Nepal - The First 10 Days

Fate tried to keep me out of Nepal – first with rumors that the border was closed – then a man surely on the Nepalese wrestling team trying to prevent me from getting on the bus and a fight breaking out between him and the bus attendant and several onlookers at the border that needed the entertainment – and finally student strikes that shut down the region around Chitwan National Park and brought the men to the street with small burning fires (which they neatly swept up when they had burned out – though they didn’t dispose of the burnt out van near as efficiently). But alas, I was free of India and in a quaint touristy village of the park where even the shopkeepers left their stores unattended and the daily traffic consisted of the elephants going to the river or off to safari.

The main draw is the one-horned Asian Rhinoceros which sounds much more exciting then they are – even when they do make steps to charge at you and you are on foot. Face it, a rhino is a cow in armor, and perhaps cows in this part of the world have more personality because they have learned to beg. So, Rhinos.

Nepal, after a ten-days at least, is not about what you see, but about what you do. You trek first and foremost. Ok, they trek – I have no shoes (damn Laos!). A 15 to 20 day trek is normal for normal people, though you have to remind yourself that some of these folks cruising the streets of Katmandu have, or are here to climb Everest and suddenly 15 days seems like a walk in the park – which it is if you mean national park. For those of us without footwear, there is kayaking down rivers for 3-days (I’m going tomorrow!), yoga, paragliding, or rafting. It’s an adventure Disneyland without the lines but edging on the costs.

But, unlike India, it is much colder, laid back, cleaner and peaceful. I didn’t realize how intense India was until I left, and to be honest, I am now dreading going back to catch my flight out of Delhi where in May the temperature will be way in the 40’s and the chaos will be such a contrast to this little Eden in the north.

Burning Gats

It is always the first one that we pay the most attention to, remember and contemplate. Your first job, first kiss, first foreign country, first burning body.

Yup.

I could say Darth Vader, at the end of the Return of the Jedi, was really my first, but even on big screen and Dolby stereo, you miss the smells and actual essence, even horror of the whole event. So, I will have to pass on that being my first and pass on this experience instead. It was still the warmer part of the afternoon, when the gats of Varanasi are quiet and the vendors and gurus have gone off to find shade or an afternoon nap. Boys wash the cows and buffalo in the Ganges at this time, and a few unfortunate workers are still out in the blazing sun finishing up the morning laundry, beating it against the stone slabs placed on the river bed.

This quiet is such a contrast from morning and evenings, where the gats come alive like any beach boardwalk might – the smells of the food and cries of the vendors, men touting boat rides, children begging for a few rupees to buy chapait, tourists with their cameras ever poised for a picture of a guru dressed only in a half orange sarong and white ash. People bathe and pray on the river’s edge. Kids and teens play cricket on any flat area large enough and stray balls peg onlookers in the back. Women sell post cards half eaten by their drooling toddlers who amuse themselves among the crowds unattended but watched by all. Dogs and cows scour the garbage looking for edibles.

But in two gats, on either end of the gats on the Ganges, a different ceremony is continuing as it has many hundreds of years – the cremation of those souls, who with good karma will now be free of this endless cycle of reincarnation. The men, and only men, carry the body, wrapped in white muslin and draped in orange silk and flowers down to the river and bathe it one last time. Some cheer, some are silent. The silk and flowers are removed, and the body is placed on the pyre of wood, then place more on top with incense and herbs and sandalwood. Eldest son, with newly shaved head lights straw from Shiva’s eternal flame and lights his father or mother or brother or sister alight.

It’s the feet that get me. They seem to always stand out from beyond the wood, so identifiable. My first were colored pink, left from Holi, and looked like little girls ballet slippers and white stockings with the flames slowly edging their way closer and closer. White turned to black, then the pink fell away into the smoke. It clears and what could be wood, or bone, protrudes out until it too falls into the ash pile below. You can make out the silhouette of a head, previously bashed in and broken, to let the soul escape. Whose job is that?

