I have wanted to visit Nepal for a very
long time. It started when I was in high school and college, learning
about and becoming inspired by the simultaneous social justice and
spiritual movements of the 1960s. (This is why I always proudly
declare myself 'A Child of the Sixties,' having been alive for the
last two days of them!) I read books about Martin Luther King, Bob
Dylan, Kent State, Ken Kesey & the Merry Pranksters, and the
questioning of unjust authority. I first began to read books about
Eastern spirituality, especially Taoism. And I first read about the
scores of Westerners who, during the 60s, traveled the great Silk
Road overland, with a final destination of the great Himalayan
Kingdom of Nepal. At the time, Nepal had just been opened up to
tourism after decades of isolation and was considered pretty exotic.
With the stories of those journeys in mind, with a growing attraction
to the mountains (odd for a New York City boy), and a healthy dose of
the Cat Stevens song “Kathmandu,” I knew by college-age that I
wanted to get there someday.
That someday was finally supposed to be
in 2005. Having had no opportunities to get out of the United States
since visiting Peru in 2000 and antsy to do some kind of
international volunteer work, I decided I would go volunteer in Nepal
for a month or two. But then the political scene in Nepal shifted.
Feeling that the civil government could not effectively manage the
insurgency of Maoist communism, the King dissolved the parliament,
declared martial law, detained political leaders, and cut Nepal's
communication ties with the outside world. I had gotten on the plane
to Peru one day after government buildings in Lima were burned by
political protesters and the possibility of a coup was at least in
discussion – but after consulting with some people who knew Nepal
well, it became clear that going to Nepal at this point would be
another brand of unwise. Anyway, the program I was going to volunteer
with abruptly suspended operations with the political news. So, I changed my plans to volunteering in
the Himalaya in Ladakh, India. Incidentally, that trip fell through
and a follow-up trip to the Himalaya in Sikkim, India and the Kingdom of Bhutan also fell through, leaving me wondering
if I would ever get to see the Great Himalaya. Five years and an unpredictable array of causes and conditions later, my dream
was finally realized when I spent this past August volunteering in
Ladakh. Yet, still, Nepal held an appeal that I felt like had been in
my bones for a very long time. So I was very excited when Miral and I
and my parents boarded the plane in Varanasi, India with a
destination of Kathmandu.
No doubt the first thing we all noticed
as our post-plane taxi took us to the resort outside of Kathmandu
that my parents had booked for us was, “We're not in India any
more.” The roads were busy, but not utter chaos. The streets were
not spotless, but lacked the overt garbage we'd become accustomed to.
There were no cows in the street. And they weren't jockeying with
bicycle rickshaws for position. There were only motorized vehicles on
the road. There were sidewalks. There were Western style storefronts.
And more than anything, there was the pulse of a sane oragnization
underlying the life we could see through the windows. No, we weren't
in India any more. And as much as each one of us, probably in
different ways and for different reasons, loved India, there was a
palpable sense of relief in the car. It didn't hurt, as well, that
Miral and I were trading in ten months of hostels and volunteer
quarters for a week at a resort. The daily breakfast buffet
was cause enough for celebration – but the grounds were truly
beautiful, nestled up in the hills just north of Kathmandu.
When we weren't enjoying the resort
facilities, the four of us spent most of our time exploring the three
Durbar Squares of the area – Patan, Bhaktapur, and Kathmandu.
“Durbar” means palace, and each of the squares houses a kingdom
palace – but, more interestingly, an array of temples and other
buildings of spectacular traditional architecture of the Newars -
the dominant ethnicity in the Khatmandu Valley.
