A TRIP TO A HYOLMU VILLAGE

ROLL OF A DICE

To leave the house and travel around the city bodes an unpredictable day.  A magnum of strength is needed to duck and dive through traffic swarming without rules, past pavement sellers and pedestrians – lots of bottle needed.   You become like a fish swimming through the flotsam of a shipwreck.  There is no separation of people, motorbikes, cars, temples…

This morning Fulmaya left the city behind.  She is travelling with some family in a jeep to Milarepa’s Cave somewhere in Helambu to the north of Kathmnandu.  The journey is rough as some of the travelling is along dry river beds with some of the boulders removed to the side to allow progress.  The ascent is from K’du Valley at over 1,200 metres (4000 ft) to over 2,700 metres (9,000 feet) – over 6-7 hours.

Suffice it to say, I’ve been left behind in Kathmandu and finding work in the ghost-writing industry, pamphlets, articles and forms.  I remember trekking this route before they had a “road” and it took several days to reach Tarkye Gyang.  I was stopped at checkpost by some very surprised policemen.   

They were there more to check Nepalese travellers who may have been carrying arms from Pakistan or opium from Baglung to the north rather than a lone trourist.  They recovered sufficiently to check my trekking permit and stamp it with a government seal.

This was February, the time of Lohsar, the Tibetan New Year, and by the time I reached T G the snow was knee deep in the drifts.  On a meadow at the centre of the village, men and women were lined up facing each other and dancing with syncopated rhythm, the men moving forward and singing in Hyolmu and the women replying in their high voices.

I was offered a room in a house which I took and the singing and dancing lasted all night.  When I woke in the morning, the beautiful Hyolmu Sherpa girl said something in Nepali which I understood and it sounded like, You have to have sex for three days to please the deity.  I don’t know if that was an invitation to a few nights of pleasure or a Nepali kukri across my throat.

No regrets, but if I could have bothered, I would be visiting Milarepa’s Cave with the others.  He’s my favourite guy amongst all the other semi-legendary characters who no doubt lived some time

from the middle of the 11^th century to 1135.  His life in Western Tibet began as a sorcerer and after killing 35 people with a giant hailstorm over an inheritance dispute, he was tutored by Marpa, the translator of various sacred texts, probably from Pali into Tibetan.

I guess what I like about him is the fact that he wrote what is now known as The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa.  This compilation is an epic poem that was inspired by his realisation of the dharma.   

There are lots of legends about the poet sage, but mostly, I like the way he’s depicted with a hand to the ear as listening to an inner spirit that guides him.  Peculiarly, he is usually portrayed in green as he subsisted on nettles.

There are several Milarepa Caves in Nepal, which one they’re going to will have the footprints and hand prints left in stone from the time of his retreat in the cave.

SHERMATANG TO CHHIME

SHERMATANG TO CHHIME

LEAVING CHHIMI WITH FULMAYA AND MAYA

As we leave Shermatang, Yongjen puts a kada around our necks and wishes us all the best for the journey.  Both she and her husband are extremely outgoing people and have a habit of shouting at each other from early morning, not in anger but as a way of having a conversation. I’ve never heard anyone talk so loudly on the phone.  She reminds me of my mother who, when phoning abroad, would shout into the phone as if the distance weakens the signal.

The journey begins with huffing and puffing up a steep slope to the main path which leads on to the track to Chhime.  So on we head off under a burning sun with the sound of the cicadas in the trees loudly celebrating the new morning.

We walk past the Mountain View Lodge, twenty-four hour hot water, and the Himalayan Lodge with its camping place.  Most of the terraces are planted with wheat which has a beautiful golden hue in the sunrise.  Bright yellow flowers  are dotting the terraces above the path.

We had taken three boys to help us with our bags and they have run ahead of us struggling up the path, even although we’re travelling light, past a dense cane forest and terraces that are overgrown with grass and weeds as if they have been lying fallow for a long time. We are walking from Shermatang at over 9,000 feet to Chhime at just under 9,000 feet.

There is a thin mist hanging over the valleys and there is a sense of the vastness of the land as if the cover of land had been stretched wrenching the hills apart.  I say hills, but these are not even the foothills which begin to the north at above 15,000 feet.  This is so much different from the dark, narrow, Scottish valleys I’m used to. Patches of thick, green, jungle forests rise steeply to my right.  Lines of white, prayer flags decorate the trees further up.

Today the mountains are obscured by clouds and the paths are dusty and dry with a very fine, light brown, sandy soil that rises in puffs as we walk and cover the bottoms of our trousers.  We pass the occasional land slip caused by the monsoon rains, or was it an earthquake that caused the land to flow into the valley?  Looking at the dense forest I can see that there will be black bears in there.  A while ago a man was attacked by one and had to have his stomach stitched by the locals before being flown by helicopter to a hospital in Kathmandu.

In the valley below there is the muffled sound of a drum and the blowing of Tibetan horns.

PRAYER FLAGS AT SUNSET

Dropping by 500 feet makes a difference as the breathing has become a lot easier now

A large gomba is being built and rises to 3-stories.  I wonder why so much money is being spent on these temples when there are surely much more necessary developments on which to concentrate – like education which is very important for the children of which there are many.

We come to a sign with Tibetan script at the top and a transcription in English below:  CHHIMI HEIGHT 8,202 FEET PROMOTED BY NORBULING RURAL DEVELOPMENT SOCIETY.

SHYENGITSE

SHYENGITSI

I’m suddenly awake in the morning after a fitful sleep, tossing and turning on a hard mattress with my sciatica sending me reminders of my age and the walking up and down of steep hills for the past week.  Immediately above my head is a clock with a Tibetan flag on the face.  My mother used to tell me she liked the sound of a ticking clock as it helped her to sleep.  I try to let the sound lull me to sleep but it seems to increase in volume and I move it to the window and fall into a light slumber at about 1am.

There is a dream I have about keys.  A large woman is trying to find a place to hide a key.  This has something to do with the Nepalese habit of hanging on to keys as they symbolise power for the holder.  My sister-in-law in Kathmandu has bunches of keys in various hiding places and only a few of them are in use.  

Opening locks on doors, of which there are many, becomes a frustrating and time-consuming business.  There’s also a lock on the outside of the bathroom door!  As well as the locks, there are two snibs on the doors, one at the top and one at the bottom, and two on the fly screen.  Then every window has the same, one at the top and bottom and the same on the fly screen.  If there’s a fire, no escape and that keeps me awake too.

The view of the mountains makes it worthwhile.  You get up early in the morning before the clouds rise over the peaks and see the most amazing site – sparkling snowy mountains at over 8000 metres, lonely and still in the distance towering over the foothills in the foreground.  Makes it all worthwhile.