Durbar Square Dining – Patan

The Durbar Squares of the Kathmandu Valley – Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur – are so captivating one could forgive the tourists for sighing obliviously into the tepid nescafes, burnt fries, and gristly momos that are the staple of many a restaurant favourably positioned to scoop up easy business. They won’t even notice the overpriced fare, spurred into a sense of obligation towards the local economy by the tickets they’ve already bought at the entries to these World Heritage Sites.

For those living in the immediate vicinity of these tourist traps, sustenance is rather more problematic. Actually, most locals will never lose sleep over the issue, sustained as they are by the home cooking of their mothers, wives and sisters. And they can eat and drink on the cheap in any number of hariyo parda establishments. In Patan, the trail from Honacha to Chyasal is littered with a decadence of smaller, dingier bhattis and they all seem to enjoy custom. The kids who frequent the tourist traps do so in much the same spirit as we did Thamel in the 1990s; tourist restaurants have a somewhat glamorous sheen to them that your local Friendship Cafe simply cannot manage.

But are they all tourist traps? Clearly there are many permutations at play here. The expensive, crap restaurant; the expensive, good restaurant; the cheap, crap restaurant; and the cheap, good restaurant are only the most obvious categories. The one thing Durbar Square Diners have in common, from a tourist’s perspective, is their proximity to the Durbar Square. Ideally, you’re looking onto it as you feed yourself.

So if you fancy something a little more upmarket than Honacha, even if it is one of the few cross-class bhattis in the Kathmandu Valley, along with Kirtipur’s superior Newa Lahana…where to go, where not? I’ll begin with a couple here and update this post as often as an empty fridge bumps me out my Mangal Bazaar flat onto the streets below. No one pays me to choke myself with momos and chowmein across town.

Cafe de Patan is on the right, right before you get to Patan Durbar Square on the left. I was once or twice positively impressed by both price and rice (in a manner of speaking, of course: the rice here is more likely to be beaten, though not downcast, ha, ha), the crucial qualifier being that I was yet to discover Honacha. The grub’s fine, but very overpriced.

Further down the road as you pass the square, on the overhanging, first floor of a long building block housing a random assortment of typical Patan businesses, is a busy, cosy establishment the name of which slips my mind (how unprofessional, because amateur, I told you no one pays me for this gig, I’ll go check tomorrow, ok? checked – it’s Layeku Kitchen), but which is unmissable – at first sight you’d take it for part of the square itself, except it is separated from it by tooting motorbikes and the usual accoutrements of third world civilisation. The Nepali set of black lentil soup w/rice, greens, mismas veggies, chicken, tomato chutney and papad was not the most authentic, but it came in nice, weighty brass bowls, came to just Rs 185, and came in very handy considering I was having lunch at 3pm. P(rice)!

To complete the triumvirate south side of Patan Durbar Square we have Tajeju Restaurant & Bar, housed in a skinny, unattractive cement block just as you turn to the right, away from the square, into a busy market street. The chief attractions are the views from the fifth floor and the cheap prices. The food is adventurous (szechuan noodles, for instance) but not particularly evocative of anything.

More to come.

Mismas Moksh

Finally, a bar that lives up to its name. Moksh has always been a notch or two clear of what tired Thamel has to offer, and has long been a favourite of the Patan crowd. Nepalis and expats congregate gregariously on busy Tuesdays and weekends as well as on the quieter, smokier nights, in the garden, the house bar, or the two-part terrace. 

But yesterday’s performance by the collective ‘ The Night’ proved yet again the old dog isn’t handily placed in Pulchowk simply so Patanites can slake their thirst this side of the river. The garden performance, though marred early on by power blips the band blamed charmingly on neglecting to invite one of the musicians onstage, was such a fusion as I have rarely seen in Nepal before: a balance of talent, professionalism and restraint. It was a blessed contrast to the rather aimless jam sessions that tend to transpire of a Kathmandu evening.

The Night’s ‘Tribalism to Technology’ gig started slowly, and stopped a little too often to earn the momentum they strove for, but when they did get going, the going was good. Initially it seemed as though their sound risked being swamped by the broad ensemble of guitars, keyboard, tabla, drums, sarangi, sitar, flute and vocals ranging from Shreeti’s mezzo-soprano to Ranav’s death-baritone. The Night skirted the issue by building on clear melodies derived in part from Nepali folk and interleaved by excursions into darker territory. The whole was anchored by simple, effective, trance-like percussive playing and ambient keyboard.

