Siem Reap / Angkor Wat, Cambodia

Last year, B and I went to a special exhibition about Angkor Wat at the Utah Museum of Natural History.  Thanks to that experience, I knew something of the scale of the temple complex that is generally known by the name of one (of many, many) of the temples in the area.  A goodly number--but not all--of these Hindu temples date from the 12th century, during the Khmer empire reign of Suryavarman II, including the temple known today as Angkor Wat.  But there are dozens of temples spread over a roughly 150 square mile area, and each one is different--in materials, in aesthetics, in time, and in the weathering of time.  The earliest temples date from the 9th century, and others continued to be built until the 15th century.  I understood from that UMNH exhibit that it was a huge sprawl of holy places.  

I did not understand that the impressive macro-scope of the project is perhaps exceeded in astonishments by the micro-scope.  Every freaking square inch of surface area on all these temples is carved, minutely, obsessively, with a mindblowing symmetry given the size of the place.  The carvings tell foundational myths and stories, relate historical eras and battles and the reigns of rulers and their families, and filigree the stones dizzyingly with ornament.  

Such a record in stone of human effort to the end of devotion has always been deeply moving to me.  We are here on this planet for hardly any time at all.  I don't imagine that the now-anonymous carvers of the Angkor-region temples are consoled by their lithic immortality, any more than I am consoled that Jay wrote poems, but there's something about the wish to mark our brief rollercoaster along this mortal coil that connects us all, and I find that powerful.

In praise of feasting

For years (decades?), the best meal I've ever had in my whole life was...a tie, between Chicago's late and lamented Green Zebra and the tiny, effortlessly elegant De Buhne in Bruges, Belgium.  In a triumph fit for a holiday of feasts, the top spot has now been claimed by a new champion: Embassy Khmer Gastronomy, in Siem Reap, Cambodia.  Happy T-day, all!  

PS. This place is owned, operated, and staffed entirely by women; the chef-owner is trying very hard to lift women out of poverty in Cambodia.  The vibe in the restaurant is somehow both super refined and homey.  I wish I could eat here weekly.

Pokhara, Nepal

[Fewa Lake, in Pokhara]

It was my intention, as I planned my time in Nepal, to stay for six weeks in this city—a smaller and altogether less chaotic place than Kathmandu, about 200 miles to the west of the capital.  I found an apartment and looked into buying a scooter for the period of my stay here.  But I discovered something unexpected upon my arrival in Kathmandu a few weeks back:  Nepal is tropical, balmy and humid. Oh, sure, it’s comfortably alpine above 9000 feet, but the lower altitudes reflect the reality that the population centers of this country sit at about the same latitude as Tampa, Florida.  And I've done far too much time in Tampa, Florida.  So I've adjusted my plans and will move on from Nepal shortly.

[View of Fewa Lake and the Lakeside district of Pokhara from Anadu Hill]

[The Peace Stupa, on the ridge above the town]

Still, before I do move on to the next adventure, I’m delighted to have several days together in Pokhara.  It’s weirdly more touristy than Kathmandu*, for good and for ill.  The good includes so many great vegan restaurants that wash their vegetables in purified water, meaning that I can have a legit huge salad and also tofu for the first time in months.  The ill includes the throngs of willowy westerners in Lulu Lemon yoga pants sucking up all the air in those vegan restaurants. There’s a big lake and some fairly easily accessible hiking nearby and, on a clear day, staggering views of the Annapurna range a few miles north of town. 

[Pretty good view from my bedroom]

In addition to the nature things, Pokhara has some cool places to visit: the International Mountain Museum highlights the history of high-altitude climbing the world over.  The flourishing village of refugees from Tibet, first founded as a tent city in the 1950s and now a tidy Buddhist enclave within the larger Hindu welter of Pokhara, testifies to a history that the neighbors to the north wish to erase from western awareness.  And of course, I took a cooking class in the home of a lovely Nepali woman named Sarita, who with great patience for my clumsy slowness taught me to make momos.  Momo party at my house in 2025!

* Maybe it's not that Pokhara is more touristy but rather that it's a lot smaller than Kathmandu, and therefore unable to absorb the tourists as Kathmandu does.  

