Phewa lake, Pokhara
Day dawns to the sound of the continued heavy rain of the night and the cheerful croaking of a legion of frogs from the drenched rice paddies below. Clouds cling smokelike to the hillsides, enveloping the forest in their long undulating and misty caresses. The valley echoes to the raucous angry shouts of villagers engaged in the day long battle to evict marauding macaques from their fields of ripening maize. A neighbour’s dog barks enthusiastically from the safe distance of a balcony, and the monkeys escape with armfuls of corn cobs. Morning advances and birds fly here and there, intent on their daily business, their calls filling the valley. I sit on my balcony and watch the scene evolve before me. Nepal. It’s been two weeks now since I boarded the first flight from the UK that eventually, two full flights further on, brought me here. A long exhausting journey with awkward connections via Copenhagen and Istanbul. The new reality of long distance travel in the days of coronavirus and international lockdowns.
It felt like a miracle to get here at all, given the complexities of visas, border closures, flight restrictions, quarantine requirements, and mandatory virus tests every stage of the way. That deeper instinct of wise counsel that has long guided me, also reassured that whenever needed, doors that seemed closed would always open for me. And they did, as if by magic. Thus did I arrive at last into my quarantine hotel on the edge of Kathmandu, a beautiful extensive, if now ageing establishment, set in lush tropical gardens and enter that always strange if essential period of ‘decompression’ as I call it, where the necessary habits and lifeways contingent upon one world reality are decommissioned and space made for others to emerge.
There I was able to rest and recover from the long journey and the seven strange long months spent in the UK following my return from India the previous November. I had finally concluded my year long pilgrimage with visits to three of the four spectacular high altitude Chota Char Dham pilgrimage sites of Gangotri, Badrinath and Kedarnath, and I knew then that the object of that period had been achieved and the journey (that stage of it) over and that, unexpectedly, I was being called to go back to the UK, something I had absolutely not expected. That, however, is a story of its own and not one I will recount here, excepting to say that it counted as a kind of dimension of its own, both different from yet part of that overall journey I had been intent upon and, once over, it was clear that the way forward lay back in the Indian subcontinent, this time Nepal.