The conscious absence of virtuoso widdling from any of the instrumentalists left space for Shreeti’s elaborations in and around threads supplied by flute, sitar, guitar and Bibhusan’s mellow vocalisations. Shreeti was at her best playing within the limits of her range, and when she combined with Tashi’s perfectly gauged Manangi chants, Moksh was mesmerised.

The Night: http://www.soundclick.com/bands/default.cfm?bandID=850042

by the brown muddy river

A steaming summer weekend in Kurintar’s Riverside Springs Resort on the flip side of the standard lunch stop-over enroute to a trek in Pokhara, and a world of difference is revealed. It’s all in the seasons after all. In spring particularly, the landscape itself is enroute to dessication, and as you wolf down your buffet you gaze over the pretentious, empty swimming pool to the cold turquoise Trishuli, your companion some part of the way to your destination. There is little to keep you here when your mind is already on the hotel in Pokhara, and the rigours if you will of the week to come.

In summer, the very air is heavy with the spirit of the monsoon rains, the mountains thick with vegetation, and the comfortable resort cottages shelter you from the boisterous greenery overhanging the paths snaking through the hilly complex. You are more likely to be in the pool, its cool blue waters justifying its ambition, though I would advise a walk down to the turbid brown rush of the equally transformed river below you. Venture away from the pleasantly dull, serviced retreat of the resort to absorb the nature that encircles you in spite of the scar of the highway that brought you here. The sandy bend in the river between the olive mountains, the patch of unobstrusive quicksand hidden by reeds you’ve been warned of, the simple, time-worn delight of seeking pretty pebbles and skimming slippy stones, the disoriented clouds that hang obstinately over everything. If you don’t get your shoes muddy you haven’t been to Kurintar.

follow your nose to…Kirtipur

A lazy Saturday afternoon eased past in Bishalnagar and my hopes of hauling friends laden with wives and chiles upto a bhatti in hilltop Kirtipur in the southwest of the valley began to founder in glass after glass of lager. Chyaang! Chwoela! Chiura! I yelled, to little avail. Naah, mumbled one, look there, it’s pouring in Kirtipur. Whuddyu wanna do there anyways? Have a Beer! Barbecued meat! Bread roll!

I persisted. And the skies parted down Kirtipur way just as a van rolled into the gates, at our service. Hurriedly I gathered the more adventurous amongst us and a quick dash across the city and through the lush expanses of Tribhuvan University brought us out onto a road leading straight towards the ridge-top town of Kirtipur. Not the Kirtipur of my unfounded, obsolete imaginings, but a wall of brick and concrete cubes facing onto all comers.

But this ancient town has retained more than just symbolic continuity with its past. As we swung right up onto the incline leading to Newa Lahana, our destination, older houses were to be seen interleaved amongst the new. We soon came out onto a square, parked, and trundled down through an alley strung across with soft yellow pearls of bulbs and sided with old, well-kept residences on the walls of which could be seen affixed a range of cultural artifacts, much in the manner of (the inside of) an English pub. To be honest, Thambahal reminded me of a medieval European town centre, complete with tourists (us!), albeit a little dustier, rustier and mustier.

This is it! announced our second-timer. We hesitated to climb the wooden stairs leading up to a raised platform next to a big red and black banner reading ‘Newa Lahana’ (in Newari). A few drinkers lounged about on a few pretty cushions and straw sukuls. This is it?

Far from it. In a plain modern building to the left, there were customers and floor space aplenty, and it was buzzing. Nawa Lahana is essentially a rambling, open-air bhatti complete with lovely dusky views of the valley before and behind, but this is not what the youngsters throng this place for. It’s a community-run restaurant, and local women chip in with their specialities – be it tongue or marrow or a drink to singe the tongue and chill the marrow – and they’re special indeed. The baras had a fluffy, bready fullness about them that Honacha can’t match; the sukuti was luscious, almost sweet despite the fire in them; and the marrow is a little more delicate than what I gingerly tried in Lazimpat’s Bhumi Resto-bar. The chyaang, served either in big earthen jars or heavy brass vases, is more than adequate, though as latecomers we had to beg for a fair portion of what was left in the evening crush.

