Before Climbing to Namche Bazaar

I’m jumping ahead of myself by taking you up the long, steep ascent to Namche before telling you the story of how I got to Nepal in the first place. That climb to the trading town was an aspiration or a symbol of the whole trek, of its challenges and of its accomplishments. So I want to take you back to January 2002 when my long-time friend, Wendy, phoned from Ottawa to ask if I’d go to Everest Base Camp with her.

Honestly, at the time, the idea seemed nutty -- frivolous. The Himalaya? Base Camp? Nepal? I couldn’t imagine why anyone did that kind of far out stuff. Actually, the thought frightened me too. The cold, the mountains, the six weeks away from home, the expense, my age -- could I do something so strenuous at almost 65, the altitude (We’ve all read stories of people dying en route to Base Camp.) I couldn’t think of even one reason why I’d want to travel there.

So I said to Wendy,” I’ll think about it.” And she waited. She phoned again. I talked with Bob. Then a couple of weeks, sensing my hesitation, Wendy, who was working at Alcatel’s Paris headquarters and accumulating a lot of airline points, offered to give me enough points for a first class return ticket to Bangkok. Her generous offer changed my whole perspective because Bob agreed to help with the financial part too. Finally, I saw an amazing opportunity to understand a part of the world I knew next to nothing about.

More honesty here. Six years ago I signed up for a post graduate creative writing course through Humber College. My mentor, Canadian writer and musician, Paul Quarrington, helped me write the first six chapters of Finding Nepal. I dipped back into other adventures that had given me the courage to consider Nepal. I described the training and finally the trek.

Because I used the journey from Lukla to Everest Base Camp as the structure, that is I followed the literal journey, I got bogged down with the book. It became predictable. It lacked tension and grip. During the period of writing, Coach Q prodded me to write more about myself, to add more flesh to the bones. So the book had also started to become an exploration of my hidden life, the part of me I didn’t want talk about, the part I hadn’t signed up for! He wanted me to be authentic. Real. Honest. Heck.

I was a reluctant horse that wanted to stay in the barn and hide. The book became a real gremlin that I had to put into a box under lock and key. Now here I am with you these six years later ready to open the box. I have no idea where I’m going with the story. But I know you are patient. I promise myself and you that I will see this journey through.

I’m including a photo of the eye of the Reclining Buddha taken in Thailand before the trek. I had this photo with me in 2006 while writing. In fact I wrote at night in hotel rooms after a six hour day of flying in CFUXY while en route to B.C., after having earned my Radio Operator’s License and Student Pilot Permit. The experiences were intense. I have the photo in front of me now. It represented(s) for me the story of the Golden Buddha. Here is that story.

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More than three hundred years ago, the Burmese army planned an attack on Thailand or Siam as it was called then. The Siamese monks at the time worshipped a golden Buddha shrine. It weighed two and a half tons. It was pure gold.

To protect it from the invading Burmese army, the monks covered the Golden Buddha with twelve inches of clay knowing that the warriors would think it worthless. But the Thai monks were slaughtered in the invasion and so the Golden Buddha remained a secret.

In 1957, a group of Tibetan monks were told that a new highway was being built in the area of the clay statue, that it would have to be moved. Later, during the lifting operation the shrine began to crack. It was much heavier than the monks and the engineers had expected. So, it was lowered onto the ground and covered with tarps for protection against an impending storm.

However, during a night time flashlight inspection, a glint caught the head monk’s eye. He found a chisel and hammer and began to chip away at a crack. As it widened, he was shocked to see the gold. By lantern, all the monks worked at the Buddha and eventually stood in awe at the miracle in front of them.

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For many and for me, the Golden Buddha represents the hidden self, the parts of us we chose to hide, our untold tales. In my blog stories, you’ll find photos of Kathmandu’s sacred power places, indescribable mountains, Hindu and Buddhist statues (While the Sherpa people of the Everest region follow Tibetan Buddhism, Nepal is mostly Hindu.), terraced rice fields in vivid shades of green and you’ll see the people that so amazed me with their happiness despite poverty. I’m glad you are on the journey with me.