The more you know: Sagarmatha edition

1.     Yaks, of which I am a huge fan.

*  Female yaks are called naaks.  

* Naak cheese and milk is the only dairy available in the Everest region.  It does not cooperate with many western digestive tracts.  I was a vegan the whole time I was up there.

*  Yaks can’t survive at altitudes below 10000 feet; they get a kind of reverse-altitude sickness and die.

*  Sherpa people cross-breed yaks and cattle for farmwork/transport at lower altitudes (that is, above 8000ft but below yak elevations).  The cross-breeds are adorable and less furry than full yaks (though the males are sterile, like mules) and are called dzo or dzokla.  

2. The Sherpa people

*  Sherpas are a branch of Tibetan Buddhists who moved south across the Himalayas about five centuries ago. Their language is derived from Tibetan (not Nepali), and between Sherpa, Tibetan, Nepali, English, and regional tongues, most Sherpa speak at least 4 or 5 languages.

*  One of the most sacred and significant spiritual sites for the Sherpa lies along the track to the Khumbu, in Tyangboche. The monks living at this monastery bless the climbing season each year, and welcome trekkers for meditation and prayers and chanting.  Spending an afternoon cross-legged in the company of novice monks chanting and playing drums and dung chen (giant horn) and metallic percussion beside a brightly painted model of the universe was maybe my favorite human thing in the whole of the region.

* The Sherpa inscribe prayers into stone tablets and rock faces along the length of the region’s paths, for a safe and reverent passage.  It was for me a great comfort to touch these prayers as I hiked mile after mile, and also to spin the prayer wheels that sped me along my way.

* Having spent time learning from the perspective of Sherpa guides and villagers, I am happy to discard my longstanding romantic adventurer’s idea that climbing Everest would be so awesome.  I now consider the whole enterprise to be a solipsistic folly; setting aside the well-documented environmental impacts of the summiting season on the region, the industry is also massively exploitive of Sherpas, who do pretty much all the work for those vaunting tourist-conquerors and take a disproportionate burden of the risk (but very little of the credit), and get paid a pittance.  Knowing what I know now about the climbing-industrial complex, I do not think it’s possible to climb Everest ethically.  Much better to spend some time walking around in these mountains, bringing needed money into the local economy without putting anyone’s wellbeing in peril.  

[Addendum to this very last point:  It is possible, to be sure, to do one of the big treks of the Sagarmatha region on your own, but for a raft of reasons, including economics, I do not recommend it.  I’m happy to talk more fully privately about it and share ideas about finding a good guide if anyone’s interested in planning their own adventure, but as an example in miniature: the relevant airports often shut down, sometimes for days at a time, creating a sweaty and frustrated backlog of trapped hikers.  If you are one of those trapped hikers, you want to be with someone who can speak Nepali to airline officials and who knows from long experience creative workarounds for getting you in and out.]

XL hike / Everest region

I’m not sure I have sufficient language to convey the vastness of my last couple of weeks, so I’ll be perforce fairly reductive here.  I’m just filled with awe and gratitude at having been able to hike up to and around and through the Khumbu Valley, home of glaciers and spectacular views and also…the tallest mountains in the world. I hiked over 100 miles, gaining about 10000 feet of altitude along the way, and got to land at the world’s most dangerous airport to boot!

(Lukla airport's [in]famous super-short runway ending off a cliff)

I have to say that it was not hard hiking.  (Ala-Kul in Kyrgystan a few weeks back was a much more technically difficult hike.)  The trails through the Everest region are pretty well-worn thoroughfares because they are the only way to get from one village to another up there.  The entire region is sparsely but consistently populated with Sherpa villages, and the Sherpa people live and work and farm and do their thing and walk up and down and between villages to visit friends and get supplies and do the things that people do when they live their lives, and the track around and to and through the Khumbu Valley is their neighborhood throughway.  Those villages--their ingenious farms, their complex social interconnections, and their near-animistic devotions--are an unexpected joy of trekking in the region.