First Patan – just across the Bagmati
River from Kathmandu and the second-largest town in the Kathmandu
Valley. Lonely Planet recommended tracking down a locally published
booklet offering a walking tour of Patan, which we found at a
sandwich shop, and we were off on a self-guided morning of wandering
the narrow streets and alleys and courtyards, past small and large
shrines and temples, and having our first tastes of the unique Nepali
friendliness – mainly when showing them pictures we had taken. As
we soaked in the culture, I think each of us quickly realized we were
in a very magical country. We eventually wound our way to Patan's
Durbar Square – an incredibly densely packed array of temples from
around the 1600s. Scattered one after another, these buildings with
multiple tiered roofs or stone domes or intricately crafted wooden
rafters or statues of 'guardians' on the steps were
nothing less than visually stunning. We spent a good part of the
afternoon taking in a vast collection of bronze and copper statues of
Buddhist and Hindu deities at the unusually informative Patan Musuem,
itself a refined renovation of a former residence of Nepal's Malla
kings. We finished the day at the ornate but warm Kwa Bahal (Golden
Temple), a 12th century courtyard monestary.
We spent a
similar day exploring the streets and the Durbar Square of Bhaktapur,
the third major town in the Khatmandu Valley. In addition to more of
the stunning Newari architecture, Bhaktapur is home to incredible
traditional craftsmen, including potters, weavers, paper-makers, and
their famous wood-carvers. Our day included a stop to gawk in
amazement at the “peacock window,” a 15th-century wood carving
that is supposed to be the finest example of Bhaktapur wood-carving
ever created, and ended with us admiring the Nyatapola Temple, which
at five stories and more than 100 feet in height is the highest
temple in Nepal – as well as arguably its best example of Newari
architecture. A few days later, we also wandered through the Durbar
Square of Khatmandu itself – but the usually hectic Square (unlike
Patan and Bhaktapur) was teeming with people busily attending to
needs for the eve before Diwali – a traditional five-day Festival
of Lights that marks the mythical return of Lord Raama to his kingdom
after defeating a demon king, signaling the eternal triumph of good
over evil. We were not sure what all of the errands are that need to
be completed before Diwali begins, but we are pretty certain that all
of Kathmandu waited until the last minute to do them. We were
swallowed up and eventually gave up our fight through the crowd with
an appreciation that it was better to swim with the tide. Eventually
we found our way to motor traffic and quickly grabbed a taxi out.
The capper on the great week exploring
Nepal with my parents was an overnight stay in Nagarkhot, a resort
village on the edge of the Kathmandu Valley that offers great views
of the mighty Himalaya. With an unseasonable haziness, we hadn't seen
much of the REAL mountains yet – and certainly no visit to Nepal would
be complete without a chance to view them. So, we enjoyed a
great dinner together at a Nagarkot hotel and then went to sleep in
preparation of the 5am wake-up to watch the sunrise to take in
the mountain views in the clear skies of the morning. The hotel rooms
all have a deck on the eastern side and the morning sunrise ritual is
what everyone does in Nagarkot. With bleary eyes and with each
tourist drowning out the others' oohs and aahs, we got to see a huge
expanse of the Himalaya range – all the way from the mighty
Dhaulagiri (26, 795 ft) in the west to the equally breathtaking Kanchenjunga (28, 169) in
the east. They say that even Everest is visible as a dot from there,
too, but we never seemed able to find it. Still, it was a morning to
remember.
In fact, it was a week to remember.
With the chaos of India behind us, Miral and my parents and I were
even more able to relax in one another's company, share stories from
each of our journeys leading up to Nepal, more deeply catch up with
what was happening in life for one another, and share many more than
a few laughs along the way. (Well, except for the Diwali crowd in
Kathmandu -- I think only Miral and I were laughing about that one!)
After a visit to the serene and beautiful British-inspired Garden of
Dreams, we had an early celebration of my 40th-birthday at an
old-house-turned-gourmet-restaurant – complete with appetizers on a
bridge overlooking a lily-pond and a dinner mood set by the
ever-present Khatmandu power-outage candlelight – that epitomized
the really sweet time we had spent all week. As my parents got into
their taxi to head to the airport and back to the States, I felt
taken by a deep appreciation for them, having journeyed so far and
through so much to be with us and having given us so much of their
love in so many ways over our two weeks traveling together. I can only say, mom
and dad, thank you.