The bill, as always, was ludicrous. Why do I continue to frequent the overpriced, undercooked tourist haunts of the city when I can eat and drink my fill at any one of the exemplars of our proud tradition of bhattis?

Wunjala no Moskva

Wunjala Moskva, the ‘garden restaurant in the heart of the city’, had long been a mystery to me. A Newari-Russian eatery seemed a conceit too easily construed as ‘ey, some boris got hitched to a maiya and opened the kitchen to the paying public’. But the place had languished in relative obscurity far too long for my liking. And if it had been around so long, they had to be doing something right. Right?

Duly booked in for a Russian set menu, this old dog led his folks into the Naxal garden for a New Year’s Eve meal. First impressions, impressive. A raised dais bound on three sides by cabins of faded brick laced with carved wood, topped with elegant tiles and fronted with glass panels to gaze out onto the masked and costumed dancers awaiting us. We settled in, shivering, and it slowly dawned on us the chill was the only Moskva about Wunjala.

The waiter explained to us the Russian grub would be a while. Ok, we said, let’s get started on the drinks. A good quarter of an hour later he stole in apologetically with the booze. ‘It really will take a while. How about some Newari food?’ We were adamant. He relented. But another quarter passed and he was back, a pitiable expression on his face. ‘Er, sir…the kitchen won’t take the order.’

‘Eh? Where’s the manager?’ Another wait, and we were informed the manager was ‘just too busy’.

I think it was at this point my father threatened the poor waiter with my blog. We asked for the bill, shouted at the patently unoccupied manager dawdling at the bar, and stormed off to an excellent and very reasonably priced New Year’s menu of prawn-stuffed avocados, tender lamb chops, spinach crepes with orange syrup, and chocolate mousse at the Radisson. Ruffles were duly smoothed. But I was ashamed at how badly Wunjala had treated us.

Surprise, surprise, they called to apologise the next year. A bit more ranting on my part, and we were invited to come back and sample the Russian menu. For free. So we did. The Russian set – herbed soups, rich stews, heavy salads and some variation on a shish kebab – was tasty enough, though unremarkable. The service, however, was authentically serf-like. We forgave them. Put it down to a labour dispute and general unprofessionalism. But next time – and there will be one – I’ll stick with the Newari.

The Gokyo Trek – Leg I

At Indira Gandhi International Airport a while back, I wondered how it was almost all the tourists headed to Kathmandu were ready-pressed and dressed like they’re heading to the mountains the moment they step out the air instead of a cab to Thamel and its cheap wonders?

It’s places like Gokyo, that’s how, coupled with the attenuated hold on the Occidental mind of Kathmandu as some kinda Shangri-La, ha, ha. Increasingly popular with those intrepids who fancy crossing over from Renjo Pass to the west or Cho-La pass to the east, the nine-day Gokyo trek along the Dudh Koshi Valley (see map) may not be as isolated as my 1997 Lonely Planet led me to imagine but the wilderness is still out there, as magnificent as anything you could dream of.

 

The Lonely Planet, 1997

Tired of people demanding if you’ve climbed Everest when the closest you’ve been to the roof of the world is through the seat of your pants? Book your flight to Lukla now.

Day 1 – Kathmandu to Lukla to Phakding

Reconfirm your flight to Lukla. Or face the consequences at Tribhuvan International Airport with your fellow travellers, most of whom will at least have a guide to do the talking for them. Walking into a terminal heaving with three days worth of tourists champing at the bit, we considered ourselves lucky to be off just two hours behind time. We squidged ourselves onto the wrong side of the plane but there ain’t much that can beat the thrill of spearing through the hills to the Lukla airstrip rushing up to meet you at an angle designed to slow you down before you hit the town, quite literally.

C Thapa, 2008

 

We enlisted a porter for the days my sister was planning – I’m an incorrigible DIY guy when it comes to trekking – and off we went, up and down the sunny mountainside along a broad, busy trail prettied up with painted mani walls and rocks. The rippled grey symmetry of Kongde (6086m) rising to the left on the other side of the suitably chalky Dudh Koshi promised much, and down by the Saino Lodge & Restaurant at Thaado Khola where we had the first of many quite passable dalbhat-sabji-achaar combos, we caught our first sight of a classic Himalayan peak – classic, that is, in its perennial coat of blinding white. Kusum Khangkaru (6370m) is considered by some the most difficult of the trekking peaks, and at this point (2580m) it seemed a long way off.

