At last I think the weather has changed, or certainly is changing. Following days of intense rains and nightly electric storms wreaking widespread havoc and destruction, building to a crescendo with a night long thunder storm like an overhead bombardment, then a full day of torrential rain, yesterday, there was a gradual easing off and then sunshine. Last night, for the first time, there was a real golden sunset and the sky clear enough to see the stars.
This morning the forested hills were also clear, largely devoid of the clouds habitually drifting smoke like around them. Probably the monsoon has a few more weeks yet to endure, but I definitely feel the worst is past.
Yesterday, as if to mark the transition, the family who run this small guesthouse ploughed the terraces where the maize had been recently harvested and then opened the culverts, flooding them with water, and lines of women moved in to plant the young rice seedlings. In the space of a day, the whole scene had changed from something distinctly Andean (to me) into something more typically Asian, which of course it is.
Here, terrace slope cultivation is a widespread agricultural adaptation, maximising the productivity of the land whilst guarding against destructive soil loss through erosion. Across the other side of world in the Andes, it is a form of agriculture sporadically used, though much more so in the past, with extensive pre-Columbian terrace systems throughout the highland regions of Peru, especially in the Sacred Valley of Cusco around Pisac.
Phewa lake has lost its blue green lustre, now looking simply muddy with sediment. Whilst high from one the surrounding peaks sits Shiva, a remote enigmatic guardian of this land where Hinduism is very much a living tradition and, of that, Shiva the most important divinity. Under his watchful gaze I lie in my hammock, or practice yoga and prepare myself for the next stage of my journey here, whenever the weather allows me to move further into the Annapurna Sanctuary and once more fall within the thrall of these awesome mountains that so allured me months ago in Gangotri, the snow capped peaks of the high Himalayas.
