Dolpo Journal 1

 As Cedar and I cull through our journals we will be posting excerpts of our time in Dolpo...

When I circled into Kathmandu, just two days earlier, square pastel buildings ringed in lush terraces looked like a model below me.  A model with a tiny taxi weaving through the streets carrying my sister to fetch me with a cold bottle of iced tea and begin the pre-trip sprint to pick up our just finished permits, and shore up the many legs of our journey just to the “trailhead” of our 35 trek into Dolpo.  It takes a trip to Nepalganj on the boarder of India, and from there, a flight to the tiny village Juphal, the only airport (a strip of dirt above a deep ravine) in Dolpo.  The flights are full and unreliable since they only fly with full planes, and only if the weather is perfectly still and clear, since it involves some large mountains.  So we decide to try to catch a rare day bus to Nepalganj, which means showing up at the bus park and asking around to see if there is a bus going, and then try our luck at the flight to Dolpo the next morning.  After sleeping a few hours we get up and stuff everything into our backpacks and flush out into the streets of Patan at the puja hour, many bells ringing, and singing from the small temples.  We catch a harried cab as Karma, our guide -- and the only guide to ever come from the villages of Dolpo --  calls to tell us he found a bus going, but we must hurry to get the last seats.  Our unusually safety conscious cab driver takes his time buckling up and driving us slowly through the empty streets to the bus park where we catch the last three seats in the very back of the bus, which we share with four and then five men,  as we catapult over the rough road for the next 14 hours.

We cross the flat jungle land of golden Buddhas sitting out in fields and hot wind blowing through the yellow Salas forest, driving into the night - long strings of fire along the forest floor.  Slowly we are rickshawed through the empty streets to a guesthouse in Nepalganj and sleep-  finally- geckos on the wall and a fan blowing hot air across us through the night.  We realized before falling asleep that we do not have enough cash for the flight, as they only take cash at the airport, so before light Isan motorbikes with the guesthouse owner into town to see if anything is open.  Of course the square is closed, and just as they are about to give up, and insure a multi-day stay in this sweltering little border town, an ATM owner looks out his window, and shouts down to see if they need to be let in.  And so they return victorious, and we load into 8-seater plane, and teeter into the white mountains, Isan- saying she took all the money out that she could, and it was just enough for one-way tickets to Dolpo. 

July

July.  I am posting some photos taken in the streets this past week.    Leaving my apartment (where I have been holing up to finish drawings) I realize it is a treasure field out there.  Oh Kathmandu, heart. 

On Crystal Mountain

Nature.

Finally. The first rain has come and with it the first   a i r   I actually want to breathe, big gulping pre-monsoonal gulps of the stuff.  I'm not really monsoon-familiar so the growing oppression of the 'dry' hot season just seemed like it would go forever and make for a really good wildfire season, but of course that is my montana-mind thinking and I am adjusting it to the fact that summer means rain, and rain makes you happy.   

Our 35 Day Dream: Dolpo

more to come!

How can I not fall for a place that streets are crowded with watermelon slice sellers.  On my way to work I curse being stuck in traffic, my thin cycle wheels bumped by fellow impatient traffic jam partners revving their motorbikes and when we start to move again I see the holdup: a watermelon slice cart and it’s pusher maneuvering around a pile of bricks in the road, ok ok I can wait for that.  Share the road!  Watermelon carts! City busses!  Bricks! The road is not discriminating. 

Last night in search for some vermillion powder I headed to the shops surrounding the temple square near my apartment. These shops, all six of them in a row, sell worship material. Basically they sell Prayer Equipment. The shelves lined with cashew jars, brown paper, and greasy bottles, the corners draped with silk scarves, ox hair tassels and malas

As I sat with the shop keeper and watched him load up customer bags with coconuts, incense, red string, colored powder, oil, metal dishes, wool wicks, ghee, sugar, and in the he tosses a handful of loose mustard seeds in, when asked why he answered  ‘for bad luck’. Of course!  This is an entire business of believing so of course they have their own rituals…this reminds me of an instance a few months back.  It was a freezing cold and windy winter night, my friend had such a bad migraine that she was sort of collapsed on the restaurant tabletop. I went to find a pharmacy to get her some pain stuff.  After picking out what I needed I waited to pay, but the pharmacist was in the middle of blessing his shop with incense so I stood there and waited while he opened every drawer, waving incense over the contents, every shelf, then the storage area behind, then the doors, windows, calculator, and lastly me and my bottle were incanted-ed and incensed. He finished, turned around, smiled and said “70 rupees”.

