The Road to Zagora

by Richard Collins

  My sound of one hand clapping is louder than your sound of one hand clapping. That’s what the array of Buddhist temples in Lumbini seem to be saying. There are temples built by Buddhists from Thailand, Korea, China, Myanmar, Japan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, India, and Tibet, among other places. They are surreal, grandiose edifices, each one in a different style, all seemingly trying to out-compete the others. They aren’t made from local materials and sit uneasily in the landscape (the artificially landscaped landscape I should say). More than one of them looks like a giant wedding cake. It is, in short, the Birth Place of the Buddha Theme Park. By the ruins of what archaeologists have identified as an ancient monastery there are a dazzling superfluity of prayer flags. And there are air conditioned tour coaches carrying affluent pilgrim/tourists from the different Buddhist countries around the site.

  We were trying to find something to eat when a Buddhist monk complete with shaved head, purple robes, sandals and twinkling eyes came up to us and asked Flic, Are you looking for something? He smiled and waited for the profound ambiguity that his words carried in such a place to sink in. Flic, well versed in the subtleties of Zen paradox, paused before replying, No. I am only looking, she said.

  By way of contrast we went on rented bicycles out into the countryside nearby and came across a sort of Hindu (I guess) garden fete. A large number of other bicycles were parked up and village people were enjoying themselves. There was a tall pagoda made of bamboo and coloured paper. Some men were dancing to the accompaniment of singing. Fun for everyone, Flic observed in her journal.

  We made our way from Lumbini to Pokhara via Tansen. You know about our bus journey from Tansen as it was extraordinary enough to qualify for best-bus-journeys-of-all-time status and made it into chapter five. From Pokhara we set out trekking again; this time to Annapurna Base Camp.

  This was our third trek in Nepal and maybe one too many. Certainly one too many for you, reading this, and so I’ll just say a little about it. It was a short trek and didn’t lead along ancient trading routes but merely through some very beautiful steep hill country and then up a bleak valley to a spot where there was never a base camp but there is a grand view of the Annapurna range, ice and snow slopes rising to stupendous high peaks all around. Not a trek too many then but lacking in the cultural encounters of our other treks and different in a number of ways.

  One difference was that, as it wasn’t a trade route and didn’t lead anywhere, the path didn’t have the usual traffic of donkeys and yaks and porters carrying goods. There are wonderful suspension bridges in Nepal. They have generally been made with help from outside; the engineering and the money to build them comes from abroad (although such bridges were built in the Himalayas hundreds of years before we had them in the west). They are foot bridges, no wider than is necessary for a fully laden donkey or yak to pass across, held up by steel cables hung from concrete stanchions. Sometimes the wooden decking is in a bad state of repair, with holes through which you can look down perhaps fifty, perhaps a hundred feet, to a rushing river below. But you know it’s safe; if a mule train or a number of yaks have crossed without the bridge giving way then you know it can take you. But here, on the ABC trek, there were no beasts of burden to test the bridges. We had seen a bridge in the Everest Region that had given way when the huge rock to which it was anchored had slumped forward. We could choose to be a little nervous crossing the bridges here if we wanted to.

  Another difference is that we were trekking in the early spring and there were still huge amounts of snow on the high slopes, deep snow to trudge through near the base camp, and the probability of the path being closed by drifts or avalanches. On the way up we met disappointed trekkers coming down having been unable to make their way through the snow. We crossed a recent avalanche at one point but we were lucky enough to be among the first trekkers to reach base camp that year. Outside one lodge we spent part of an afternoon shovelling snow away from the entrance – very hard work at that altitude.

