Kathmandu Surprise! (Guest Author! Betsy!)

13-16 October
Something must die. Pigs, goats, chickens beware. It is the festival
of Dashain and the goddesses will be appeased. Nick was excited to
see this river of blood (good photos, you know) but I was nervous.
Rachel was too. It’s hard to get blood out of nice shoes.
We went today to Durbar square to witness the sacrificial festivities
but saw only one sacrificed animal and, to our shoes’ delight, no
streams of blood. The buildings, however, were fantastic to look at
in their own right. Beautfully and intricatlly carved wood on the
stupas, brightly painted Shivas and guard dogs, thousands of hindus
flocking to Taleju to do a ceremonial clockwise walk around their
temple. It was magical.


The crowds were overwhelming to me and it was nice to climb the stairs
of a stupa and watch the people walk by and admire the buildings
without the worry of being hit by a motorcycle.


I am so happy to be here and so happy that I was actually able to find
Rachel and Nick. Did you know they were planning to pick me up at the
airport? I thought they said they were. This was comforting to me
since I landed at 10:30 pm. But instead of a reunion I waited an hour
and a half while the airport cleared out and shut down. By midnight I
decided to find my own way to a hotel. Success the next day however
when Rachel and Nick read my email, panicked, and came round to
collect me.

Despite the initial snafu things have been easy-peasy. We’ve been
buying everything we need for the trek, seeing the sights, and
chatting it up. We went to the monkey temple today, a Buddhist
temple. The sky decided to turn to water so all the famed monkeys
went inside and didn’t bother to greet us. The temple was amazing all
the same. The eyes of the Buddha, huge and spanning across the
temple, were enchanting. The top of the temple is painted gold and
the gold paint washes down onto the white round walls below making
beautiful designs, creating a beautiful kind of decay. At the base of
temple are a series of prayer wheels which pilgrims rotate as they
walk the circumference. It occurred to me that I was seeing something
with my own eyes that I’ve only seen in pictures. This made me happy.
I shared this with N and R and they had similar sentiments.

Tomorrow, my birthday, we head out at 5 am to start our Everest Base
Camp trek. The trek is 27 days long! All three of us must be crazy.
Note, we will not have internet access for at least ten days, maybe
you will not hear from N and R for 27 days…and it won’t be because of
something I’ve done.