For very boring technological reasons, it is impossible to upload photos to this blog which is a shame as I've got quite a few now that I'd like to share. Hopefully, when I get to my friend Amy's place in Dhaka sometime next week I'll be able to figure out what the problem is and put something here. This is when having your own laptop while travelling becomes very convenient...
Although almost every traveller under the sun has a copy of the Lonely Planet guide to whatever country they're in, a very common conversation is about how unreliable the reviews are and how good it is to find places that aren't listed. Having no listing in was one of my reasons for wanting to go to Uttarey; that and the fact that no-one seemed to have heard of it. When I got there, I found out why it has no listing: there is absolutely nothing there! When you first arrive you just see one small strip of little shops and hotels, and that's it! As I got out of the jeep (the roads are in too bad a condition for buses), a girl called Goma asked me if I'd booked somewhere to stay. I never pre-book places, mostly because I often don't know where I'm going until just before I go, and it turned out that her family ran a home-stay. Not having any better plan, or in fact any plan at all, I went with her, her niece Bandna and another lady who was a member of the family but I was never entirely clear on the connections between everyone. Goma and Bandna both spoke some English; Bandna is only 12 and I think she goes to quite a good school, she was definitely happy chatting away.
They lived higher up the than the main drag of the town, and as we went up I saw that Uttarey is really a loose collection of little farms that straggle up both sides of a valley. The family I stayed with were Nepali, at least, they spoke Nepalese rather than Sikkimese or Tibetan, and they had a farm with chickens, fourteen cows and their own vegetable patch. Apart from a few things like cooking oil and mobile phones, they are pretty much self-sufficient. As in, they milk all fourteen cows twice a day, then make their own butter, yoghurt and cheese. All the vegetables they eat come from their own garden, and if they want to eat a chicken, they have to kill it themselves.
It's tempting to romanticise that kind of life and to think how lucky they are to live so closely connected with nature and the natural cycles of a year. There are things that they have that perhaps we don't such as a real and deep sense of community. On both nights that I was there, neighbours and extended family members popped in and out, extremely grubby children ran about, and the whole place was full of fun and laughter. But there's no getting away from the fact that all the people there are poor and work harder than most of us can imagine. There's no hospital so I imagine that illnesses that are easily treatable in the West could be very serious in a place like Uttarey.
I suppose when we travel we tend to carry our cultural preconceptions with us which makes it hard to simply accept a situation for what it is. It doesn't really do much good to make comparisons between life here and life in the West, but it's hard not to do that sometimes, especially when local people tell you how much they would like to visit your country, and you know that's just never going to happen. Last time I travelled I remember feeling the guilt most people feel when they realise that in actual fact they are far luckier than most of the world's population. This time, I mostly just feel profoundly grateful to have what I have and be able to do what I'm doing.