It’s getting hot here but right now there are cumulous building to the east. The city sounds. It is another New Year here, Nepali year 2068; this will be my fourth New Year since arriving in Nepal. Silver flags, strips of pure bright flitting flickering above, a canopy of silver in the dark greasy tunnel of street. To celebrate this new year I am going to post photos from India where I was for the New Year of 2012 a few months back.  I will post some words about that place but am waiting for my poetess sister to show up here, today, that’s right…my sister returns!  Tomorrow with sister I am setting off to the region of Dolpo in NW Nepal. If you read Peter Matthiessens Snow Leopard, well that’s the place! So I am going to study with this exceptional artist from a tiny village up on the Tibetan border.  Tenzin Norbu, the artist, and his assistants are painting the wall murals in a new Buddhist monastery and I might be able to put a few lines in as well. !!!!!!.  You can see some of his work here- http://www.drokpa.org/dolpo_artist/paintings1.htm. We will be walking and camping out for over 30 days.  I can hardly contain myself. 

India, Rajasthan

D r e a m.

In the mountains, the high treeless glaciating country, where everything is blue, black and clear. I am hurrying along trying to make it to a road to find a bus back to Kathmandu. Coming up and over a lateral moraine I stop, an enormous creature the size and color of the boulders is moving about the smoke colored glacier rubble. The cracked and shifting body is shocking in size and yet exhilaratingly familiar. The ridged spine, multiple nose horns and beaked mouth all make sense! This is where THEY have been! Right here in this Himalayan glacial melt valley, hidden among the sharp flecks of growing mountains living off of what? lichen? stones? I looked around and there they are: The Great Creatures of all our childhood dreaming. Slowly lumbering around the stones; horns, tails, beaks all cutting angles into the bright cold sky. Looking back toward the peak I have just come from, I spot a streak of ice-white Sabertooths lounging, slowly tilting their monumental heads this way and that in the thin gusting air, the canines splitting the sun into a million beams. Behind them snow is blowing in big ghost-like patterns off the tips of the mountains. I kneel down, overwhelmed with the joy one feels in dreams where you realize that a deceased loved one didn’t actually die but just had a changed address and you feel so relieved and excited that there was actually no loss after all, no grief, just a misplaced address, phone number. And now you know; you can call anytime. So friends, this is Planet Dinosauria letting you know it was just a change of address.

Dhaulagiri and Cedar

SO. so. Here another slew of entries after quite the hiatus. Now it is Tibetan New Year and we (dearest didi: ms. cedar brant.. and myself) have been on a work retreat at a lovely nunnery backed into one of the forested foothills of the Kathmandu Valley.

For one week it was this: Isan - Painting, Cedar - Writing, Both Sisters: Drinking gallons of Milk Tea. Two days ago we climbed the mountain (Shivapuri) behind the nunnery hoping to do a bit of Himal gazing, the clouds had already hunkered in on the horizon so we settled for getting pushed around by the wind on a gigantic mountain-gazing boulder and watching the foothills fade, row by row into the night. Shivapuri has a long tradition of Hindu yogis living and meditating in the forest, and near the top of Shivapuri lives one such Baba. While we had a plan to hike down to the nunnery in the dark if need be, in the last light of day we came upon the little hermitage with all its prayer flags, a golden lion mouth over the spring, a fire going in the open kitchen and a few friendly Austrian faces peering out from beside the Indian Baba, and we said, lets stay! So we squatted beside the firewood with Baba cooking us rice and curry beside his Shiva trident casting long trident-shaped shadows, and upon closer inspection decided the Austrians (very tall and pale with long shiny black hair and even shinier pointed lil’whites) were in fact vampires, so there we stayed, two mountain-hungry Brant sisters, three Vampires from Vienna, and the sparkly old Sadhu eating rice and drinking the fire smoke into the night. We then curled to sleep in our dark bare concrete room in the temple, which smelled of years of puja offerings (less romantic smell than it sounds, actually we had a conversation about it)

Isan “ ick. what is that smell?

Cedar “ yeah, it does smell a little bad in here, it’s just that stinky Nepal smell”

Isan “ Really? I didn't realize there was a specific stinky Nepal smell?”

Cedar “ Yeah, its this smell I have smelled a lot here, what is it?.... its like stinky puja stuff, that’s it! its built up old puja smell!”

Isan “ oh yeah, yeah, that’s it.”

And so we drifted off in an olfactory cloud of a million lit butter lamps, sour ghee, holy water and milk, heaps of burned juniper, incense, decomposing marigolds and fruits into a remarkably deep and lovely sleep

We woke before light to climb up the white stone steps in the hush and orange sky of dawn, past orchids and golden tendrils of moss, and caught the first pink in the mountains as they slowly emerged like whales form the murky deep, from the night, from the smoke of a million fires warming water in the valleys for tea. We sat in the wind, with mountains like a great rumpled cloth in the morning – a rag used to polish some great crystal orb of stars.

We descended to find the baba in his hermitage in the woods boiling us tea, when asking him about the cow, he snorts and paws the air imitating a tiger with his orange long johns, white beard, and star-like eyes. The vampires had taken sick in the night and so we hoofed it away from them, sleeping pale-ey in the sun, away from the hermitage cow with a bucket on its head, away from the baba over his smokey Shiva fire and down into the large trees where monkeys rustled around in the leaves, and the leaves shown silver, and the trail led down to the Gompa, to the city, to that great blinding warp of golden unknown that strings out, the paint, the gold lining of words mapping mapping mapping our way through this world of living.