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.

Trek to Pokhara

We decided at the last minute to go for a walk to Pokhara. Boyd dashed down to Besisaha before lunch and still dripping with sweat but loaded with emergency peanuts and cheese we set off along the not so well trodden path to Pokara. We had a map photocopied from the Anapurna map that had nearly the whole route( only a couple of centimeter s chopped off in the middle).  Some directions delivered to Rissa in Nepalese by a quarry worker and a compass.

In this part of the world there are still walking tracks between villages but there is also a road which we followed getting a touch nervous that we might be running out of time for our walk to Nalma. True to form the kids stopped to admire Tractors, some stone quarries, moss, puddles and a man carrying a chicken in a bag.

We arrived at the first village, a tiny settlement that spanned the ridge between two valleys.  Boyd asked..... "Is this Nalma? "  Everyone replied "Yes!!" But we had been in Nepal long enough now...... So Boyd asked if Nalma was back the way we had come. To which the answer was emphatically Yes!  The compass pointed through the village and across the ridge. And once we had established that no we were not staying and that Yes we were going to Nalma an old man escorted us up the hill in the right direction and found us a local also destined for Nalma. A kind lovely lady who spoke no English but walked so patiently at kids speed, along the road, down the steps through a wedding at dusk and all the way to the only guest house in the dark in Nalma.

We gratefully ate delicious Dahl baht  and grunted at the locals who came to gaze at us through wire meshing that enclosed our dining area. Reminiscing of zoo trips we spotted another westerner  ( Noella) and invited her in. She had been staying In the village teaching at the school for 6 weeks and hadn't seem a white face for 2 weeks. The village had been a thriving tourist destination 30 years ago when the Anapurna circuit started Pokara. We had an insight into what accommodation looked like in those days. Our bedroom windows had iron bars and corrugated iron shuttets. Ama spoke no English but served DELICIOUS Dahl baht.

Everyday is a Saturday

I often try to think about how to describe life here in Gaunshaha not from a specific this is what happens but how it feels. And it came to me on how to describe it here.

It feels like a Saturday back home, things to do but at at your own pace.
You choose what order and when.
You have the time to stop and just hang out if needed. Your the one to choose I need to get going.
You have your little projects your working on which you have planned
Its still busy
And as a Dad you can take the kids on a special trip somewhere fully focused with them.
All this each day everyday.

That is how it feels.

One week old kid, taken by the grandma.

Getting ready to carry stones across a cliff face

Socialising in someone's kitchen

Luke heating breakfast ginger tea with Beounce

The Nieghbour getting some stones delivered

Rice Harvest

In Thailand it is socially unacceptable to climb on the table or drop food on the floor but it that is nothing compared to stepping over, or heaven forbid, on rice. When eating, every grain is carefully transported and messy eaters just don't exist- (except in my family. ) In Thailand we were introduced to a different cultural mind set, community first, respect elders above all else, the group mindset as a posed to the single entity. And was with these ideas that I stepped reverently onto the Nepali rice field, contemplated food for the family for half the year and set to " cuttigo le Daan" (cutting the rice).

Rice is, like most grains, a kind of grass,. The rice grain shiney and white encased in its brown fibrous husk. Each husk and grain growing with perhaps 40 others on stem of rice grass and each plant home to 5 or 6 stems. I grasped the first plant with my left hand and every rice grain rustled dramatically reminding me how easy it was to dislodged the precious grain. Steadying the plant with my left hand I sliced the plant off at the ground height with the rice knife and then turned to carefully place it flat behind me with the tidy rows generated by the prolific industry of my Nepali coworkers. I watched them slicing and placing at skillful pace Gibbering Nepalese and not spilling a seed.

4 days later we  returned to gently gather the dried plants into bundles , and tie them  with a twist of straw (barrals) . A circular patch in the rice field had been weeded and and slurry of water and buffalo dung massaged into the soil resulting in a smooth dust free surface to work on.  Taras favorite part was to carry the barrals laden with rice to this circle and carfully lay the barrals grain parts innermost. In the centre was a stone apon where the grain was seperated( zartigo le Dan) from the plant by bashing it on a Stone (Lukey  loved this part). Papa  formed the barrals into  a hay stack and the rice was carried home to be dried in the sun and later separated fronts the husks at the rice mill. 

During the threshing most of the grain is dislodged, but some remains on the plant. So a few days later all the barrals were taken home from the field and restacked They will be unstacked again next week and thrown under the feet of oxen tied to stake and driven around and around  in circles over the straw. This aerates the fodder before restacking loosely for cow food for the rest of the winter but also dislodges the last remaining grains of rice which are carefully swept up and saved. 

Each grain of rice is so tiny but together they feed the whole of Asia.

!