01/02/2008
remain at Malemchigaon. There is a celebration of three days (today is the last) to the gompa (Tibetan Buddhist temple) to commemorate and pray for a man during a year after his death. It is used to celebrate after three days, after seven, after forty-nine and after a year. The family provides food and beverages is doing pujas (ceremonies) continuously for three days. It 'a big party and say what happens on average about twenty times a year and then plenty more than once a month.
The man who died is remembered today in India. Many people of this village go to India to work, to build houses and someone who also owns shops in Ladakh.
The lodge where I am belongs to a man without children (great evil here) says that he is the current head of the village, but later I learn that it is only according to the Maoist faction while would be another legitimate; situations likely to be repeated often in this election to Nepal on hold who knows if they really come in April as promised and in the process of transition from monarchy to parliamentary democracy.
I make a trip to the gompa to see what happens and if I can take some pictures because the opportunity is tempting.
As I stand at the temple door invite me to sit with them and after a while 'puja begins. For all three days make it all the time, with a few breaks in between to chat, drink tea, salted butter (the Tibetan tea) and Raks or chang (local spirits). Oddly
the blade leading the prayers has no clothes Monaco: in fact it is not, it is a secular blade, a "family" blade, as they say and how they are all the lamas of these villages have families, they drink alcohol and do everything like the others. These villages sherpa Niyngmapa follow the lineage of the oldest in Tibetan Buddhism, and in this tradition the intermediate state between Monaco and secular is not too strange.
The festival will be a difficult thing for me to forget: big fires with huge logs of wood carried on the shoulders until the open space in front of the gompa, with a lot of people around, who is sitting to talk or eat, if you distribute rice from huge cauldrons Who turns to offer tea or chang and Raks.
And then there are the moments in which all sing and pray both inside and outside the gompa with this blade that you do not understand what they are and which are not. And finally, the evening dances around the fire singing and no music other than the time clocked by a drum.
A semicircle, a stretch of one of the men and women, held his arms behind his life and turn inornata doing every once in a forward or a step back.
Almost everyone speaks enough English, especially teachers and students of the local school which also has a hostel for children of surrounding villages and is sponsored by a British NGO.
During the afternoon I know the teacher-director of the school looks like a beautiful person, intelligent and "good will '." His is an interesting story and I would say, edifying was young and studying to become a civil engineer, and once this has passed through the village during a trek. At that time here there was no school education in Nepal is not in fact mandatory, nor for the parents to send their children to school, nor, apparently, for the government to the schools for the people, especially those who live in mountain villages (that is, if anyone can just afford to send their children to private schools).
The people of the village (have figured out the type, that was a good one? Who knows ....) asked him to stop and teach their children. He thought for a bit 'up and said he was "why not put down roots here in this beautiful village, among these good people?". And so it was: he had to deal with a little 'discussion with her parents to leave school, but has followed its decision. For the first twelve or thirteen years, the villagers have provided food and shelter, but worked without pay, then came the British NGO, and the following agreements with the government and so now there is a beautiful and well maintained school apparently well-functioning public with him as director and other teachers in turn. It is also converted to Buddhism, its origin Hindu he married a woman here and now has a beautiful house that is also a lodge for tourists.
After a while, 'the dancing started I go to bed tomorrow is a new day's journey and the numerous cups of hot Raks invite you to sleep.
From inside the sleeping bag I hear them go on and on until I fall asleep.
02/02/2008
From Malemchigaon descend steeply (watch out for ice!) For a while, 'till the suspension bridge over the river where I found an old man with a dagger at his belt kukhuri makes me realize that it's back and Malemchigaon on the village, complained a bit 'of the instability of the bridge and greets me warmly shaking hands. The people around here is just too good!
Throughout the course I always find someone ready to give me valuable suggestions on the path to follow, even before I asked them to him or calling from far away to correct my direction guessing my destination - after all in the high season of tourists here will pass many and they all have the same path.
But perhaps the person I remember with more pleasure during this climb I met today on the bridge to Tarkegyang.
At some point, those parts of the village of Dozum did not know well which way to go, the trail was no longer visible, I saw a house nearby and I got close, but apparently There was no one, then I heard a voice calling me by a bit 'higher up and I see a woman who is neither young nor old milking a buffalo. He asks me if I'm alone (the first thing everyone asked me always amazed in all these trips in the areas of Indian culture, along with "what is your name?" And "where are you from?") And then tell me if I want to drink a cup of tea .. I made a good impression: it is the image of Sherpa country, I am glad to pause for a moment with her and agree. I am entering the house and sat in his beautiful Tibetan style kitchen with large cupboard full of pots, cups and plates of metal and the stove where I sit low on the right side, the place of respect for the host (or which would otherwise be the head of household), while the woman is usually left in front of the fire and the children, males and females on the right to the left (and possibly other guests on the continuing right seated around a long table below).
It 's very nice. He stopped milking, he began to collect firewood, has rekindled the fire and put on the pot, so ', just to make me a cup of tea' I eat on the journey, as I passed by his house and I am alone.
speaks little English, she says she has two children (but there are now) and her husband who works in the nearby region of Langtang, then, we discover still talking that we were both at the monastery of Key, in the valley of Spiti in Himachal Pradesh, India, in 2000, when the Dalai Lama gave a Kalachakra initiation there and she remembers little of the 'hustle and bustle of the police that there was and the monks of the "service order" when people we all pull together in time to see the sacred mandala was swept away after the ceremony and we just lacked that collapsed the scale on which all crowded to go up to room of the mandala. What a coincidence!
