THE
ROAD TO PANAUTI
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| Raju Lama, my guide |
Looking forward to
visiting the town of Panauti after about twenty-five years. I last visited with Colin Touche, a volunteer
from Nova Scotia. He came as part of a cultural exchange programme through Canadian Crossroads International of
which I was an assistant to Fulmaya who was the country rep. Colin and I decided to visit Panauti because
of a boarding pupil, Deepak Choulagain at Fulmaya’s school, Ideal, whom he was
sponsoring. Deepak’s mother had passed
away and his father had remarried.
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| Harvested rice stalks drying in the sun |
We got the bus to Banepa
then walked the rest of the way to the family house half way up a steep
hill. The house was quite basic with a
veranda and a few acres of land on which the father grew corn and some rice, as
far as I can remember.
We stayed for a meal and I
can remember a lot of laughter coming from the kitchen as his wife and another
woman prepared our lunch. Out came the
food, eventually, to howls of laughter from the two-women. At the side of the plate was a little bowl of
some brown paste. This, we were told,
was ganjako gerako achar, or cannabis seed pickle. This explained the laughter from the kitchen
and increased our appetites ten-fold.
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| Ganja on the roadside |
After the meal, he brought
out a large branch of ganja and explained that this was for the cow. Apparently, the cow ate the ganja and
increased its hunger, produced more milk and everybody, including the cow, was
happy.
This time round, I wasn’t
sure of the road to the town, so I hired a guide for Rs500 (about £3.60) and
got on the road at 06.30. The journey
took us through the villages of Sanku, Naubisi, Suntan and eventually on to
Panauti.
From afar I could see that
the town was a lot larger than I remembered it to be.
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| The cremation |
As we came to the river, the first thing I
noticed was smoke coming from as small temple and realised this was a
cremation. The burning of bodies in Nepal is always a very open and public event
and the road beside the ghat was filled with people going to work and children
going to school, unconcerned about the early-morning cremation. I asked Raju,
my guide, if it would be OK to take a few pictures and he said, Of course!
There very few restrictions about taking photographs of people and
events.
We asked around a few
shops about the Humagains but we quickly found out that there were hundreds of
families by this name and our chances of finding the house I had visited
twenty-five years ago had dwindled to zero pretty quickly.
After a meal, we returned
half way along the road we had come on a ramshackle bus on which we had to
stand. Looking around there was a baby
at the breast, a family four occupying a seat and a bunch of young boys at the
back, everybody bouncing in unison as the bus trundled along over potholes,
ruts and boulders.
We got off at the end of
the road and started the long climb back to Namo Buddha. At a well, I sent Raju off to get some water
and thought I would go ahead in my own, slow way.
At the top of a ridge I sat down and waited
for 15-minutes for him to arrive, but he never did and I climbed the rest of
the hill alone.
When I eventually got to the stupa,
bedraggled and sweating, there was Raju looking fresh and serving an Israeli
couple of which there are a large number who, when leaving the army or just
deciding to travel, head towards China, Thailand, India and Nepal. Apparently, Raju had taken a shortcut which I
must have missed.
Moral of the story: don’t
expect things to be the same as they were twenty-five years ago; don’t
overestimate your capability of trekking in Nepal as even some of the lesser
hills are steeper than the steepest hills in Scotland; and never ever separate
from you guide.
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| Not our bus! |
