepal about 2,500 years ago). But Hindus claim that Buddha is the 9th incarnation of their god Vishnu, so enabling them to worship at any Buddhist temple, where they have also added shrines to numerous hindu gods. So you go into a nice clean Tibetan Buddhist temple (often huge stupas - like an upside down ice-cream cone) which then get invaded by hoards of Hindus queuing up to chuck rice and other offreings (mainly food) over their favorite god, and leaving little piles of embers all over the place for unsuspecting people to burn their feet on. Its all a bit confusing, but this is their religion and as messy as it is and as many flies as the piles of food attract, I have to respect that. I think I may get bored of Hindu temples pretty soon though...... Er Yep, bored now.

Other Crap bits
- The roads, if you can call them that are worse than dirt tracks. So the buses go really slowly, and really bumpily, especially if you happen to be crammed onto the back seat. Enough said (although I could moan on at length).


And now Sally has gone home and I am off to do a bit of rafting in the far west of Nepal for 10 days - back into Maoist country, (I'll keep an eye open for those mouse traps), then south to India.

Bye for now
Pete