C Thapa, 2008

 

But it was a short, easy day to Phakding, which suited us just fine. Forty-five minutes by plane, three hours by foot, we were a world away from the bluster of Kathmandu. We were in the Khumbu, on our way to Everest…sort of, and certainly if you fell for the triumphal blares of music pouring out the telly where a mountaineering DVD regaled the weary, dulled punters.    

Day 2 – Phakding to Naamche Bazaar

Trekking in Nepal is tough love, no question. Thousands must have been fooled into thinking the famed Everest Base Camp trek a doddle after their first day. Hiking up from Jorsale to Naamche Bazaar the day after puts most in their place.

I was more surprised by the sheer volume of people populating the trail. Were we really out of the capital? We strode past files of octogenarian Japanese tourists and weaved around mini yak caravans. True, the weather had blanked out flights for two days. Views of Thamserku’s (6618m) serrated, ragged glory and the blue-grey confluence of the Dudh Koshi with the Bhote Koshi notwithstanding, I couldn’t help but wish I was further along the road to Gokyo.

I was somewhat mollified at the entrance post to Sagarmatha National Park, where I exercised the local privilege of jumping the queue, not needing to be in one at all. But after a long, hot slog soothed only by a brief, thrilling first sight of Everest peeking out from behind some pines, Naamche Bazaar seemed to offer little more than relief, with not much at the end of the day by way of ambience in its spread of multi-storeyed blue-green-red roofed hotels, Thamelesque high street tourist tat and om mani chants.

But though this Sherpa village at 3440m has moved with the times, as any trading post must do, it continues to court ambition, desire and fulfilment. We wandered through the weekend market, where the pained, sweaty visages we’d passed on the trail were to be seen smiling behind wares lugged over from Jiri, a week’s walk. Further along the China market sprawled in technicoloured heaps, unspooled from yak backs. Coffee and pastries at the original Hermann Helmer’s Bäckerei und Conditorei, stacked with rows and rows of loaves of bread, did wonders for us. There’s no denying the drama of Naamche’s surrounds either, confirmed by a short uphill stroll to the army post that lays out Ama Dablam (6814m), Lhotse (8516m), Nuptse (7864m), Everest (8850m) and  Pumori (7165m).

 

And cheese-lovers weep no more! If the general lack of your favoured nibble and the blandness of Kathmandu Yak and Kanchan had you groping for comparisons with Comte, try some of the local variety of firm, holey, mature Yak cheese. While you’re at it, ask for a dram of the local millet chhyaang or better still, settle in for an evening of fermented millet beer. The leisurely charms of tongba will keep you warm and woozy a few mugs down the line. Many thanks to Palden and Dolma, who run one of Naamche’s oldest and most respectable hotels, the Namaste Lodge.

Day 3 & 4 – Naamche Bazaar to Thami trek (acclimatisation)

The Naamche to Thami trek is a couple of clicks more than the three-hour jaunt advertised in the Lonely Planet, and the Thami you sleep in is really just a collection of lodges rather than the ‘more traditional Sherpa village’ it’s touted as. The walk is well worth it however, unless you really fancy a night out on the cobbles of Naamche while you’re acclimatising. It begins with a pleasant stroll through cool oak and rhododendron forests west from Naamche and continues to the end of the Bhote Koshi valley.

We ambled along the trail, passing our first ‘real’ yaks (and first ‘real’ Tibetan men with turquoise in their ears) coming down the old trade route from Tibet, which passes through Thami. Lunch took forever at the Maya Lodge in Thamo, giving us ample opportunity to admire the dining ceiling plastered with t-shirts from past Everest Marathons. Our porter, Nir Kumar Rai, revealed he’d been sixth in the men’s event this year. He’d run the 42-kilometre loop from Base Camp to Naamche in less than 5 hours; while most trekkers hobble the same in three to four days. I was limping along myself; the leather boots I’d treated myself to were holding up admirably well, except being brand new, they felt like logs of wood with my feet tender worms within them. I wouldn’t be running no marathons.

As the sun was cut off mid-conversation by the looming black mountains we crossed the furious rush of the Bhotekoshi sculpting russet rock into smooth convolutions. Our porter stopped, pointed and lo! there stood a magnificent Himalayan tahr twenty metres down the hill, its coat flowing in the wind.