Finding Nepal

Bridge Crossing

It’s one of those odd things – but even though I fly a plane, I’m still spooked by heights.  So when Wendy, (my Ottawa friend and trekking partner) and I saw the bridge off in the distance, I thought the Tibetan prayer flags were actually pieces of the bridge flying off into the air. Our guide, Rajendra, said, “We’ll be crossing the Dudh Kosi river on that one. It’s one of highest bridges in the Everest region (or Sagarmatha as the Nepalese call it)).” I remember thinking, I’d crawl across.

But that was before I knew that the bridge was full of holes stuffed with rocks by Yak herders, before I realized that the lumbering Yaks left their traces on the bridge, that the bridge swung in the air and that you could see the ground through the holes that weren’t stuffed. It was six months before Bob bought the 1958 Cessna 172 and nine months before I freaked out in the cockpit somewhere over the Prairies. But that is a much later story.

By the time Wendy and I had reached the bridge, we’d seen the Golden Buddha in Thailand, visited ancient cities within Kathmandu and landed in Lukla,  a tiny village east of Kathmandu, onto one of the scariest runways in the world. Maybe you have landed on some odd ones. But this one is the be all end all because you land at the edge of a steep cliff and taxi uphill to stop dead in front of barbed wire and a concrete building. You can imagine where my heart was at the end of that flight. I was already wondering what the take off would be like. But that also is another story.

Next post    “The climb to Namche Bazaar”   (I’ll post maps for the Mexico trip and for the Everest trek as soon as I can figure out the software.)

Back to Nepal

Garden earth around the house is warm and bulbs are popping up. I’m counting the blankets around the house in case we have to protect them from frost. Hard to believe – but for the last few days we’ve been X country skiing in Haliburton – falling and sinking into the deep soft snow and skiing over rivers running across the trails. But skiing nonetheless.

This next week, I’m returning to Nepal and my experiences trekking to Everest Base Camp in the Solu Khumbu region, northeast of Kathmandu and just south of Tibet. I have many photos (taken with a non digital Nikon SLR using Fuji Velvia slide film and scanned onto CDs) of the mountains, the people, their customs and religions to show you.

While a trek like this isn’t for everyone, doing something beyond your comfort zone – whatever it is, will give you a feeling of excitement, heightened awareness (I mentioned awareness in an earlier blog post) and confidence from taking the risk to do something new.

In the map below, my friend Wendy and I flew from Kathmandu (lower left corner) to Lukla where you see the airplane on the right, then trekked north though a number of small villages to Gokyo (upper -- right of centre) then back down to around Tengboche and north to the top of Kala Pattar (a small mountain, upper right) for the best view of Everest.

I don’t want to simply recreate the trek in chronological order because I think that would be boring. I’ll attach a better map so you can see the route, though. I want to frame the experience so you’ll understand many facets of Nepal and have a sense of trekking there, to be surrounded by 8 000 + meter mountains – the highest in the world. I’ll also include experiences and photos from the Annapurna region to the west of Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal – which is more accessible for those who want to see the towering giants in a shorter period of time.

The six chapters I've written for Finding Nepal have been collecting dust for six years. Now finally with the help of this blog and you, I'm dipping back in.

See you in Nepal!

Spring Light

We are skiing here at The Domain of Killien in Haliburton and already the light has a spring hue and lift. The road we crossed yesterday to access the trail was a coursing river.

After the stifling heat of Cancun, after climbing pyramid steps and stumbling through a jungle, how strange, how home it feels to be skiing again -- to feel the crunch of snow, because at end of January when we left for Mexico, we had only a dusting. Where did the winter go?

It was the spring light on translucent birch bark that caught my eye today.

