My time in Nepal is approaching its end. On Tuesday I am due to fly back to Kathmandu, ahead of leaving the country. As usual when you are confronting the end of a period of time spent anywhere, you get many flashbacks to different times and experiences. So, the first two months were spent in […]
It was way back in June when I first arrived into Kathmandu, before making my way to Pokhara, which has been the base for my several travels since. Well do I remember in my earliest posts, describing the scene from my balcony at Greenhills, of the fields being plowed ready for the rice sowing. The […]
As koalas and kangaroos are emblematic of Australia, tigers of India, pandas China, so yaks and yetis have a similar totemic function here in Nepal. For me, however, the beauty and mystique of the high Himalayas is ever symbolised by the reclusive snow leopard, which, alas, I was never able to see. They roam the […]
It was a short drive down to Kagbeni, a small village cum town that, given its strategic location between Jomsom and Muktinath, has likely served as a staging post for pilgrimage traffic across the centuries, given the town itself is some eight hundred years old. I had been aware of Yac Donalds for some time, […]
Morning duly dawned. Amongst a series of nightmares that night, I had also dreamt that I would forget the flowers I had bought for the temple down in Kagbeni. Customarily you find stalls selling garlands and flowers for temple offerings outside Hindu temples, but at this height there are few flowers of the sort standardly […]
I set off the following morning at ten, in a beat up car that passed for a taxi. After the gruelling ten hours drive up from Pokhara, it was only around an hour and a half to Muktinath on roads that were at least navigable. As we left Jomsom, the stark bleached arid mountainscapes unfolded […]
The journey upwards took some ten hours in total, with a brief stop for lunch, and we rattled into Jomsom at six in the evening, just as the light was starting to fade. No city this, more an extended village of mainly traditional houses which, being the location of the airport, had expanded a little […]
The Sanskrit word ”Mukti” (also Moksha) broadly translates as ‘salvation’. In Eastern religions and theological traditions with their implicit belief in reincarnation, salvation is understood rather differently to the way it is in Christianity, with its emphasis on hellfire and damnation. Salvation here means freedom from the otherwise eternal cycle of reincarnation, envisaged as a […]