First, I’d like all readers to know up front that we have changed the settings and you no longer have to log in or sign in or give a blood sample to leave a comment, so please fill our comment page letters that from words, words that form sentences and sentences that form paragraphs, whatever they may be. Thank you.
Secondly, let us celebrate the now more than a week old victory of the virtuous and virile over the vulgar and virulent, the success of the saintly over the scandalous, the fortification of the fantastic. I am of course writing of the Ducks of Oregon defeating the Beavers of Oregon State. Go Ducks!
When I last wrote, we were about to set off for Pokhara and Sadhana Yoga with plans of yoga, relaxation and that’s about it. Since then, a lot has changed, largely due to the recent attack in Mumbai, though we never had designs on visiting anywhere near that city. In the wake of the violence, we have decided to spend almost all of the rest of our travel time here in Nepal. But enough about ugly things and changes in plans. Let’s get to what we have been doing.
We started at Sadhana Yoga more than two weeks ago. It is a nice yoga retreat about a 45 minute walk outside of Pokhara. The building is situated on a lower slope of Sarangkhot hill and has an excellent view of Lake Fewa (the south end of the lake is where the town is). The bus from Kathmandu stops at the edge of town and we figured, from the looks of our Lonely Planet map, the distance from the bus stand to the yoga center was walkable – we are walkers after all. Well, it is walkable, but not pleasant. At first, it was quite nice walking through town and then out onto the dirt road that skirts the lake. It was even nice when we finally came to the turn off for Sadhana Yoga, despite the road’s shabby state: ridiculously rocky and almost unmanageable for anything not on two legs, two wheels or absurd suspension. It was the last bit that did us in. Fifteen minutes up the hill and we came to a narrow trail, innocent and flat in appearance. Soon after turning onto it we found ourselves scrambling up a steep hillside, sweaty, hot, red in the afternoon sun, our backpacks sagging our shoulders into our knees as we climbed. But we made it… I guess it wasn’t so bad.
The yoga wasn’t nearly as difficult or demanding, not that I have a great amount of experience with it, but I was told by a reliable source (whom you all should know) that it wasn’t nearly as strenuous as most classes. Here I’ll provide a schedule for your enjoyment:
6:00 am – Meditation: We sat cross-legged or, if you are built like Gumby, in the lotus position and slowly repeated “so hum”, first aloud and then only mouthing the words. Generally, we managed to stay awake throughout the meditation despite the early hour, however, the same cannot be said for our legs which dozed off every time and sometimes became downright comatose.
7:00 am – Morning Walk: This was a walk down the trail that tortured us on our way in, then down the rockiest road this side of Baskin Robbin’s and out onto the dirt road around Lake Fewa. We did the same walk every day and saw pretty much the same things, though sometimes the fishing boats were in different places. One morning, we saw an entire family – aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. – giving some freshly cut and dried rice the thrashing of a lifetime. I mean really giving it a good beating. One it won’t soon forget.
8:00 am – Nose Cleansing: Does anyone know what a Netti Pot is? It’s a tea-pot like contraption with a spout specially designed to fit into your nostril so that you can pour warm salt water (or whatever you like really) into it so as to cleanse your sinuses. The salt water travels up into your sinus and then out through the other nostril. Naturally, you stand with your head tilted sideways while you do this. It sounds like it would feel the way it does when you get water up your nose in a pool, but it doesn’t. It was kind of nice. Once you have cleansed both nostrils, it is time to blow your nose in three different ways. I bet none of you know that there are so many ways to blow your nose. You do each nostril individually, then both nostrils together, then both nostrils together while pretending to chop wood and finally both nostrils together while doing the chicken dance. It sounds like I’m joking but I am completely serious.
9:00 am – Yoga: Finally, the yoga… well… not quite. First we do some Pranayama breathing exercises which involve breathing air out of your nose in strong streams and holding your breath, often as long as you can. This we did not commonly enjoy, but we had to do it to get to the yoga. The morning yoga varied from the usually yogic activities more so than evening yoga. Often, instead of a flowing yoga, or yoga at all, we did various movements and positions that seemed more designed to build muscle than anything else. Sometimes we did sun salutations or moon salutations, but those were more frequently done in the evenings.
10:00 am – Breakfast: This was a delicious mix of curd, fruit (apples and bananas) and muesli. It was very good and washed down with banana lassies.
10:30 am – Free Time: After breakfast, we could take mud baths or steam baths. We did mud baths on the first day. We were brought to the roof and given a bucket of warm mud and told to smear it on our bodies in layers. We did so and froze every time a stiff wind passed. After an hour, we washed it off. My skin has never felt so smooth in my life. However, neither has it felt so dry. I felt like my skin was a size and a half too small for my body, like I was wearing my younger brother’s clothes. It wasn’t pleasant. I also tried the steam bath. I was put into a box with only my head out, like I was posing for one of those photos where you’re body is behind a board painted to look like a lion or something and your head is in a cut out hole. The box was then pumped full of herb-infused steam from a pressure cooker. I sweated a lot and smelled like a mixture of lemon-grass and rice.