Under the Same Moon

We’ve been home only four days, running around with the silliness of everyday life. One of my thoughts while we were in Mexico detached from the CBC news, The National, magazines and newspapers (Well I have to confess that I snuck a peek at Globe and Mail headlines a few times) was that we are absolutely too wired here. My resolution when back home was to stop listening to the news during the day and to stop watching the National at night. I’ll paint instead.

Some people – especially in Mexico City, are attached to their devices – but in most of the places we visited we didn’t people walking down the street chatting into phones. They are with their friends talking and laughing and actually – yes actually physically talking and looking into their friends’ eyes. On a GO train before leaving home, I saw five young guys sit down and start to text each other. No kidding. Their mouths seemed to be in good shape. But their fingers were doing the communicating. What kind of world is that?

Jean Jacques Rousseau said once that if society did not keep moral pace with technological advances, it would become a madhouse. I know, you might be thinking – well, Lynda, you are using an Ipad and you use email more than the phone. True. But I also see my friends and actually talk with them.

   

Another thing I noticed in Mexico was that I was paying attention all the time -- totally engaged with the people, the old buildings, the narrow sidewalks and in people’s conversations. Not easy in another language because you can do two things at once when listening in English -- and so I often didn’t notice a car hurtling toward me until Bob yanked me out of the way.

What do scientists say – that we use only 20% of our brain’s capacity? In Mexico, I swear I was using about 40%. One day in Oaxaca toward the end of our two and a half weeks there, I noticed that the buildings on the familiar route we walked were becoming commonplace. It struck me that I’d stopped paying attention the way I had before.

So I’m going to attach a photo or two to each blog. I'll call Wide Eyed – referring to the opening of the camera lens and to my eyes that have seen something new and different.

Spring Melt

Snow Drops in March

We’re off to the Domain of Killien in Haliburton with friends for a few days now. I hope to post a blog while there.

See you soon,

Lynda

PS  We’re all under the same moon in this world. We all have the same hopes, wishes desires for our families, for a roof over our head and food to eat. We all want respect and we all need love. The moon shot is taken while lying in a Cancun hammock the night before we left.

And So to Sleep

Our server said, "My parents moved to Cancun thirty years ago to work in the tourist industry. Before they came here Cancun was just a fisherman's island surrounded by forest."

"When do most of the students come down here?" I asked. "Later on in March," she said. But it's not like it used to be. In the spa where my mother worked, four guys ripped a huge door from the steam room a few years ago. That was the tipping point. Since then, hotels have added a lot of restrictions -- parents with their kids don't like all the partying.

Bob and I are staying in an eco hotel, Rey del Caribe in downtown Cancun and if even if there was partying on the resort strip, we wouldn't hear it.

Of the seven places we've stayed, (one was our home stay), three hotels were favourites, the Camino Royal in Puebla, Medio Mundo in Merida and here in Cancun. The others were places to hang our hats.

We leave here early tomorrow and I'm pinching myself that we'll be in Caledon this time tomorrow night. "This trip has been intense," I said to Bob over dinner tonight. "Not as intense as flying to Dawson City," he said.

True, I thought. With flying we had all the navigation and weather issues to deal with and the concentration of five to six hours a day in the air.

Being in touch with you through this blog has been fun. I hope you've enjoyed the ride as much as I have. It will take time to process our Mexican adventure. Check back in for "Looking Back" -- coming soon.

Getting Around

There are two bus companies in this part of Mexico -- OCC and ADO. Most of the locals travel second class on these. If you have more coin you in your pocket, you choose ADO or OCC first class. If your pockets are a little heavier with the stuff, you'd choose ADO, GL and if you want the very best, you go ADO Platino which is the ultimate first class. We're going Platino today.

If we were laden with coin, we'd probably have chosen to fly from city to city and at night to sleep on fine Egyptian cotton sheets. But as Nelson, our Merida B&B owner said, "If you want to see the people and understand their culture, you have to sleep on the first floor, not the second."

