Dear Friends,
After filtering water, eating
breakfast, completing our personal ablutions, we handed our daypacks and Dick’s
10-pound tripod to our team of helpers and were off at 7:30 AM. Our destination was the Nice View [Now
there’s a real understatement!] Lodge, at the end of a 2000 ft. ascent to upper
Ghorepani. The oak and rhododendron
forest was cool, and the streams we walked along invited Donna to try her rock
balancing skills, so she added a few artful stacks to the dozens left by other
trekkers with steady hands.
 |
| Dorje watches from the trail as Donna balances rocks. He fashionably wears my bright red daypack on his chest. |
Because Christians make up a small
percentage of the Nepali population, we were surprised to see a Christian
Church as we left Banthanti. A little
farther up the trail we were charmed by two beautiful little girls wearing
especially fancy, sheer Western style dresses over their colorful T-shirts and
tights. These dresses reminded me of the Easter dresses worn by little girls at
my mother-in-law’s church in Chico. Only after one of our fellow trekkers – a
woman with a British accent who passed us as we were taking pictures – greeted
us with a jolly “Happy Easter!” did I realize where those two girls and their
mom were likely headed and what holiday they were going to celebrate. Happy Easter indeed, I thought, and wondered
if I had every celebrated that holiday in a more exotic location. Of course, the answer was, “No.”
We stopped in Nagathanti for a
Coke-Fanta-coffee break, and while we were sitting down, we heard the
unmistakable sounds of an approaching pony caravan. Having heard them pass through Hille and
Banthanti and not having been able to get my iPhone and its camera ready in
time to capture their passing, I left my coffee to cool and took some movies
and photos. You might well ask, with a
muffled groan, “More pony pictures?” but this one also shows how the trail
looks going through a village where it is not a staircase but relatively flat. In the picture below are the last ponies of the dozen in the
caravan and their “muleteer” pass through the village of Nagathanti on Easter
Sunday, 2012 – for them, a workday like any other. On the left of the trail is the ”thanti” or
rest house where we had stopped for drinks and on the right of the trail are
the homes of the villagers.
 |
| Dick, Donna, and Marian ascend into the Rhododendron Forest. Karma hangs back to take the photo. |
The farther we climbed after leaving
Nagathanti, the greater was the proportion of rhododendron trees in the
forest. The beautiful flowered trees
were devilishly hard to photograph with my iPhone’s camera, and I didn’t get an
image fit to send you until we arrived at our lodging. But other trekkers were clearly as charmed as
I was to be in a forest where dark green trees shed red and pink flowers and
petals. They had celebrated by creating
huge heart shapes on the forest floor, “drawing” with windrows of petals. Sometimes they even added their initials and
the occasional cupid’s arrow piercing a 20 ft. wide heart “sketched” in a
meadow with pink and red petals.
 |
| The first rhododendron petal heart of our trek |
Since we had made the puja for the
success of my friend Ann’s surgery in Patan one week earlier on April 1, I had
wanted to make another prayerful offering, but in the mountains, for our friend
Dean. I had told Donna of my idea and
that I had brought along the extra incense from Patan and a couple of
candles. As we walked along, Donna and I
looked for a suitable spot. About noon
we entered a clearing completely surrounded by very tall, robust rhododendron
trees in full bloom. In the center of
the clearing was a huge rectangular rest stop for porters -- a very large
version of the ever-present double-stepped stone benches that allow a porter to
sit or lean on the lower bench and rest their load on the bench above. When
Donna walked into the clearing, she immediately exclaimed, “That looks like a
Heiau – one of those traditional Hawaiian temples on the Big Island – the
perfect place for Dean’s puja!” Dick and Karma agreed, and we explained to
Jawane that we wanted to stop and make a puja.
Jawane and the helpers immediately understood and helped us gather
rhododendron branches and flowers to place on the improvised alter. Jawane helped me stabilize the candles and
produced a Bic to light them and the incense. Since we didn't have all the
floral and pastry paraphernalia available in Patan, we simply lit the candles,
held the three smoking incense sticks, and made clockwise circles with the
incense while we stated our hopes for Dean and his family. Donna and Karma did
the same for their friends and family in turn. Then, with our hearts moved by
our small ritual, we all cried and hugged in this beautiful place. We consulted
Jawane about leaving the incense burning on the altar as we had in Patan, and
he thought it was wet enough to be safe even on this slightly breezy day. So we quietly and reverently moved away up
the trail with our three sticks of incense left smoking on the improvised
altar.
 |
| Baldys hold the incense, inscribe a clockwise circle with it, and speak their wishes for healing for Dean and peace for his family. |
After
the puja we kept moving up through the rhododendron forest towards Ghorepani,
stopping to look in awe or to try to capture the scene in a photograph. Before long we entered the village of
Ghorepani at 9,040 feet elevation. Tsering, Jawane’s “chief helper,” met and
guided us through the village center and uphill another 400 feet to the Nice
View Lodge and Restaurant -- where the rooms without private bath faced the
view and those with a private bath faced the back yard. We were assigned the
latter style room. I have to say that
after ascending 4,400 feet in 2 days my leg muscles shouted “HURRAH!” and
“Praise the Lord [Buddha, of course]!” when they saw the European style toilet
in our bathroom. We dumped our daypacks
and duffels, and headed down to the dining room for lunch. We had the best food on our trek here: a wood
fired oven pizza with a crisp crust, “chicken chili” with rice that would be
the envy of a good California Chinese restaurant, and cold bottles of Everest
beer to moderate the heat of the chilies.
 |
| The view of “suburban” Ghorepani from the Nice View Lodge and Restaurant and, finally, some fabulous rhododendron trees in bloom captured by the iPhone. |
Mother Nature, who had been showing
off her power each afternoon with a thunderstorm, did not disappoint us in
Ghorepani. Not long after lunch,
showers, and naps it began to rain heavily, and then it hailed, and then a bolt
of lightening hit something electrically important with a huge flash and a big
bang right behind our room and the whole lodge went dark. We navigated the hallways and stairs with our
headlamps and flashlights, ate dinner by candle light, and went to bed early
with heads full of peaceful dreams of hillsides festooned with pink and red
rhododendron flowers. As we dozed off,
our fellow lodgers excitedly told long, loud stories – happily they were in a
language that we could not decipher and at a volume that earplugs could dampen.
Namaste, Marian (Chico, CA, 5/13/12)
No comments:
Post a Comment