12:00 pm – Meditation: We skipped this every day so I can’t tell you if it was any different from the morning session. Either way, an hour of meditation a day is sufficient by our standards.
12:45 pm – Lunch: This was almost always the same and commonly referred to as Dhal Bhat. We had rice, dhal, a couple of curries (usually a cabbage curry and some sort of bean thing) and some Indian pickle. It was good and after lunch we had more free time.
3:00 pm – Karma Yoga: We cleaned stuff, pulled up a radish garden and flattened the soil to make a grassy area for yoga, painted a fence and coffee table, picked up rocks and collected and burned trash from the trail – this last one was a bit of a wash, karma neutral due to the emissions from the plastic we were told to burn.
4:00 pm – Tea and Popcorn: Pretty self explanatory. I dam near cracked every tooth chewing half-popped cornels. Dangerous!
4:30 pm – Chanting: Durga, the wife of the yogi, Asanga, led us on various chants ranging from simple to complicated. They were either in Sanskrit, Hindi or Nepali. None were in English. She has a beautiful voice and the chants were very nice when they were easy enough for us to be able to do them without having to read them. Our favorite went: “Jaya mata kali, jaya mata durgai, jaya mata kali, jaya mata durgai. Kali durgai, namo nama, kali durgai namo nama, kali durgai, namo nama.“ Ask Hilary or Smith to sing it. It doesn’t sound as good in print.
5:15 pm – Yoga: We tended to do more traditional yoga activities during this yoga session, as I said earlier. We also did some Pranayama exercises, but nearly as strenuous as the morning’s. I didn’t mind them so much. The yoga was good. It was at a nice level for a beginner such as myself. I think Hilary might have enjoyed some more advanced positions and to that end, we had a positions contest in which she would get into some advanced balancing position and I would fail at trying to match her, frequently crashing headfirst into the ground.
7:00 pm – Dinner: More Dhal Bhat, this time in more of a stew form using the leftovers from lunch and accompanied by fresh chapattis (a flat bread not unlike a tortilla). This was also good. We were rarely wanting for food and frequently too full. Once we reached breakfast, the food came fast and in large amounts. The women who served us seemingly do not know the meaning of, “only a little, please” because no matter how many times I said it, they gave me a full second serving.
We were left to our own devices after dinner, but the power was infrequent and often we retired to our rooms within an hour of finishing.
Sadhana also offers a cleanse of the entire system, and as I like to try these things, I paid the extra 500 rupees and did it. The process goes like this. The night before you start, you eat only an apple. Then, in the morning you are given a bucket of warm salt water, a cup and a list of exercises, and then you are escorted to the cleansing room which has its own attached squat toilet, which you will need. You are told to drink two full cups of salt water per exercise cycle. The cups are not small and you are to drink them down in one gulp if possible, and as fast as you can if not. You cannot eat anything. My directions were to drink and exercise until only water came out. Durga said it should take between ten twenty cycles, but probably 15 would do – for the math-challenged, this means between 20 and 40 cups of salt water without break. I made it through 10 rounds and decided it was more than sufficient. From then on, I was supposed to relax, stay awake and eat a thin gruel of rice and dhal. I did it but was fantasizing about huge chocolate covered caramel candy bars by the end.
Somewhere in there we went to town and learned of the viciousness in Mumbai, decided to stay in Nepal for the duration of our trip and signed up for a trek into the Annapurnas with a Canadian friend we made at Sadhana named Sarah. We got a local guide named Lucky and packed light.
There are many treks you can take in Nepal and a majority of them involve the Annapurna section of the Himalayas. The mountains are quite picturesque and loom large behind Pokhara. We settled on one of the more common treks. We decided to do a six day trek that took us up to Poon Hill, an astonishingly beautiful viewpoint from where you can see all of the Annapurnas like they’re in your backyard, and then over to a hot spring. We took a bus from Pokhara to Nayapul on Monday December 1 and headed into the mountains. It is the end of the trekking season currently and we passed only a few fellow hikers on our path. We spent our first night in Tikhedhunga, a small and empty village on a lower hillside. From there, we hiked to Ghorepani, the base point for Poon Hill. Poon Hill is a short hike from Ghorepani, but it is extremely steep and almost entirely made up of stairs. The previous day’s hike from Tikhedhunga to Ghorepani is infamous for its stairs – a total of 3,300 supposedly – that seem to be endless and zigzag straight up an increasingly steep hillside. The 1,000 or so stairs to Poon Hill were not agreeable either. Plus, we headed up from sunrise instead of sunset due to cloud cover. Poon Hill is around two miles above sea level and wicked cold, but the view was well worth the hike. We hiked back down to our lodge satisfied.
Next, we headed for Tadapani and from there we turned to Jhinu Danda and the hot springs. The springs were nice and the locals had built a little pool with underwater cement benches. We all jumped into the nearby river and then warmed ourselves in the pool. Despite being glacial runoff, the river was not as cold as the Rogue, though it was breath-takingly cold. The kind of cold that momentarily seizes your lungs and chest.