ADO stations are spiffy places with lots of clean glass and as we found out today different levels of waiting rooms. At first we sat on blue hard plastic chairs in a room the size of three football fields where you pay to use the washrooms. Lots of passengers waiting there. Then Bob noticed another smaller room off in one corner. Because we had Platino tickets, we dragged our baggage through sparkling glass doors and settled into red plastic upholstered chairs. Like in the larger room, we could watch buses coming and going. An attendant checked our tickets. "You must go into another room," he said.

"Why? I asked. "Because this isn't the Platino waiting room, he replied. I shrugged as he led us us to a third windowless room. This one had blue upholstered fabric chairs, free washrooms, complimentary tea and coffee, TV and device chargers. We sat down on the soft chairs.

"I don't like it in here," I said to Bob. "What's wrong with it? he asked. "I can't see the outside and I want to go back to the room with the red seats. I found the attendant. "No you can't change rooms. You are in a special class."

"Well," I said (all along in my most polite Spanish, of course), "I don't feel special and it's like a prison in there." Luckily for both of us, our bus to Cancun arrived then.

Here is a cut and paste map of Mexico showing our route from Mexico City south by bus to Puebla, then Oaxaca, by plane to Tuxla, taxi to San Cristobel de las Casas, bu to Palenque, Campeche, Merida and Cancun.

On the Culinary Side

If a Mexican asked you to describe a typical Canadian meal, what would you say? I'd have been stumped because our food is a mixture of so many cultures -- many of us are vegetarian -- so describing a meat dish wouldn't work. Sixty years ago, I would have described a Sunday dinner of roast beef, potatoes and dumplings, beans and carrots -- a very British meal.

But colorful, spicy Mexican cuisine has come through thousands of years of blending the food of indigenous cultures with Spanish after the 16th century. Mexican cuisine is so unique that in November 2010 it was was added by UNESCO to its lists of the world's "intangible cultural heritage". Pretty impressive.

The staples of Mexican foods are corn and beans. Corn is used to make masa, a dough for tamales, tortillas, gorditas, and lots of other corn-based foods. Lots of people here buy corn from vendors on the street and eat it as we would a hot dog.

Many of our lunches and dinners were prepared with typical Mexican spices --chiles, oregano, cilantro, epazote, cinnamon, Chipotle (a smoke-dried jalapeño chili), garlic and onions.

We love our breakfasts here at Medio Mundo -- a fruit plate with mango, papaya, pineapple, orange, melon, watermelon, raspberries, blackberries, mango yoghurt, sweet pastry, multigrain bread, butter, 3 types of jam, fresh orange juice and great coffee.

I've always loved a spicy Indian curry more than a dish of black beans with hot chili peppers. But when you order a beer here it will often come with a dish of limes and peanuts. If you order more than drinks the server will bring a bowl of nachos and four sauces -- a bean paste, a salsa, a very hot green sauce and something creamy. Yummy.

At our home stay, a large colorful napkin of fresh tortillas came in the door every morning from somewhere. In most restaurants, tortillas are made in house. In the photos you'll see some of our favourite dishes.

Our top restaurant here in Merida is La Chaya Maya that serves authentic Yucatan food. Women in traditional Mexican dress make tortillas there from dawn to dusk. It's a lively, fun place with yummy food. Later today, I'll post photos of this restaurant and our favourite dishes.

See you in Cancun

Uxmal

We walked back back to the B&B from an evening of traditional Yucatan guitar music tonight -- along dark streets with narrow sidewalks, our shoulders brushing the fronts of houses. Side streets have very few streetlights.

Culture is supported by the government with free concerts several times a week. Amazing. Visiting Uxmal today was almost a last minute decision but a lucky one because the ruins are in such good shape -- much better than those of Palenque and a lot more interesting. In the photos you'll see bas reliefs of snakes, birds, turtles, flowers, jaguars and rain gods covering the massive stone walls. Mayan gods are mostly connected to the natural world -- with weather, power and fertility.