  On this trek I was a year further along the Parkinson’s road and now had difficulty putting things in and getting things out of containers; particularly squishy things like clothes and sleeping bags into squishy containers like rucksacks. Imagine being Flic. You’ve walked all day beside a guy who keeps asking you to put his jumper here or look for his hat or find something from the bottom of his rucksack and all the time it’s in his pocket. The snow was deep and your feet are cold and wet (why didn’t he tell you to get new boots?) but when you mention it he says, too smugly, that his are dry. You are now exhausted, cold, and suffering the discomfort of high altitude but you’ve arrived at the lodge and you can lie down for a while and rest, maybe later talk to that handsome young Australian guy who you met in Lumbini (what a great coincidence that he should be here too!). You’re just settling down in your sleeping bag, all warm and cosy, when you hear a voice, Flic. You ignore him for a bit, pretend you didn’t hear. You’re just dropping off to sleep and he starts again, Flic. Flic, can you help me with something? Flic?

  Hmmm... perhaps I wouldn’t choose me as a travelling companion. On the Annapurna Base Camp trek we saw fresh snow leopard tracks in fresh snow. We had fabulous views of Machupuchare, the fishtail mountain. We met interesting people along the way. But there were times, it has to be said, when we weren’t as good together as we might have been. And I was saddened by that.

  When we got back to Pokhara we slowed right down. We stayed in a guest house by the lake again. It was there that we met some remarkable people, including Jules and Nigel; they were staying in the room next to us. Jules was a life-loving, come-to-the-cabaret type of person. An all-singing, all-dancing good time girl, a great traveller, a JAP (Jewish American Princess) but not of the east coast variety – she comes from California. She was, I guess, in her fifties and still in possession of much joie de vivre. She and Nigel met some years ago and became friends and casual lovers for a while. Still great friends they were spending a few weeks together by the lake at Pokhara before returning to their homes in San Francisco (Jules) and Thailand (Nigel). They were friendly neighbours to us and fun to be with. Nigel was the more remarkable one.

  On the balcony that we shared with our new friends there was a plaster statue of Ganesh that Nigel was decorating with acrylic paint in bright garish colours. He said he was an artist but I don’t think so; I think it was just colouring in. But he loved doing it and people passing by complimented him on his work. Ganesh was monstrous, having the head of an elephant and the body of a human, only with more arms. Nigel, on the other hand, looked OK, was tall and gaunt, suntanned; doing well for his sixty eight years. He was Jewish too but was brought up in England. He became, as his parents would wish, a sensible professional man, a Harley Street dentist. He told us straight away that he liked to (putting a special emphasis on this word) smoke. Somehow he had given up dentistry and become a grower (of marijuana, that is) in Amsterdam and then a dealer in LSD. He got caught and was lucky to spend only a year in prison. He lives now in Thailand and Amsterdam on the remains of the money he made in teeth and drugs.

  Nigel was charming, sort of modest and self-confident at the same time, friendly, open, relatively carefree. When I first overheard him talking to Jules I thought there were two men present; a well-spoken Englishman and an urbane American. He has never lived in America but has managed to acquire an adrift-in-the-mid-Atlantic accent.

  Nigel smoked a lot of hash. We suggested to him that it masked the ups and downs of life and took away some of its richness. What ups and downs? he said, without a smile or any hint of irony. He was meant to have a lover waiting for him back in Thailand, a Korean woman who he had rescued from an abusive relationship. But she had returned to the old boyfriend in Nigel’s absence and the man wrote to Nigel and told him so. It’s not important, Nigel said. And there was his friendship with a high-caste (Brahmin) Nepali woman who had separated from her husband. She came to the balcony and told Nigel that the husband was jealous and making trouble. She wanted Nigel to
take her away with him but he wouldn’t and she left in tears. It’s all OK, he said, or at least implied.

  He was a great womaniser whose speciality was kindness and caring. But he remained, somehow, unconnected, a free man, untouched by the consequences of his actions for other people. But he seemed badly shaken on the afternoon of the day that he heard the news from Thailand and also received the visit from his Nepali inamorata. His voice retained that mid-Atlantic confident tone, he seemed calm, spoke reasonably. It doesn’t matter, he said. But I thought that his face showed signs of emotional stress. He looked distraught.