We spent our last night in Tolka and then hiked down to Dhumpus Phedi where we were greeted like stars by a group of kids from a school for the def who were on a picnic. We took pictures with them and smiled big, toothy smiles like people who have accomplished something. We stank of sweat and were beaten and tired, and I’m almost certain the kids who took our pictures will show their friends the photos and say, “here we are with the smelliest people we have ever met.” Just the same, we felt great.
I’ll try to include a map of our trek, if I can find one on the net.
A quick side note about the towns along our trek. Perhaps it was because we were hiking at the end of the season or maybe we were taking a less common trek, but almost every village we stayed in was almost entirely vacant. I mean empty. Bereft of human life. They were like sets for horror films. Walking into Ghorepani, the cobblestone streets were entirely abandoned but for a couple of small children playing with a toy truck and some crows cawing in the distance. There was even some mist floating down off the surrounding mountains. If anyone is looking for a good
location for a slasher film, try the Annapurna Circuit. The towns are sweetly quaint without any vehicular access. You couldn’t even mountain bike in. Everything comes from the surrounding area or is trekked in on the backs of mules, donkeys, asses and porters. We passed many of them on our way in and out. The porters were the most amazing. These seemingly tiny men climbing these brutal, unending stairs with homemade baskets brimming with clothes, rice, beer, soda, coffee, jackets, blankets, toilet paper, disposable cameras, tampons, candy bars, shoes, gloves, dhal, flour, liquor, toothpaste, scarves, sunscreen, bandages, boots, earrings, bracelets, miniature statues. The baskets strapped to their backs or hanging from cloth wrapped across their foreheads. These are truly hardened men doing unenviable work for a pittance.
We finished our trek on Saturday, December 6th.
We are back in Pokhara and will spend a week here checking out the sights. The World Peace Pagoda is here. Tomorrow, Smith and I will go paragliding. Wish us luck.
We left Chitwan easily enough, though the condition of our bus was a little less then desirable. At first, things seemed okay. We were making a decent clip and weren’t too uncomfortable, but gradually the bus became fuller and fuller until we were tighter than a girdle. This was only the first of our problems and a relatively innocuous problem at that. It’s not so bad being in such close quarters and we probably smelled about as bad or worse than anyone else on the bus due to the fact that we’d refrained from showering while in Chitwan. We stayed full and tight until we got to Butwal, where we were to turn south to Bairawa. Here the problems got steeper. Our bus abruptly stopped in a random bus station and we were all told to change buses because there was a strike. 
Our next bus took us around town picking more people up and then stopped as abruptly as the last. Again we were told there was a strike. A bus across the street was full and leaving for Bairawa right then so we ran across the street with a small group of European travelers in tow and scrambled up the back ladder onto the roof of the bus. These were the only seat available. We spent the next hour and a half ducking and dodging low hanging tree branches and electrical wires, dust kicking up from passing trucks and buses, stopping every 20 minutes to pay off a striker. 
I suppose the striking business deserves an explanation. It appears that any time there’s a disagreement here, people strike. They don’t strike like people in the US. There’s no worker walk out or picketing. Instead, locals close down the roads in their area and demand money for their use, or in extreme cases, deny use entirely. In this instance a local person had been struck and killed by a bus and the people in the region were demanding the bus driver be charged (though there’s dispute over culpability) and the government pay them some sort of reparations. 
We got into Bairawa in the afternoon and were immediately accosted by bus and taxi drivers, each pulling us toward their vehicles while snarling and arguing at the others. We ended up atop another bus racing along the road, spitting dust up into our faces. When we finally pulled into Lumbini, a kindly looking gentleman informed us that this was not where we wanted to get off. We actually wanted to go a little further. And, knowing no better, we stayed on. We found ourselves in what could reasonably be called a Nepali ghetto. The streets were thick with acrid smoke and people living in extreme poverty. Everyone stared at us and it was quite clear that we’d gone a lot farther than we thought to. Our new friend guided us to the only guest house in the area. His guest house. The room was cheap and the sheets extremely musty, but the food was good. We stayed one night and moved to the real Lumbini. The place where we’d been told to stay on the bus. There we found a nice clean guest house.
The park its self is quite stunning, though it was foggy the entire time we were there. Buddhist nations and organizations from all over the world have built or are building giant monastaries, temples, pagodas and nunneries there, and each seems to be attempting to out-do the others in ornate-ness, beauty and size. They have intricate paintings and large white or gold stupas rising from the middles. Lagoons and waterfalls in their gardens. All sorts of extravagances. However, the actual site of Buddha’s birth is quite non-descript. It is housed in a square brick building that protects the ruins of an old temple and a piece of stone encased in bulletproof glass that is said to be the exact place and stone on which Buddha was born. It appears to have a footprint in it. The place had more a feeling of a museum than of a holy site. I was somewhat disappointed by this. I figured a holy site such as this would have an aura of peace and worship but it was more peaceful and seemingly sacred at the Monkey Temple in the middle of Kathmandu. Still, it was good.
