Trecking to Pokara day 2

We woke early to the sound of cockerels. lots of cockerels!

Lukey had a quiet wee wee out of the window though the iron bars that clattered loudly on the iron roof below and landed on the neighbours patio below.

As we chomped on our tasty chapatti and fried egg we spotted a boy playing knuckle bones with some stones and  then Lukey played with a chicken on a string. 

When I had researched tracking in Nepal I had read a book published in 1980  that had been discarded from the Library. It painted a picture of Nepal where people subsistence farmed, where  bright eyed children followed trekkers  amazed by the sight of white faces. Where children made their own toys and every one was friendly.  This was the Nepal that I found this morning. The land in this valley was Nepali flat  ( terraces wider than 4m) and faced the sun  and significantly warmer than Guanshaha. It took us 2 hours to leave the village, either distracted by the rice mill or an Ama beconing us in for "Boise doot and suntallas" (buffalo milk and oranges). And everywhere we went we were follOwed by a silent entourage of  children keen to demonstrate their windmills on sticks, or just to stare  at our children. :-)

The first sign of the Nepali festival  was a trail of dead cockerels. The first ones were brandished by young children still fully feathered. As we got closer to the Temple more and more carcasses emerged some plucked , some partly cookd and  a couple of guys were  dangling the fully roasted hind end of a goat. These guys had enough English to  explain that the animals had been taken down  to the temple to be slaughtered and the blood offered as puja to the  Hindu Gods.

We met a man who wants us to give him a 10 percent investment into a 5200 000 american doller 3 megawatt power station: a hydro power station that would result in damming a pristine Nepali valley... Hmmmm tempting. ?

We got to the base of the threatened valley where an ancient wizerned face appeared out of a tiny window  and grasped the air with her tiny hands yelling in Nepali. Then she slapped her hands to her head pointy fingers skywards. Tara and Lukey recognized the Nepali words for Buffalo milk and we ducked inside for refreshments. Afterwards the Nepali children followed us down to the Wooden bridge which spanned the river and demonstrated its sturdyness by running back and forth across it before we attempted the crossing .

On the other side of the river we were back onto a road. It  gave tantalizing glimpses of the Nepali villages below but time was getting on and we dare not leave the road. As we trudged down the road, I ( Rissa ) began to realize that the dotted line that beautifully strung the villages together on our map was a walking track  and the road that we were walking on was not on  our map and so attempted to make various detours away from the road. The last detour was successful ( aside from getting directions from a drunk man that wanted Tara to sit on his knee) and we followed a Nepali man carrying 40kg of buffalo food across the river flats zigzagging across the rivulets of the braided river that we had spotted from the valley crest the night before. We were followed by more and more Nepalis on their way home, a young lady, dressed in her finest clothes, an old lady quietly knitting  as she walked and a drunk man with his angry wife that lost it at one point and stopped to hurl abuse and stones at him.

When we got close to Laxmi Bazaar  we walked along a man made canal that ran parallel to the river. The reason for its apparent disuse became clear when we reached an area where a land slide had tipped its broken body into the river.  We got to Laxmi  Bazaar on dusk.

Now, when planning our trip we had got directions from the Nepali guy in the quarry called Durga who spoke as much English as I did Nepali. So when I couldn't find  the "Grand Bazaar" he mentioned on my map , I assumed that I had misheard and he ment "Laxmi Bazaar " that I could find. As we approached the village it struck me that the Grand Bazaar he talked about us getting accommodation in  might have been in the missing 1cm of our route on the map. We asked "Guest House  ?" And the shaking of heads confirmed my suspicions. "Hmm this'll be interesting" said Boyd "Still we wanted an adventure!" and undeterred he set off through the village.

Eventually we found a man who had tacked a wooden extension onto his house and had put 5 beds on it, so we gratefully put our bags down and asked for some tea.

A group of about 15 adults and children gathered to watch us, gibbering n
 Nepalese. They were so curious that they followed us into our room watching us unpack, feed the kids , drink our tea. The last child left well after nightfall.