  In the evening Nigel looked happier again. He bounced back; I admired him for that. He had finished painting Ganesh and was busy wrapping up small lumps of hash (were there thirty of them?) in layer after layer of clingfilm so that he could smuggle them into Thailand. Before leaving for home he would swallow these parcels and then in the days that followed he could retrieve them, unwrap them one by one, and carry on with his comforting habit. I imagine that if you asked him about himself and his life he would say it was fine and he would more or less be telling the truth. What ups and downs? he would probably say.

  There was Jules and there was Nigel and there were other visitors to the balcony. Dmitry, a beautiful and crazy Russian ex-heroin addict. Franz, a stilt-walking accordion player from Bavaria. A Korean man (I can’t remember his name), in dreadlocks and leather jacket, the son of a wealthy industrialist who had once made a present of 500 chickens to a local village, got chatted up by one of the women there, and punched on the nose by her husband. There were probably one or two more but I can’t remember them all now.

  One day we set off with Jules and Nigel to go to a village in the valley beyond the lake. They were fun to be with. Jules chatted up a young man whose jeans were held up by a very flashy belt with an elaborate buckle. She insisted on taking a photo of the buckle which involved a period of time focusing the camera on his crotch. He didn’t seem to mind. And when we passed the Hungry Feel restaurant she commented that she had experienced one or two of those in her time.

  The real reason for our journey was that we wanted to ride on the roof of the bus, something we could try here on a short trip down a country road but wouldn’t be tempted to do on a long journey over mountain passes. It was great, and would be one of my favourite bus journeys of all time if it hadn’t been over so quickly. We travelled along the edge of the lake and into a wide valley of agricultural land, some of it newly sown with rice. There were water buffalo grazing, each one with a white egret as a companion. We passed by our favourite banyan tree with its fantastical aerial root system. We stopped to let cows and chickens cross the road. We squeezed past a bus coming the other way and greeted its load of rooftop travellers. And the ticket vendor climbed up onto the roof as we drove along and sold us our tickets. These are things that just aren’t going to happen on the bus from Aberystwyth to Machynlleth. A good time was had by all; except for Nigel who as a bony sixty-eight year old found it distressingly uncomfortable when the tarmac road gave out and we bounced along a rutted track.

  We got off at the village and walked a little way down the valley. Jules and Nigel asked the inhabitants of a seemingly random house if they would cook us some lunch and we wandered down to the river while we waited for it to be prepared. Nigel sat down and indulged in his customary habit. Flic took out her sketchbook and drew a picture of the village on the bank opposite us. Perhaps it was there that Jules had the idea of commissioning a picture from Flic. It turned out to be a view from the balcony that we shared with them. I believe that it’s still on the wall of Jules’ house in San Francisco.

  It was in Pokhara that we had the chance to celebrate Holi, the Hindu festival of colours. It’s a national holiday for Nepalis and people are out on the street. Bottles of coloured water and little plastic bags of bright coloured pigment are for sale and children, teenagers and some foreigners enjoy throwing it at each other. Flic enthusiastically attacked small boys and ended up covered in colour herself. When it got too much we rented a small boat and went out onto the lake. It’s nearly always calm and beautiful out there and we spent a lot of time on the water during our stay in Pokhara.

  The lake is particularly beautiful in the mornings and evenings. Early one morning I walked out along the shore and managed to rent a boat from a lakeside guest house. I paddled out into the mist and waited calmly for it to clear and reveal the view of the hills and the snow-capped Annapurnas in the distance. I was the only person on the water and it felt magical, just waiting for the mist to clear. But the mist didn’t clear and it stopped feeling magical after a while. When I got too cold I paddled back to the shore.

  Back at the guesthouse I had time to write a piece to put on my blog:

  We can look down from our hotel balcony onto a network of tiny terraced fields. Two weeks ago, before we went to Annapurna basecamp, a man was ploughing them with a simple wooden plough (small enough and light enough to be carried in on his shoulder) and a pair of oxen. The fields are so small that the animals are constantly driven into tight turns at the corners and headlands. Somehow they manage – the man controls them with a long stick and a number of wordless grunts and cries.