 (Namche Bazaar, the region's largest village, from above)

The whole of Sagarmatha National Park (the huge area in which Everest is just one of many peaks) is just unspeakably beautiful, with one dramatic white 7500m+ peak after another, a breathless procession, an incantation in rock:  Mera, Kusum, Kongdaree, Kyashar, Kangtega, Ama Dablam, Tobuche, Cholatse, Lobuche, Lotse, Nuptse, Pumori, and Chomolungma, as the Sherpa people call Everest.  This last is, honestly, is the least dramatic of them all, except perhaps in the imagination. 

(Cholatse, Lobuche, and the Chola valley in between)

(Kangtega at evening)

(Ama Dablam, with stupa and yaks)

The thing that makes trekking the region difficult is, obviously, altitude.  Happily, altitude wasn’t really a problem for me, until it was.  I had excellent pulse-ox readings—like, 60 bpm and 94-95%—consistently throughout the upward climb until the night I slept in Lobuche village, at about 5000 meters (16300ish feet).  That night while I slept, my oxygen cratered to about 75%. I woke up in a full-blown heart-racing panic attack at 2am knowing absolutely that I was about to die and had to get off that mountain.  I threw my sleeping bag across the room, stripped off my clothes, and headed out into the night, making excellent decisions with my very clear brain.  I somehow talked myself out of streaking down the frozen trail and back inside my spartan teahouse room, and muttered calm if clenched encouragement to myself for the rest of the night. I took half a Diamox in the morning with breakfast (the only time I took that altitude drug) and pressed onward and upward. By the time I got to Goruk Shep village (about 17000 feet) a few hours later, I was fine, mostly back to myself, a little tingly (side effect of Diamox), with my oxygen over 90 again.  

(Khumbu Glacier)

Let me mention briefly the place that is the focus of most folks’ attention when they trek through the Sagarmatha region: Everest Base Camp.  It was cool, fine, love the Khumbu Glacier and the famous Icefall for sure, but it really was less interesting (and more crowded) than pretty much everywhere else in the region.  My heart was already lost, anyway, to all the other mountains, and the lovely villages, and the baby Buddhist monks in training, and the epic-scale views in every direction, and the impossibly high timberline, and the million waterfalls, and the coldly dazzling stars, and the endless refills of dal bhat. To my mind, EBC is, at best, a place to take a photo. 

Coming soon: Extra-large hike

There will be a pause in this blog for the next couple of weeks to accommodate a very long hike.  I'll return later in November with cool photos and a few good narratives to share. In the meantime, please enjoy this awesome shrine inside a system of tree roots. 

A brief story about momos

(To distract from the stress of the election.)

Man, I love me a momo.  The Tibetan variety is a giant dumpling, more or less like a fist stuffed with spices and vegetables and served with a spicy dipping sauce.  

When I saw momos on the menu at my Kathmandu restaurant for pretty darn cheap (like 75 cents), I was so excited! Thought I'd get a couple to have as an appetizer before my soup.  So I ordered two.

Here's what I got:

Not two momos.  Two orders of ten momos each.  20 Nepali momos.  About 7.5 cents per momo.  At least the Nepali variety are smaller than the Tibetan ones, more or less like a potsticker/gyoza.  But 20 momos of even that smaller size is a lot of momos. 

And I ate every last one of them.  And they were delicious.

Kathman-2: A Tale of Two Temples

Nepal is about 80% Hindu, 10% Buddhist, 5% Muslim, 4% Christian, and 1% other.  The two largest traditions, Buddhism and Hinduism, have been living harmoniously here for centuries.  

(Here's a Buddha all decorated for a Hindu festival)

The influence of Hinduism is fully evident in Nepal.  The country holds the cow sacred--it's illegal to kill cows in Nepal (they serve yak and "buff," or water buffalo, instead of beef here).  The goddess Sita was born in Nepal.  And Kathmandu is home to a number of important Hindu pilgrimage sites in Nepal, chief among them the Pashupatinath Temple, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  You know me: never one to pass up a UNESCO site.  So I grabbed a taxi and went to Pashupatinath. 