 

The sighting of Khumbu natives apparently unafraid of humans (ergo unhunted) cheered me enough to ignore the nondescript approach to Thami, where we quickly settled in to the neat, cosy Everest Summiteers Lodge, owned by Appa ‘many times’ Sherpa. Just how many times Appa’s got to the top becomes clear as you survey out of enforced boredom the certificates ringing the warm dining room. I’ll stick with 17, insomuch as I couldn’t locate one that congratulated him for the 18^th time. There are certainly some interesting ways to make a name.

Give the man his due, but Appa might want to hike back from Amrika to straighten out the lodge operating in his name. The Everest Summiteers Lodge breaks outrageously with the unspoken tradition of not charging porters for room and board. This has as much to do with rising prices as the gradual compulsion on the part of hoteliers and trekking agencies to grant porters rights, from setting daily rates of pay to allowing them into the common areas. If they are to be treated as humans, the logic goes, they (read: their clients) must pay their share, and never mind if they brought the hotel business. Nir Kumar’s bill amounted to almost ten dollars…more than what each of us was paying.

Grumbling about the commercialisation of trekking, stomachs rumbling with the most awful momos we’d ever chewed through (two plates instead of one, courtesy of an error in the kitchen), we trudged twenty minutes up to the freshly renovated 500-year-old Thami Gomba, which sits pretty amongst stone dwellings more resembling a village. A cheery, wide-eyed monk showed us an upper chamber, waving away our attempts at de-shoeing and winking towards the donation box, leaving me wondering just what the pungent milky liquid sloshing around in his bottle was…

…but perhaps I was in an overtly cynical frame of mind. Really, there was not much to complain about in the clear sunshine of this mountain morning. After all it was this very hardheadedness that had got Khumbu where it was. The neatly uniformed, multi-ethnic group of students we encountered on the way back stood in stark contrast to the onerupeeonepenonechocolate child beggars of the Annapurna region. The Khumbu Bijuli Company set up by Austrian NGO EcoHimal illuminates the region even as Kathmandu hunkers down to 63 hours a week of loadshedding this winter. Naamche is booming. The Sherpas have done well by themselves, and who are we to begrudge them the fruits of their labours?

 

The Gokyo Trek – Leg II

Day 5 – Naamche Bazaar to Dhole

Having dispatched my sister back to Lukla with Nir Kumar, I was on my own again, and happily so. As much as I appreciate the camaraderie of a trekking group, I prefer going solo, picking my companions as I roll along. There’s nothing so liberating as an extended ramble through the mountains when you can start and stop as you like it, which means something of a frozen Khumbu morning. Half an hour more in your cocoon? No worries. Think you can leg it to the next set of lights before dark? Carry on, trekker.

That said, the first evening on my ownsome offered ample opportunities for not wholly wholesome reflections. I was alone in a crowd, dining among groups of trekkers chatting fluently (the Spaniards), playing cards and giggling (the Nepali guides and Canadian girls from Mountain Madness), journaling and reading (the Germans) and poring over their maps (the French).

Post-prandial high-altitude flatulence aside, I was the odd one out. The guides and porters clearly didn’t know what to make of a Nepali who’d trek alone for the heck of it. For my part I found myself judging the young bloods for their pop accoutrements and sneaky, lewd asides, preferring the pastoral ideal of the honest, naive village guide even as I chided myself for believing in it. Perhaps I considered them inadequate as representatives of our collective culture. Perhaps it was a general resentment of pharener girls with those boys, mirroring that of pharener lads with our girls. I felt better qualified to discourse on the country they were experiencing through the microcosm of trekking. But I was too much like them to give them the Otherness they craved, too easily dismissed as a rich boy from Kathmandu.

Thoughts turn upon themselves in the dark. Once more, I had nothing to complain about! A fresh, sunshiney start from Naamche up to Mong, scattering raucous blood pheasants before me, relishing the first clear views of the jewel that is Ama Dablam and the approaching Everest panorama. A dusty scramble down to Phortse Thanga and a bowl of noodles before a dogged climb up and through forests to Dhole at 4110m, facing the emergent massifs of Thamserku and the saddle mountain Kantega (6783m), golden in the dying light. I’d covered excellent ground in a day – I don’t recommend pushing on beyond Phortse Thanga to everyone – and was well on my way.