  Then yesterday he ploughs again; this time followed by his wife who dribbles a line of seed (rice, wheat, barley? we don’t know) from her hand into the open furrow. They work all day and only when they are nearly finished does it begin to rain.

  It rains a little, eases off, rains again. Then, at dusk, the storm begins. Massing clouds, high winds, thunder, lightning, and a torrential downpour. Somewhere behind the clouds the sun descends and sets and the sky turns from orange to sickly yellow to dark grey. At first we see only the pale impressions of lightning and long after hear distant thunder. Then the storm comes out from behind the hill and great wriggles and forks of electric light flash in the southern sky, facing us directly as we sit on the balcony. Sometimes it is loud enough and bright enough to make us enjoyably scared.

  There are four of us sitting in a row on cane chairs, shouting and cheering against the noise of wind and rain on banana leaves and tin roofs. The storm lasts maybe two hours, moving eastwards and lighting up the lake before disappearing behind further hills.

  There is an incongruity here – the medieval ploughman surrounded by modern hotels and curious tourists. Sometimes it seems like we are time travellers. But we met a nice man running a trekking lodge in the hills who had travelled a little, spoke good English, and had one foot firmly in the 21st century. When the lodge closes for the monsoon he returns to his family on the Terrai (in the flat south of Nepal) and ploughs his land with his own oxen. He was a handsome young man, high cheekbones, brown skin, a ready smile and a Nike hooded sweatshirt. It seems like he occupies two times zones, one past and one present. But that’s not really how it is. He is just a Nepali living in Nepal and it’s not the UK, it’s different here. Much of it is beautifully different.

  Q is for Quito (Ecuador)

  On the way to Quito we met two people who had been robbed there, one of them beaten up a little in the process. In Peru we had a bag stolen from us and also met an Englishman who had been robbed at gunpoint on a night bus. That’s South America for you. So we walked about the beautiful city of Quito in fear, not enjoying it as we should, seeing the shady characters staring from shady doorways as much as we saw the handsome buildings and green spaces.

  We visited a neo-Gothic basilica, a huge church on a hill in the centre of town. The outside featured anteaters, iguanas, turtles, pumas, monkeys and pelicans carved out of stone. Inside we found that we were allowed access to all sorts of areas normally hidden from the public. We walked along a wooden gangway that ran the length of the building in the roof space between the curved ceiling of the nave and the v-shape of the roof above. It led to a series of stairways and ladders that took us outside of the building and onto more ladders leading up a flying buttress and onto a spire. At the other end of the church we went up spiral staircas
es inside the tower and saw a large clock face from the inside with the numbers back to front. At the top of the tower we were more than 300 feet above street level and had an amazing view over the city.

  We visited a museum housing the works of Oswaldo Guaysamín. They were very impressive and powerful large paintings depicting, among other things, the struggles of the South American people. It was a special place; my favourite art gallery in the world.

  We also saw a man in the park demonstrating the medicinal uses of a sort of giant (6 inch long, and fat too) slug/snail.

  But we didn’t see the volcano that stands above the city, it was covered in clouds. Volcanoes and clouds spend a lot of time in each other’s company in Ecuador.

  18

  Me and my Monkey

  This chapter is about three places and one river. Our last few days in India were spent in Rishikesh where the Ganges flows out of the mountains and onto the plains. On the way there we stayed by its tributary, the Yamuna, outside Delhi, and also spent a few memorable days on the Ganges at Varanasi, the holy city.

  It occurred to me that the river is the link that ties these places together in my story. But I look at a map and see that the drainage basin (why isn’t there a more poetic word for this?) of the Ganges is massive. The outflow of the lake at Pokhara, the Marsyangdi and the Kali Kandaki rivers around Annapurna, the snow-melt and ice-melt of the Everest region, the Yamuna river that flows past Delhi and through Agra, all flow into the Ganges. Half the places we went to in India and all the places we went to in Nepal are in the Ganges catchment. It’s big.

  On February 3rd, 2010 I wrote this blog post: