in-sanity: Back to Kathmandu and off to Shanghai

Back to Kathmandu...A hot shower and a meal that did not consist of rice, dhal or potato curry. Little pleasures in life go a long way after you've been living in grime for days on end.

The trek to the monastery was hard. The trek back even harder. In a week I washed twice and hardly changed clothes. I ate dreary rice and dhal every day. I have severe blisters on my toes and grime under my nails. Would I do it all again? Will I?

Tonight I fly back to Shanghai. I am looking forward to going home. Back with Frank, back with friends and back to work. Back to real clean warm showers, clean toilets, food that I don't have to wonder whether it will make me sick, abundant clean drinking water...back to my life.

Yet, I do wonder, when all the blisters are gone and the vivid memories fade, what the impact of meeting these people of the mountains will have on my life; how being in their lives for a few hours or a few days changed me; because changed me it did. I guess only time will tell...

During the trek I tried to continue my habit of writing stream- of -consciousness daily. It empties the mind of all angst crap and lets you free to write what's important. I found it impossible. It was as if there was nothing left of me to write about; no space left for any aimless existentialist randomness that I was even remotely aware of. My mind was only full of the stories, people and situations I encountered during the day. I occasionally, vaguely, wondered if that is being in the moment, but even that thought was hard to sustain. I gave up and went with the flow and just wrote down the stories and described the people.

So many experiences to share. Where does one start? The trek up and the Shaman at Photeng and the chopping off of the puppy's tail? The toddler at 3,300m? The lovely nuns at Bigu monastery and the moving puja? The Bigu Shaman and his spitting and hitting me on the head with his drum? The robbery of the nuns on the Off-Road-Express jeep? Grandpa's story? The hard- hard- hard walk down and the magnificence of the rhododendrons? The dreariness and the grime and the immense humanity of the people, even as life is cheap here?

I will never be able to do it all justice, but I will attempt to bit by bit to describe the lives of the people I encountered. I'll do it in chronological order as I experienced it and hope that I can take you with me to Bigu and back.

For now here are some photos to wet your appetite.