Nagarkot, Nepal October 25-28

PREFACE

The itinerary for our Nepal trip was firmly guided by Thomas Kelly, who has lived here for 40 years. My father and Thomas' (my “Uncle Bud”) were best friends from the age of 10, when they met on a dusty playground in Santa Fe. They stayed close through boarding school, college, the military, and until my Dad died. Uncle Bud gave me away at my wedding. Thomas and his twin brother, Robert, are contemporaries of my older half-siblings. Thomas came to Nepal with the Peace Corps in the late '70's or so, and stayed, living in Tibet with monks for severy years. He is a photographer and documentary film-maker who works here, in Tibet, India, Mongolia... all over southeast Asia. His wife, Carroll, is an anthropologist who is likewise embedded in the culture after studying deeply. Together they have done a lot of work documenting sex trafficking in India and Nepal to help stem the tide. They also have a trek and retreat business, Wild Earth Journeys, and it is with their guides that we will do our trek to the Mani Rimdu Festival.

Thomas knowingly offered his and Carroll's retreat cottage near the mountain town of Nagarkot, as a salve to the shock of Kathmandu. And indeed, we left the chaos and pollution of the city with significant relief. In fact, we fled.

We drove up to the mountains with gradually increasing car sickness (I did, at least). Fairly quickly as we climbed out of the valley, the paving narrowed to a ribbon in the center of rutted, rocky dirt.

Multitasking on motorbike on the outskirts of Kathmandu.

Later this dwindled to an almost-one-car-wide ATV course clawed out of the ridge side with a sheer drop just beyond the tires on the downhill side. Jouncing and lurching along, we eventually wound up to Nagarkot, then trundled over the ridge and down along others. After 15 more minutes of tooth-loosening bumps, we arrived at the gate to Farmhouse Vajra, a small (beautiful!) retreat hotel, and somewhat shakily climbed out of the car.

We were met by Dhakpa, the caretaker of Tom and Carroll’s cottage, who is originally from Tibet. He slung two of our big backpacks on his shoulders and took off around the guesthouses and down a stair way/path through the garden. We followed him, descending through terraces of marigolds, corn stalks, and then orchard. After a bit, we arrived at the cottage perched below, our little aerie for the next few nights.

We were coddled at the retreat cottage. This was really the first time since we began traveling that we haven’t been dashing to see something or figuring out our next step, whether sight or city or meal. No wifi, no internet, just books.

Interior main area (kitchen are behind, with sleeping loft above it).

From the hillside onto the terrace, looking into the sleeping loft.

Cottage with morning glory climbing up the stove pipe.

Like being in a bird's nest: bulbuls, drogons, woodpeckers, busy little flycatchers, magpies.... a wonderful cacophony in the mornings.

We were silent and still. We read, we lazed in the sun, Brian convalesced from a nasty chest cold after his Kathmandu mountain bike ride. We (I) bird-watched, we played cards, we napped, we sat and gazed at the Himalaya from our blanket on the grass, we drank lemon grass tea from the giant thermos-ful Dhakpa made each morning, we sat up on the terrace at night to see the milky way blazing above. We slept deeply in the loft under heavy quilts, still musty from storage over the monsoon season.

And we ate! Dhakpa had been a cook, and he prepared every meal for us--Dhal baat (lentil stew and rice), fried potatoes and fresh vegetables from his garden, jam he had made from the peaches in the orchard, yogurt made by his wife, with milk fresh from their buffalos. Chicken soup, vegetable stew, curried cauliflower…. he would appear with his pack of supplies, and an hour or two later we would were contentedly replete.

Two exceptions to our relative hibernation:

One, a pre-dawn taxi up to a lookout tower to see sunrise over the Himalaya. We were the first ones there, but not the last! A great cheer went up when the sun topped the mountains, and a massive multicultural selfie fiesta ensued.

Brian and Nuala are up in the viewing tower...

Two, Dhakpa took us on a long walk along the ridges—roads and footpaths, past a school soccer match and stupas.

As we walked, he noted the different crops on the terraces along the valley. Rice and some barley, both spread out on big cloths in people’s yards for drying and winnowing, corn (now hung to dry under the eaves of houses), potatoes, beans, squash I think he called isskuss (sp?), cucumbers, carrots, tomatoes, mustard, ginger, chile.

We stopped in a village on the way home to buy some chicken for dinner and watched as the butcher torched the skin (like, really, a big-ass blowtorch) to burn off any remaining feathery bits, then lopped it apart with his cleaver.

Hike with Dhakpa. The marvelous thing about prayer flags is that they are not flying to "ask" for something like good crops, but are put up to send prayers and good wishes out to the world.

On the hike, Dhakpa also told us a little bit about his family, and how Tom had helped them, one by one, escape from Tibet to Nepal. At lunch in a village on the way back, he showed us pictures on his phone of friends and family members--glimpses into his life. A video of his friend and the younger of his friend’s two wives (awkward moment); happy festival days with his mother and aunt, who are buddhist monks; pictures of his cousin somewhere in Canada (relocated through a connection of Thomas’). The photos show too, the almost 30-year ties between Tom and Carroll and Dhakpa's family: photos of both families gathered at several stages, a picture of Tom and Carroll from many years ago, and a portrait Tom took of Dhakpa’s grandparents, who were Tibetan monks and the original family connection.

Now, Dhakpa’s oldest child is in college, but all three of his kids are educated at a boarding school for Tibetans in Kathmandu, where they study not only Nepali and English, but their own culture and language. When I ask him if he thinks his children might someday go back, Dhakpa shrugs: not likely. But his kids are, and will be, Tibetan. As so many parents must, Dhakpa and his wife feel the onus to preserve their culture and foster the light of their religious practice as they watch it crushed in China’s brutal takeover of their homeland. They are guardians in the deepest sense.

POSTSCRIPT, 11.25.16

I remember writing this, it feels like ages ago. I remember writing in wonder at the scope of the Tibetan diaspora, remember wondering what it must be like to feel that onus, that sense of losing your country. I feel new resonance now, reading it weeks after the election in the US. How do we--meaning moderates-liberals-women-LGBTQ-people-of-color-immigrants--how do we hold the line against the barbarism of the Trumpian wave? How do we preserve and foster the light?