The Family

I’ve been really busy running all over town looking for an apartment to Rent with my friend Aiden for the independent study period.  It’s exciting and kind of fun despite the work, but it made me realize that I’ve never posted about my wonderful host family with whom I’ve been living.   Below are a couple of photos I snapped at breakfast this morning.  The first is of my Amala, Yangzom, watching as my four year old sister, Tenzin Choenyi, spells and shouts the names of more English vegetables than I know (do you know what a capsicum is?).

                The picture below it is of my 4 year old brother, Tenzin Chonjup.  Choenyi is unbelievably smart and Chonjup is equally lazy.  Though they’re twins Choenyi is already a grade ahead; it’s pretty hilarious to hear my amala joke about it.  Last night Choenyi grabbed a ruler and sat Chonjup in a chair in the center of the room and demanded he sing the alphabet.  Whenever he would mess up, and he would mess up, she would force him to put out his hand and rap him on the knuckles.  He responded by asking, in English (I think it’s the only English phrase he knows), “Miss, may I go the bathroom?”  Then walking over to Choenyi and pretending to pee on her.

Tihar and a Promise

I got a request to update my blog more frequently.   I promise I’ll try.

It’s Tihar in Kathmandu right now, which just means the city is one big party.  It’s the festival of lights and buildings are decked out in a Christmas-like way.  Sparklers are everywhere and kids are lighting off homemade bombs at all hours, day and night and from the explosions I can hear outside my bedroom window while I write this post it sounds like some of the engineers were pretty ambitious.  The festival is particularly exciting because, unlike the last national festival, Desai, no animals are sacrificed during Tihar, meaning that Kathmandu’s Buddhist population (in which I am living) gets to participate too.

                If you’re young it’s a pretty good financial opportunity too.  If you’re in a rock band, you rig up some amps, a drum set, and a microphone stand in the back of a pickup truck and drive around town stopping and playing outside of apartment complexes and in crowded areas.  People who stop to listen and dance offer food and money to the performers….and they’re everywhere.  Especially during the day it’s a little challenging to get away from the Nepali rock songs.  There are a few English tracks too: F**k the Police being one crowd favorite.   Driving down the main road in my neighborhood yesterday afternoon was a six part brass band playing on top of what looked like a commandeered sanitation truck.  Who needs a sanitation truck when everyone just burns their rubbish anyway?

                The weather here is pretty much perfect.  It’s cool and sunny, but (especially with all the lights up) I miss the cold.  I hear it snowed in Denver and some of the ski season hype has made its way out here.  The bootleg DVD shop around the corner has a skiing video and I just may pick it up after class today.

                On another note I got up at 5:30 yesterday morning to watch the world series at a friends’ house where the television gets ESPN, only to find out the game was postponed.  Woke up again today and it was worth it.  Wow.  I had to leave for class in the bottom of the eighth but had the next four innings up on gamecast during the lecture.   Tomorrow we get to do it all again.

                I always tell myself to keep the text to a minimum in these posts so that people are willing to actually read it, but I never seem to manage.  Maybe that means I do need to just post more often!  Anyway, I’ll end this scatter brained post with a picture me riding a horse back from an excursion to the villages and caves north of Lo-Manthang, just a few miles from the Nepal-Tibet border.

Photo Credit: Ganden Tashi

A bit about mustang

    I suppose that before I clog up this blog with too many more posts about Mustang I should explain a little bit about what the place is.  Temporally this post can represent 2 days in Jomsom I spent waiting for my other classmates to arrive. 

Mustang is a district in Nepal which stretches like a giant fat finger into the Tibetan plateau.  The reason I had to fly through the gorge I described in my last post is that Mustang actually lies geographically on the plateau.  It is the only piece of Nepal which lies on the northern side of the Himalayan range which runs like a spine along the northern borders of Nepal India and Pakistan.

                Severed from Nepal by some of the highest mountains in the world, and from mainland China by the (until very recently) totally undeveloped TAR, the place is very remote.  Until 1992 foreigners were officially barred from entering the region by the Nepalese monarchy and even now, any trip to upper mustang (which means trekking past the village of Kagbeni) means outrageous (as in, I’m never ever going to be able to afford to go back) fees to the government.  All that means is that very few people make the trip and I feel very very lucky.

                Culturally, religiously, and linguistically, upper Mustang is unmistakably Tibetan.  Still today nearly all of the regions 7,000 inhabitants are pastoralists, herding yaks and goats in the winter and summer and growing winter wheat, mustard, buckwheat, and barley during the rest of the year.

                Below is a photo I took of a buckwheat field outside the village of Thini which sits across the valley and above Jomsom (which is really just pretty new a cluster of government buildings and guest houses).  The little white building on the hill in the distance is the Stupa which was the destination for that day-hike

 

Back in Kathmandu/ Ep. 1.

                I’ve been back in Kathmandu (and reunited with the internet) for a couple of days now but I feel like I’m still getting my feet back under me and it doesn’t help that I’ve had a nasty stomach bug for the last 24 hours.  When I lie down or lean to the side I can actually feel the liquid in my bowels flowing around in the tubes.  Amala is doting over me so much though that it feels like home. 

                To try and write about the trip would be ridiculous.  There’s too much to talk about so I’ll write about little episodes whenever I get some time.  Episodic stories are always cooler anyway.

PART 1 OF THE DAVID’S ADVENTURES IN MUSTANG: GETTING THERE

                The trek was scheduled to start from Jomsom but getting there means a 20 minute plane flight from Pokhara.   Pokhara is around 3,000 feet and Jomsom is just over 9,000 feet in elevation.   The Jomsom airport is the most dangerous in the world and to get there you have to fly through the deepest mountain gorge in the world – between Nilgiri and Dhaulagiri, the smallest of which is over 23,000 feet tall.  The dinky 15 seater planes which fly the route get grounded if it’s cloudy and don’t fly after noon because the wind blasting through the gap is too intense.  Sounds awesome.

                Unfortunately the day our flights were scheduled to leave was really cloudy.  We arrived before 6am and waited for the weather to clear.  At one point a wheel fell off of a plane on the tarmac and there was a mad scramble to fix it.  That gave us something to watch. 

                The clouds didn’t really clear up much, but at 10:30 they let a plane go and six of us piled on.  It was not a smooth ride.  We didn’t know at the time but the regular cruising altitude for the flight is 12,000 feet and we were up around 19,000 struggling to stay clear of the clouds (and mostly failing).  Because of the clouds we didn’t get many spectacular vistas but when the fog would clear enough to see a peek it felt close enough to touch.  I took the photo below during one of the longer cloud breaks.

                Needless to say we arrived safely but were the only flight the authorities let go that day.  None left the next day either and the remaining 11 students ended up spending 2 days on public busses fighting their way up the gorge on a dirt road (if you can call it a road) which more often broken than functional.  They have some pretty crazy stories but I’ll take an awesome 20 minute flight and 2 free days of day hikes from Jomsom any day.