Day 6 – Dhole to Macchermo

A slow community was forming this second day out from Naamche. Moving en masse to our destination, meeting and greeting on the trail before dispersing over the few lodges that awaited our arrival at the end of the afternoon. There was none of the jostling anonymity we’d kicked off with from Lukla. I took it easy, hanging back with the Spaniards to admire the giant whose slipstream we were entering, Cho Oyu (8201m). We were clearly above the treeline now. Rooted to the sienna scrub, we traced the grey serpent of the glacier down in the valley to the white massif framed by the deepest blue.

Setting our bags down in the busy, sunny first lodge whose name I cannot recall, we pushed up a nose above Machhermo at 4470m, and stood enthralled at the view from Cho Oyu to Thamserku as the boys from Mountain Madness leaped from rock to rock for the benefit of their kaanchhis. It was only when a Frenchman pointed it out we saw old hoary Everest itself pop out of our panorama, resplendent in its pyramidal, defiantly unsnowed glory.

Our emergent community and the relative comfort (the toilets! the cooked food! the arctic nights!) may have negated the down-at-earth ‘into the wild’ experience my facebook status message promised à la Chris ‘Supertramp’ McCandless, who perished in the Alaskan outback. But it’s all about the bigger picture. The wide angle of the rocks, ice and snow rising above the scrubby hills, the play of light as it ebbs and flows through the day, throwing into relief what it will when it will. Red, yellow and orange lichen in sheets and bubbles, clumps of stubborn alpine flowers. This was the wild around me even ensconced in a warm dining room waiting for my mixed chowmein before to bed, to bed!

Day 7 – Macchermo to Gokyo and Gokyo Ri

A state of stunned euphoria is how I might have described my state as I sat alone – blissfully alone – amongst the three-score loudly babbling trekkers scarfing their dinner in the Gokyo Resort. Cut off from their expectations of the morrow, having taken the advice of the owner to catch the Gokyo Ri panorama at sunset, I floated in my own weary bubble of satisfaction. I didn’t care that everyone I met on the trail was elsewhere lodged – if anything, I felt slightly sorry for them. To them the numbing morning winds as they crawled up Gokyo Ri, to them the blinding sunrise views.

Words can’t quite convey the spirit of the panorama from Cho Oyu to Thamserku as it moved through shades of gold, pink and violet above the long grey smear of the Ngozompa glacier next to the chain of perfect turquoise lakes I’d skipped along up from Macchhermo. But neither can photos. Beyond the obvious, much of what made the view is lost in translation. It was in the long, tough trudge to the top. It was in the anxiety of seeing mists cottoning up the valley and wondering if the view would be gone by the time I got from 4700m to 5355m. It didn’t happen. It all lay before me as I clambered happily on to the rocks strewn with prayer flags to join the half-dozen intrepids already there, the sublimation of all what had gone before.

A jocular Nepali showed me the pair of tents he and a wild-bearded Japanese were spending the night in before offering me a warm drink of pineapple tang and a lightning name-drop tour of the vista…before gesturing towards the retreating glacier pocked with ponds and adding sombrely, yehi ho nepal ko bhabishya. The future of Nepal lies in the rising glacial lakes of the Himalaya.

Gokyo may well be in the path of a future inundation. For the time being it’s thriving. The Gokyo Resort’s unassuming Brahmin owner Surendra Sharma recounted to me the development of the settlement. In the early 1980s, when he set up shop, there was almost no traffic to speak of. A ballooning expedition in the 1990s brought the region much-needed publicity. Today up to 30 or 40 trekkers and guides bed down in the dining room on the busiest of evenings. I almost found out the hard way. Meandering along the lakes with assortments of acquaintances I got to Gokyo to find I was the only one without a room booked. Until Sharma took pity on me. It was just as well. The food was the best I’d had since I left Kathmandu; an experimental Thai special fried rice with cashews and coconut bits for dinner, and tasty, substantial hash browns and eggs for breakfast did me very nicely.

There may be some good in having a guide, though the going hasn’t been all that good for them this season. Those with daily budgets for their guests have been hit by hotel prices (300 rupees for a plain jane dalbhat, anyone?) because commodity prices are more than up in this elevated part of the world. Sharma’s Sherpa wife Kaanchi complained about paying Rs350/kilo for tomatoes and Rs500/kilo for onions…and how not, when the formerly reliable service provided by porters from Jiri has been supplanted by an unreliable plane and helicopter service? I look at everyone’s accounts, said Sharma. I can tell by the guides’ faces that their guests are eating all their profits. And why wouldn’t they, given how much they pay the trekking agencies?

