| Early morning before the walk... |
[May. 13th, 2008|06:32 pm] |
Written this morning, posted tonight...
It's 4:30 am and I mistakenly left the alarm in Set Alarm mode, so that when I looked at the clock, I thought it was already 5:10. We leapt up and were puzzled by how dark it is. We have a rendezvous with our guys this morning to do their morning puja walk. They go every morning to a Shiva (I think) temple on a little hill outside of the city. The whole round trip takes them 2 hours, and they stop for tea and chat and take it easy along the way. I did this walk once with Surya and Ramesh before, in 2005.
In 1979, Rampashad Prajapati owned the only guest house in Bhaktapur, located outside the city gate next to a little pine forest. In the early mornings, women would come to the forest to gather pine needles for their cooking fires. Now the city has many, many guest houses and restaurants and Rampashad moved his concern outside the city not far from the temple where we're going this morning. I met Rampashad again in 2005, had coffee and talked about how successful he has become. He's sent his children to America to be educated; he's that successful. He's an old guy now, surrounded by grandchildren, gently guiding his sons into the business.
Yesterday, I put together a little video about our first walk in the city. I used the footage from my FlipVideo and audio from my little voice recorder, though I did some talking while I shot the video and that is overlaid with the other audio. This is my first attempt at using MovieMaker and it's pretty crude, but I think it starts to give the feeling of that magical morning. I still haven't seen any of JF's photos, but I'm sure they will be much more satisfying in the long run. Video is a great tool, and this little Flip is so cute and easy to use, but there's nothing like the quality of the image you really need to do a halfway professional production.
I'm still sneezing the dust and pollution of Kathmandu out of my nose. When we arrived, it was Saturday, and the middle of the day. Yesterday, we left at 2 pm and didn't get home until 6. It was an appalling trip, and I actually knew what was coming. Several people have said to us that the government is simply not functioning here, hasn't been functioning for some time. There are officials...we met two of them yesterday. They were driving a huge SUV. The hotshots here love their SUVs. They don't have Humvees, or at least I haven't seen any, but if they could get them here, they would. Officials abound, but their priorities are not on getting the work of governing done, my Nepali friends tell me.
So the no-motorized traffic laws for the center of Bhaktapur are ignored and the motorbikes buzz around like big, lethal bees. So the road-- and there is only one road, there is not a back way or any possible short or long cut--to Kathmandu is so choked with vehicles, taxis, buses, motorcycles, scooters and individual cars, that it takes an hour and a half to go about seven miles. You couldn't walk it in that time, but believe me, after doing it once, you WANT to. There is no restriction on the number of vehicles that can come into the country and our government official yesterday told us they were arriving at the rate of 10,000 a year, all of them, practically, to the Kathmandu valley.
People wear face masks when they have to be outside in the traffic for any length of time, like the Japanese.
After the Indian Embassy proved impregnable, we walked back to the bus station, which is really just a wide place in the road with a million buses belching black soot into the air. We went into Thamel, the tourist part of the city. JF was dumbstruck that there is absolutely nothing left of the Kathmandu we knew in 1979. In Thamel, the streets are filled to the brim with souvenir shops, tourists and touts. We were looking for a book for him, since he's about to be finished with his sci-fi novel, but JF has made the astute observation that travelers and tourists don't seem to read science fiction on the road. At least, he's having trouble finding any second-hand books...or even new ones.
I'm posting news about the web site project over on the Worlds Touch blog. |
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