After tea with me on the edge of their fields to show me the path and while running after the cows and a newborn lamb to bring them back in their boxes. I
asked nothing and I believe I have respected his dignity in the country did not offer to pay anything for the tea.
I resume the climb and there is another moment I'll remember.
At some point, go down the rather steep rock steps, but do not consider that I stuck in the pack a sleeping bag while I go down that relies on the previous step and gives me a push forward, thankfully not strong enough - but just little - to really push forward because there are just a few meters under vacuum with the rocks on the bottom.
There are places in the world where Death is waiting for us perhaps (at that time? Always? - But then there is the time for death has ?...): hidden there all along the right conditions to come and take without our knowing, and perhaps for some of our internal power, some for our good deed committed in the past or to whom we gave up some bad or maybe because she is then just at that moment he is distracted for a moment with someone else, instead we spend and we remain free to apply, in memory, just that point in space and time in which our lives for the slightest thing could end, but no, instead of c ' was still everything else and we're still here to tell it.
One of these places, which is always here in my memory as if to that end I escaped just now, it's one point about in the middle of the bridge Ariccia, near Rome - a place known for suicides - where to fifteen years, at the height of my adolescent self-destructive crises, there really is not a moment that I throw below for a close and safe with this do not throw away everything that was my next life.
probably are moments that pass so many guys at that stage of growth, but I still feel that not thank you enough that basic survival skills that once made me start to walk away from the bridge as soon as possible without waiting to have found an answer right to my brood of time if it was more just to live or die. I thank the sword cut cleanly through the ill taste of those arguments, the hand that has uprooted them without consideration. Thank you for letting me live that instinct all the next life, for all the joy and all pain, all the efforts, including the one in this way, the possibility of andarmi dovechessia to look like it is, on my way up to forget the problems of the time, for which I would have lost their lives and now have even less sense today that there are others that will be replaced tomorrow by some, to make each new location where there will always be corners well where death is waiting for me. But after that moment on that bridge when come to the point where it was she who will take me find me. I accept, but if I find the point where I'll be there waiting for me to live life, not to seek death.
Shortly after these steps of rock, a point as another point as another from every point of view of others or earlier arrival in Tarkegyang, where I stop to sleep.
The lodge is family relatives with whom I stayed at the previous village, which has recommended it to me.
It 's a couple who has three children Lama in Dharamsala, seat of the Dalai Lama into exile in India, an immigrant in Britain, a daughter in Israel and another young and very beautiful, delicate, which helps the mother to be eat together with two younger siblings. After
a bit 'here comes a group of Australian trekkers, an organized group with three guides and three porters. I'm not talking much: the English spoken by Australians (particularly in the group all together) I understand little.
am a little 'talking to the Nepalese after dinner.
03/02/2008 Today I want to stop here, but it is already very cold, clouds are coming and the old house expected bad weather. The village's next stop is a little higher, but they say less and less exposed to cold, so the decision is taken: I do the backpack and go.
Timely, almost had called the old man, he starts to fall snow, but light, although a couple of hours.
I go well: the path is relatively flat and I feel well the music on the iPod, then the first Buddha Bar Monte Adentro, my dear friends at home, and then the jazz great Ron Carter.
After a while, 'the snow stops, but faces another problem: I keep on walking for a long time without encountering either people or villages and there were a couple of forks on which I had to decide by intuition. Intuition which to begin to doubt as they prepare the rest of the forest. A forest dense and foggy: it seems to be in the "Jungle Book" or in "The mysteries of the jungle black" and that a tiger is about to jump out from every bush. In fact you only see birds and many other marks on the ground of the work of digging by wild boars, but I also see these things in my house.
when she came at last to the village of Sermantang (confirming the accuracy of my intuition) tells me that yes, there are tigers, leopards and even, but it is a small breed and very nice if you Namaste "(the Nepali greeting with folded hands) will also feature" Namaste, "I say jokingly (maybe because they are all vegetarians here that you create an alliance with the animals - but also with meat eaters? - but I am beginning to suspect if this is really tigers, even though I will remain happy .... if in doubt!). The
my host family - also a relative of those of the previous two villages - is composed of a pair in his fifties who have emigrated to Israel three daughters and two sons who are students in Kathmandu today returned to the village for the feast of Losar, the Tibetan new year there will be four days. I am a boy and a girl diciassete twenty-one years. She was twice in Britain with the traditional Nepalese dance company to which it belongs. The first time was fourteen years old and wanted to stay there to work, but did not know that in Europe, child labor is banned, and now, he says, is too difficult to obtain a visa. She speaks good English and seems an intelligent and educated girl. The parents talk a lot less, but still spend the evening in a nice long chat about many topics of Nepal, Italy, tourism, with a party of monks who will be dancing in the village two weeks after I Losar It reminds of return on the occasion. At one point
greeting and go to sleep: I would still be here but I understand that people go to bed early and do not want to bother (after all there is no light bulb in the kitchen except for a weakly supported by the solar panel on this day cloudy). In
room all the candles, fortunately I have some 'spare.
in my sleeping bag I think it is a beautiful lucky to have found this family.
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