 

Day 8 – Gokyo to Thore

In an unsually empty lodge off the main drag – the Kantega View in Thore on the return loop the other side of the Dudh Koshi – after a slow listless morning lit up only by the crackling crunches of the glacier as it poured down in its millennial tread from Cho Oyu, the trip felt as if it were winding down. I wasn’t tired. But I’d had my fix. I wondered at the numbers of enthusiastic trekkers who, liberated from their backpacks, figured they’d squeeze in two five and half thousand metre climbs in a fortnight (Everest Base Camp and Gokyo) rather than one in twice that time: the guides spoke fearfully of rumoured deaths from altitude sickness in Gokyo the day before.

My trek felt done, if only in a physical sense. But each day I was going where no Nepalikukur had gone before. I was alone only when I chose to be. And I had the Mani Rimdu festival in Tengboche to look to. Wrapped up in my bag in my cold room, I blew plumes through the circle of light cast by my torch.

The Gokyo Trek – Leg III

Day 9 – Thore to Phortse

I halted at a twist just above Phortse, walked out onto an outcrop and plonked myself down. Just for the view and all there was in it. In the terrible, murderously sharp ridges of Thamserku. The deep clefts running down to the rivers. The meagre settlements perched where these ridges eased out, their square gombas offering some solace in the midst of such giant wildness.

It was so overwhelming when one paused to really look, how could I have room for the mundane thoughts of the everyday, let alone the abstractions of the future? I just sat there and looked, crunching on some welcome Trekker’s Granola.

Then back down for a hot shower at the big, red-roofed, well-organised Peacefull Lodge in Phortse. After a week of sticky sleep and smelly socks, I cannot say just how cleansed and liberated I felt. Warming myself in the late afternoon sun, I chatted to an older porter. A Frenchman approached and asked me to ask the porter if he wanted some boxers and socks. He did. ‘Tell him they need to be washed first,’ he warned as he handed over his gifts, smiling benevolently. You fool, I thought. But it was not my privilege to be offended.

As I sat there, the porters complained about their treatment at the hands of the locals. I felt vaguely uncomfortable, as one of the few Nepalis paying from the menu, and, it was implied, being treated decently only because of it. Still, they argued, compared to ten years ago it’s like heaven.

Day 10 – Phortse via Tengboche to Naamche Bazaar

 

After a foolish detour from Phortse that had me backtracking almost all the way from Pangboche (and rewarded with gorgeous full frontals of Ama Dablam), I got to Tengboche past midday. I pushed into the jam-packed, square gomba courtyard, where unfolded the masked dances one by one. As the venerables presided with chants, drums, cymbals and longhorns, skeletons and demons took their turn to dip and twirl across the flagstones. Old Man came out with his stick and proceeded to harass the crowd, picking out two tourists for special mistreatment which they bore admirably. They scuttled up rickety ladders to receive their scarves from the lamas after a extended run of slapstick kicks and random humiliations. And why not? The audience must get its due.

A plate of sour curd and an assortment of snacks later, handed out generously by the gomba, a fearsome octet emerged to solemn blares. Bhairab-like demons, wide-eyed feminine visages with huge, carved grins and disconcerting blind-eyed horrors arrayed in a fantastic spectrum of colours and armed with voodoo dolls, a half-skull, spears and knives went about their business when whooomphh! A sigh of horror sprang up from the very stones and we turned to see a lanky white-haired tourist splayed out on the ground, the women and children shrinking away as if he were an abomination. His friends rushed in. The fool had fallen 10 feet from the balcony into the courtyard, almost onto the women. While he lay fainting I watched horrified, a chill in me as much to do with the demon dance, which didn’t miss a beat. But the dancers turned to look; they were human after all. Eventually, the unfortunate sat up with a cup of tea, and nervous laughter broke out. All was well. I left soon after for Naamche.

 

Day 11 & 12 – Naamche Bazaar to Lukla to Kathmandu

And back again. Naught of note except I was in a hurry, and had no time for the slow-moving yaks and trekkers going both ways. Or ignorant locals. Stopping at Phakding for a terribly bland plate of chowmein, I was irked more than usual when the proprietor wondered if I really was Nepali. Tapai ta same Indian, she added for good measure. If you went down to the south, you’d be same Chinese, I retorted, but my point was lost on her. Tapai ta same Indian, she insisted, wrapped up in her ethnocentrism.