And whoa, it was not what I was expecting.  Yes, it's a holy site, one of the places to which devout Hindus make pilgrimage once in their lives.  Situated on the banks of the Bagmati River, it's a huge complex of temples and shrines, ashrams, and basic structures where the sick or elderly can take shelter and be cared for.  The place is teeming with free-range cows, pilgrims who don't have money to get back to wherever they started, infirm folks, and...funerals.  By "funerals," I mean, huge gatherings of people from all over the country who bring their dead to this place to cremate them.  Like, right there on the riverbank, in the open air.  With lots of keening and ceremony and so. much. smoke.  Wikipedia tells me that "the cremation zone of the temple complex falls under 'Lhundrup Tsek' or 'Spontaneous Mound charnel ground' and is revered among the eight great charnal grounds where Padmasambhava meditated and gained spiritual accomplishments."  I do not know enough about Hinduism to know the spiritual significance of the place, But I can tell you that I was the only white lady there and I felt that I absolutely should not be.  I should not have been sold an inexpensive ticket and ushered in as if it were just another cool photo opportunity for Instagram. It wasn't just the pervasive smell of human cremation; it was the fact that I was obviously a tourist there among people's observances of the transition from life to death.  I felt conspicuous and inappropriate, an intruder.  I stayed for about 20 minutes before striding purposefully to the nearest exit, which wasn't near enough.  I don't think I had any sense that a UNESCO site might not just mark a place of ancient significance but a place where people's private living and dying goes on yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

I hailed the first taxi I found and asked to be taken to the Boudhanath Stupa, another UNESCO site about 10 minutes by car away.  The Boudhanath Stupa is Kathmandu's largest Buddhist shrine, and the center of Tibetan Buddhism, and as I understand it, the stupa embodies the enlightened minds of all the buddhas.  It includes relics of both body parts and artifacts, but the vibe here is just totally different.  If at Pashupatinath I felt like I absolutely should not be there, gawking and gangly and over-tall and -pale, at the Boudhanath I felt absolutely welcome.  Indeed, one of the monks that inhabits the monastery adjacent to Boudhanath gestured me over, chanted some prayers above me, and tied a colorful string about ten times around my wrist before knotting it and pointing to the knot, saying, "For beginnings and endings."  At every turn here--whether circumambulating the stupa or walking upon its dome or spinning prayer wheels around the square or sitting for chanting in the monastery, I was invited in, greeted, enfolded in the rhythms and the values of the place.  

(I'm telling you: unless you run away, someone's gonna give you tikka.)

I am embarrassingly unfamiliar with the deep particulars of Hinduism and Buddhism, and I don't feel like I have any authority to weigh in on the practices of these two traditions.  But my contrasting experiences of these two places has left me more than a little unsettled as I try to coordinate my relative sense of belonging/participation with my interactions.  I'll think about this for a long time.

Kathmandu, Nepal

Chaos.  Utter and absolute chaos.  The roads are a hoedown of vectors and speeds and potholes, every moped, taxi-let, and bike vying for the same 3 feet of space.  Do they drive on the left side or on the right side of the road in this city?  Yes.  Yes, they do.  And since there are no sidewalks, the pedestrians are all pinballing through that affray as well.  I have, astonishingly, seen no collisions of any kind so far.  I have also tried, and failed, to take a photo of the traffic/pedestrian ballet, so you'll just have to imagine the most outrageous and disorderly interplay of bodies flesh and steel, and then triple it.

Here are some pix from Swayambunath Mahachaitya, commonly called the Monkey Temple.  It's a complex of primarily Buddhist holy sites on a small hill on the west side of the city.  There's one large stupa (holy reliquary), and a whole lot of small satellite shrines and temples, including Hindu shrines that have been accumulated over the centuries--for it is the way of Hindu shrines to pop up wherever there's a frisson of the sacred. The holy complex dates from the 5th century CE. 

Its nickname derives from the resident troupe of holy monkeys, cared for lovingly by the temple staff. Legend has it that the monkeys grew from the beard-lice of the boddhisatva Manjushri, so:  ick? but also, beauty comes from all over.  I think that's the lesson. 

(If you do not already have a red dot--the tikka--on your forehead, you pretty much cannot stop it: someone will come up to you and give you tikka.  And then ask for a little money.)