It's hard to imagine all these stone walls painted in vibrant colors as they were way back then. The lighter coloured pieces are restorations. I felt a sense of awe walking amongst jumbles of carved ancient rock on the ground where it had tumbled hundreds of years ago.

I learned a little more about Mayan cosmetic practices today. I mentioned cone heads which is referred to as forehead flattening. It was wax beads that were dangled between babies eyes to make them beautifully crossed. Men and women cut themselves to create lovely scars and the elites sharpened their teeth to points, making small dents in order to insert Jade and Pyrite that symbolized wealth and beauty.

Ball games were their favourite sport. But these games were serious affairs often ending in death. The players had to try to keep a hard rubber ball in the air without using their hands, heads or feet. The game was often used to settle disputes between rival communities. I've heard from several guides that either the winning or losing team captain was executed. So the jury is out on that piece of information. What a shame that most Mayan writing was destroyed.

Uxmul site was the capital city of the then Puuc region and most of the buildings were constructed between 875 and 900 CE. Only 50 years after this intense building period the people left for other areas.

Along with photos of the ruins, I'm including a shot of traditional dancers in the park from last night.

Upcoming blogs -- Mexican food and sleep. On to Cancun tomorrow by bus.

A World of Difference

"Merida is only three hours by bus from Campeche. But it's as though they are separate worlds. How could they be so different?" I asked our Merida B&B owner this morning over breakfast.

"Because Campeche is on the coast, it was constantly invaded by pirates and British privateers. It wasn't able to easily establish itself later. But Merida is inland and so early on it had trading opportunities and is better off now," he said.

Late yesterday afternoon while exploring the Merida Zocalo, organ music drew us into the cathedral -- and what a church it is! The structure (and the music) soar to the heavens. As I sat in the gleaming wooden pews I thought -- what a gift to be here in this amazing cathedral listening to music that pulls at your heartstrings. Later on we stopped at a cultural centre to look at a Frieda Kahlo poster advertising a woman's rights conference being held today. Tonight we're going to the Zocala for a Yucatan song and dance performance -- tomorrow night to a trio ensemble performance.

This evening we're tuckered again after walking around town, trying to squeeze in as much as possible. I suppose it was a good thing that many museums are closed on Monday. So we had more time to see Mexican artist Fernando Castro Pacheco's 27 vividly colourful murals in the Governor's Palace. These moveable murals show what many believe was the reality of life for the Maya in the Yucatan after the Spanish conquest as well as images and myths of the tribes in the region. Castro Pacheo's paintings also depict scenes of work and torture under the Spanish colonizers.

You'll see a photo of a Mayan man emerging from an ear of maize as described in the Popol Vul, the sacred book of the Maya. Since ancient times maize has been the most important Maya food. The god of maize is the most important of the Maya gods. How horribly ironic, then, that the indigenous people now have to purchase their corn from Monsanto! For these people each kernel of corn is considered sacred because it contains the power to sustain man and represents the cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth. Not anymore.

One of the biggest learnings I'm having during these travels is what a mess we've made of things. A guest asked the B & B owner why Mexicans were so poor. He said, "Because North America has robbed them." This is true in so many ways. Campeche is the safest state in Mexico. But the northern states closest to the US aren't safe because of the drug wars created by our dependance on drugs.

Sorry. This is a downer subject. We know all about this stuff. So I'm not going to talk about it anymore.

You'll see photos taken around Merida today, the birth from corn mural and the cathedral with the 80 pipe organ.

We've visited seven cities and seven states so far -- what an amazing headful of sights, sounds and thoughts we are carrying back home with us.

I'll continue this blog at home, writing about my experiences in Nepal and of our flights in CFUXY to B.C. and the Yukon. Tons of photos for you still to see.

Off to the Mayan ruins of Uxmal tomorrow. We have eaten in lots of restaurants with no stomach problems so far (We had injections to fight Ecoli before leaving home). But I got 16 bug bites in Campeche (I think that's what they are) that are driving me a bit nuts. Don't know how the little buggers bit me where they did.