It was a long, sweaty day back to Lukla. I had no time for this town of hotels. Last night in the Himalayas, cheered the banners inviting returnees to parties. All I wanted was to get back home. My day was done.

Thanks to my solitary stay at the very ordinary Base Camp Hotel, whose proprietor is also the main man in Yeti Airline’s Lukla office, the next morning was as smooth as silk. On a signal the chosen scampered down to the tarmac, where the flying Yeti disgorged a fresh set of eager beavers. Just as quickly, we were pushed onto the plane (quickly please, urged the stewardess) and I’d barely got my belt tightened before we were on-air, and (those of us on the right side) admiring the view we’d just spent the last fortnight in. An admiring hour later, we skimmed down through the blanket of fog that was the Kathmandu Valley. The dirty ramshackle familiarity of my hometown grinned crookedly up at me.

Off the plane, I could make out a near-translucent Langtang behind the hazy northern contours of the Valley. A world away, once again. The Himalaya may as well have been a mirage…had I not known the dust of the trails threading around its fresh valleys of ice and snow…where it is cold and much, much more.

hotel kathmandu

A walk about town earlier this year on the sixth day of the southern strikes that closed the Valley down, snapping posters of Prachanda-for-President, ‘victims’ of the US Embassy’s DV immigration scheme, the ruins of the old Malpi College and the abandoned Hotel Kathmandu, the funky fusion of the Jhiljhile Kumari temple, crumbling Krishna Pauroti and chaotic Chabahil before I stretch my legs all the way down to Chakrapath where it hits me the comic-graphic nightmare of Kathmandu by way of the grey river, the black volcanic tyre dust of the road curving down and past Dhumbarahi where cruising along the drains of toxic green sludge a-chock with black, white and blue plastic bags and the dusty shells of water bottles and everything else besides there’s two dead dogs, one kalo-seto tate-pate as if kicked into the bushes the other brown and swoll and red-collared, and a film of dust over everything, everywhere.

Is this the Kathmandu I grew up in? Is it any different for me to be anywhere else I am familiar with and feel the casual alienation I feel here, too? I rarely walked here, BMX bandits we were thrilling past on our way to another game of follow-the-leader and bang-bang, what cared we for the new Shankha Park that fades there its walls plastered with red slogans manufactured up the road at the Youth Communist League office behind its protective barricade of bamboo pilings and commie-speak? I ground my way down to Chakrapath past the curving lines of idling vehicles ending at the pump closed till the morrow who knows what brings?

Meantime Mother has been attending her own revelations:

‘UN ko earthquake ko seminar ta horror movie hereko jasto hundo raicha!’

(the UN earthquake seminar I went to was like a horror movie!)

nagdaha buzz

a limber out of the dustbowl across the river from Dhapakhel led us to Nagdaha, another body of water surrounded by low terraces of green and yellow, another pocket of peace that couldn’t help but remind us of Taudaha-by-Chobhar. Part of the pond sectioned off as a patch of grassy wetland where waddled wild ducks and coots and white storks, and in the early evening joined by swallows swooping to meet their reflections. Facing onto the water we shared a ragged garden with other picnickers – the usual assortment of lads, familiers and couplets at the corners, speaking of what? away from the disapproving darts of self-professed loved ones. We tasted tongues (jibro fry) and guzzled beer, and Bikash lumped out luscious, spicy has ko chwoela picked up in a earthen brick eatery I’d never had picked for anything but demolition, to temper the light daze of the day.

Thence to the bar Bikash runs, Buzz. The novelty stemming as much as from the unlikeliness of the locality of Jawalakhel as from the bar’s cosy neighbourhood feel and warm tones. We balanced on the barstools and made merry, though what the rest made of us drunken knaves is doubtful enough.

A second sober visit confirmed my instincts. A large grave Buddha dominates one wall and is reflected in the opposite mirror; stylised paintings of women’s faces fill the walls around wooden chairs and tables with elegant bamboo coasters. Buzz is up the road to St. Mary’s, opposite the bonus branches of New Orleans, and a little further on, Roadhouse Café. There’s a couple of restaurants about as well, and with Quixote’s Cove set to lay out its literary wares in the next couple of months, I run the grave risk of abandoning Thamel altogether.