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.

Who’s Nhuchhe?

Listing to interminable, reactionary rambles on the quagmire of Nepali politics, I sit shrouded in my own darkness, list in the flickering flames we draw on, amused only by the idea that this Baluwatar space, once most likely the seat of a minor noble in Rana times, also served as the headquarters of the royalist Janashakti Party, before its modern-day incarnation as *Nhuchhe’s Kitchen: The Organic Bistro. Where last year I sip-supped on laligurans juice (a little tar, refreshing, and awfully nationalistic) and organic buff momos from Kavre, presumably reared with much tender care before being dragged off to the slaughtering grounds in the Valley mooing Jai Bajrangabali Mata Ki Jai Please Toot and Have A Nice Day!

(*since incarnated once more as a Thai & Organic restaurant!)

conversations with women

A conversation overhead (as I stopped, amused, opposite the tailor’s shop off New Road where, in big bold white on red a sign sums up in English and Nepali what clients should expect: Humour)

Lady (with long protruding teeth): haina haat haalera najiskinus na bhanya.
Leda (nondescript): ey ke bho ta ni
Lady: aimai sanga haat halera jiskinu hunna k. logne maanche ra swasni maanche chuttai basnu parcha.

And another gem from Pashupati. As I began distributing old wrinkled notes to old, wrinkled ladies on the way out, after being prompted by me mum, two robust looking ladies in dhotis and shawls approached me. They couldnt have been more than 40. ‘Ey babu hamilai pani dinus na!’ I gave them a weary shake of the head. ‘Maile ta yaha budi aama haru lai po dina lageko, tapai haru la kaaha ho ra?’ To which one rejoined: ‘Hami pani magne ta ho ni!!!’ I laughed, and stepped into a pat of fresh dung. They laughed.

manjushree galchhedo

Millennia have washed past since Manjushree cleft the valley with his flaming sword but it was only last winter I made my way to Chobhar, dropping onto the ringroad to Kirtipur through a forgotten side road out of Sanepa. Except for the burgeoning numbers of concrete residences spilling out the centre and filling up all the wrinkles and folds of the valley, in evidence in this southwest corner too, Kirtipur appears forgotten as well.

We drove past the battered, tattered gates of the national university, then up the hill to come upon Taudaha (past the tiny, painted, bamboo cottages for young lovers, the signpost sporting a nubile, barely clad maiden belying its claim to be a Family Garden Resort), an asymmetrical large pond where a giant Nag is believed to lurk (a semi-divine escapee from Manjushree’s draining of the Valley waters), in reality a winter stopover for avian tourists.

This day of dreary, cloudy early Magh the depleted waters sat stolidly amongst worn hillocks upon which perched our little restaurant. But the looming olive mountains to our back surveyed that rarest of things in the Valley today – space. Today, scores of wild ducks floated on Taudaha while large black cormorants weighed down the two bare trees on the tiny island to the left.

After the birds had chirruped their evening roost, we drove over to the gorge itself, heralded by an all-too-familiar stench. That Bagmati, viewed as a springing fall down the face of Shivapuri (even the mountain can barely be made out through the winter smog now), makes its inglorious exit here.

There’s something classically wrong about this view out the Valley. You tread onto the narrow suspension bridge, and look down to see what you have already wrinkled your nose at – the black waters of Kathmandu’s river, swirling with white effluent. You dread what you might see if you gaze too deeply into its viscosity and step back off, smiling weakly. If ever there was a photo op over a river, this is one to put on the bilboards, except this dystopia straight out of a comicbook is not some imagined nightmare, it’s Nepal 2008, the ancient temple of Jal Binayak perversely framed by the rusting hulk of the Himal Cement Factory on the one, the Bikhumati on the other.

on the bhatti trail

Fresh from the Gokyo trail, alternating between explications of myself (to bemused locals) and my country (to curious phareners), the latter peppered with exhortations to try the tongba! the chhyaang! – imagine my indignation once we’d twistered ourselves around a mini-table on the rooftop of the Anacha bhatti to be told yes, we’d get our sekuwas, our egg baras, our alu ko achar and our kachela, but there was no chhyaang. Eh? What’s that? No chhyaang in a bhatti?

So it was true! That dwarf of a Home Minister was really getting on my nerves now. The dance bars? The footpath people? The casinos? They don’t sell anything I want. But moonshine? Are we to be condemned to drink shite Nepali lager and worse Indo-whisky at the expense of our homegrown and well, well-tested local brews?

Still, the view of the Krishna Mandir flush in front of Anacha is superlative. It’s one thing to be craning about with your camera while motorbikes vroom you away, another to be sitting back admiring the intricate stone figurework washing down some crunchy, spicy sekuwa with a bowl of…?

It was time to move on. Indeed, it was incumbent upon us to get to the bottom of this sorry business. Where was the chhyaang? No less than a bhatti crawl would do. We paid the sahuni, stoutly surrounded by her wares, a pot of money, and a large flat tawa on which she turned half a dozen egg baras over while shouting at her charges.

We crossed Patan Durbar Square in the fading gold of the evening, arrowed for Chasal, where, my pharen-local friend informed me, a classy bhatti awaited, buffalo testicles at the ready. But just as soon as we’d dipped into one of the alleys we espied a hariyo parda. We peeked in – a tiny, grimy cove sucked us in. Steel bowls of chhyaang were quickly doled out under the smiles of the regulars. Thin, but plentiful. Indifferent plates of chewy meat made their way towards us. In a circle around the stove a family conversed in Newari as they ate and drank, the littlest of all cradling her own littlest plate of meat. And what plopped from above? A starling, peering out her mud nest on the blackened rafters.

A few more twists and turns in the dark we burst upon the Chasal bhatti, an altogether grander, dozen-tabled affair housed in a roofed-in courtyard, replete with posters of stupas and tigers reclining before waterfalls. More birds, hens this time, cleaning up under the tables. The chhyaang was altogether richer, the meat yet enticing after all our labours, and the ambience, classic. Here the men of Nepal drink and eat and talk and laugh.

I’d love to tell you how to get here. Only I don’t remember. Try Chasal Chowk next to Patan Durbar Square. This would be my local if I were local to Patan. Where’s yours?