Then there are the Untouchables, the lowest caste whose life this is to pile wood and free ash into the river. The untouchables, who not long ago had to sweep the ground after them so even their footprints wouldn’t be touched by those above them. Still they are outcasts, out castes, working through the day and the night, burning 300 bodies a day.

It seems gruesome at first. Then turns to fascination, then even that disappears into some type of peace. Yes, these bodies aren’t needed anymore. These people have spent their whole lives watching this, knowing this ending, and many, from all over the country, even the world, come here to die in the dream of ending this cycle and finally setting their soul free on two gats on the Ganges in this most sacred spot of Varanasi.

Ranthambore National Park

Wild tigers. Really, do I need to say more?

Camels

Michael Jackson was my first. He barred his teeth and foamed at the mouth as I came near, but by force from the lead rope passed through his nose ring, allowed me comfort and passage until lunch. Sand crunched under wide foot, the water in a half-filled bottle swished to the rhythm as the sun beat down. Not two hours later this group, my group, was asleep under the shade of a tree passing away the hours that couldn’t be spent doing anything else.

It’s hot.

Black goats with amber eyes woke us up at three, snapping at the branches of our firewood and finding the scraps of lost lunch. We moved on, across dune and through scrub following trails made by herders and their flocks. One camel had a bell. It rang with each step as each plied for the space in the lead of the pack like a race in slow motion interrupted by tasty bushes that took precedence, though we all reached a new campsite together. No winner.

Under the stars and camel blankets in a bed of sand we slept, only the sounds of camel snored. Orion passed. Night passed. No chill, though I pretend it is still crisp just before sunrise as it should be and might be, but it passes to quick to be sure.

King has disappeared, front legs tied together, nose tied to a now broken branch, he wandered somewhere unknown. The man with the turban went to search taking Michael Jackson with him. I had Moola, then another camel, new to the field of carrying fat westerners and he chooses to sit mid path in protest. We scout for lost camels, the guides calling the sounds of desert birds to alert the man in the turban to a possible King high on a ridge, but camels wander here with the holy cows and sheep and goats and an occasional villager who carries no water, only a herding stick. The King is free.

Our camels slip on sandstone going down hills, and protest further progress preferring shade and shrubs. We concur and stop finally for noon to pass. It does. We do. One more hour and we return to the road, and to Jaisalmer and the hawkers in the street stalls and horns of cycles and crowds on narrow streets of people who also came in from the quiet.

Flying through Rajasthan

You can get a handle on most countries after a few days but after six weeks in India I am still grabbing straws and left surprised. This is not to say that traveling here is difficult – quite the contrary since the mantra seems to be “anything is possible”. Perhaps you would like to look at several hotels at 2 am when you bus arrives or arrange a continuing bus at a moments notice – and of course, it is not a problem.

I left Gujarat, where I was the only foreigner and camel carts cruised the roads under tree canopies filled with flocks of parakeets, and moved north to Rajasthan, the land of kings. Udaipur was James Bond (Octopussy), Jaisalmer was Arabian Nights, and Pushkar is a dry hippie haven – no meat, no eggs, no alcohol allowed, though the holy men and hippie counterparts ply the streets in prayers and beards long past their chins.

Traveling at night in a sleeper bus allows you a bed perched above the rows of seats. It’s a glassed off capsule with the window open, you are only locked in by a thin black bar from the world below you. There is plenty of time to pass as the desert, and every smell from dead carcass to watering hole comes directly into your nose as you lie there. I find myself, in a land barren of trees, wondering if middle schools still have wood shop and find it easier to imagine then even Cambodia, so far away though much more recent. Highway turns to sand as the dunes progress. A lone shop is open for tea as the family sleeps out front on the benches and beds under the naked light bulb. Small towns and new people join our bus, others leave. An albino boy tries to sell bottled water, horns try to move cows. Through this, you drift in and out of sleep like it is all a dream world created in imagination, not reality, which seems to make it all make more sense. What is India and its billion people scattered through wild lands and baked summer soil? Who are the kings and where have they gone? Is this Arabia, or Asia or does the term Indian sub-continent really express what this is – its own creation that can never fit a tag, label or stereotype but only be named by the sari or smile?