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Posted by Ed (354 days ago)

Kathmandu, Nepal: Tushita Heaven Handicrafts

At first blush, Tsonamgel Lama has a highly unusual résumé for an art dealer. Mr. Lama, a onetime Buddhist monk, switched from meditating on Nirvana to solving complex equations, en route to a master’s degree in mathematics.

Yet these two seemingly disparate passions — religious and analytic, metaphysical and numerical — make immediate sense once you behold the deeply spiritual, intricately geometric and highly rule-governed thangka paintings that he sells in his Kathmandu gallery, Tushita Heaven Handicrafts.

In them, icons and characters out of Buddhist lore — deities, demons, bodhisattvas and the Buddha himself — float against kaleidoscopically colorful backgrounds filled with complex Buddhist symbols, swirling landscapes and occasionally mind-bending geometric patterns.

At Tushita Heaven Handicrafts, some 200 artists have been chosen to contribute to the vast collection.

“Each artist has a different specialty and skill,” said Mr. Lama, who has been selling thangkas for 25 years. “Some are excellent at depicting colors. Others are very knowledgeable about history.”

In several thangkas, the teenage bodhisattva Manjushri swings a flaming sword, symbolically slicing away the artificial dualities of thought. Others depict the Tibetan Wheel of Life, a representation of the endless process of birth, suffering, death and rebirth that unenlightened beings endure — a cycle known as samsara. At the center of the zodiac-like circle are always a pig, a snake and a rooster, representing the three delusions responsible for suffering: greed, hatred and ignorance. One character sits beyond the grim scene, in the upper corner of the canvas: the Buddha. Only from his teachings, the Wheels of Life remind, can human beings transcend samsara.

Creating such thangkas requires more than a facility with a paintbrush and knowledge of Buddhist thought. “There are very specific mathematical proportions,” Mr. Lama said. “Knowing the geometry and proportions for thangka paintings is very important.” The lively reds, deep blues, electric oranges and other pigments are mostly derived from local stones, and the shimmering gold patterns and lines come from 24-karat gold.

A 2-foot-by-3-foot thangka of high quality can take six months to make and cost several thousand dollars. But the store has plenty of smaller thangkas of simpler quality and no gold paint that cost less than $20.

http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/travel/14Foraging.html

(I am based in Hong Kong)

Posted by Ed (354 days ago)

Reaching A Goal In Nepal

ON a trek, there are good starts and there are bad starts to a day. The fact that my guide was cursing from the doorway of our room undoubtedly meant the latter.

I was still wrapped in my sleeping bag at more than 13,700 feet in the Nepali Himalaya, having got only a few hours of sleep because of the thin air and freezing temperatures. I could see the frost from my breath even inside our lodge in the four-house settlement of Letdar. As my guide, Jit Bahadur Thapa, continued his ranting, I stumbled shivering to the doorway.

The world outside was covered in snow. A blizzard had hit overnight, and flakes were still coming down hard.

We were just a day away from crossing Thorung La. This pass, a notch in the mountains at 17,765 feet that allows passage from the spectacular Manang Valley to the Mustang district on the Tibetan plateau, was supposed to be the most difficult part of the arduous 18-day trek I had undertaken. Even in ideal conditions, the pass is a relatively tough climb, given the lack of oxygen and danger of altitude sickness.

Despite all the prayers and candle offerings we had made at Buddhist monasteries along the way, it seemed that our karmic wheel had taken a turn for the worse. To go on meant possibly being trapped in the snowstorm. To go back meant retracing our steady ascent of the last 10 days.

''So what do we do?'' I asked Jit.

He tested the snow with his foot, then uttered the words that a part of me was afraid to hear: ''We don't have a choice. We go for the pass.''

Getting into potentially life-threatening situations was not on my agenda when I decided to go to Nepal last November. I had moved from California to New York more than a year earlier. In the city, the closest I got to nature was the smell wafting from the sewers during the summer. I was spending too much time in front of an office computer.

My thoughts turned obsessively to the Himalayas, which had left an indelible impression from an earlier trip to Pakistan, and to the Tibetan Buddhist culture that had fascinated me during travels in western China a year and a half before. Buddhist philosophy, with its teachings about desire, suffering and impermanence, seemed to offer a broader perspective on life, and had intrigued me since visiting those Tibetan villages.

I wasn't exactly sure what I was looking for, but I thought I could find it along the popular trekking route known as the Annapurna Circuit. It is a walk of more than 150 miles that circumnavigates the Annapurna massif, ascending from subtropical terrain up to the high deserts of the Tibetan plateau, in the shadow of peaks that tower to more than 26,500 feet.

I flew from New York to Delhi, then spent four days taking a train and buses to the lakeside resort town of Pokhara, in central Nepal. The valley was lush and dotted with rice terraces. Internet cafes and trekking shops lined the streets of the town's tourist neighborhoods. I spent two days biking and rowing along Phewa Lake and meeting several guides. Many trekkers complete the Annapurna Circuit without a guide, but I wanted to learn more about the region and its people.

I settled on Jit. At 45, not only had he guided clients dozens of times over Thorung La, but he had accompanied trips to Tibet, the K2 base camp in Pakistan and the Indian Himalayas. His English was nearly fluent.

We caught a bus the next morning to the trail head at the village of Besisahar, with a goal of finishing the circuit in 18 days. I wanted to head quickly up to the Manang Valley, where the mountain scenery was supposed to be at its most dramatic and where Buddhism was much more prevalent than in the predominantly Hindu lower regions. From there, we would take several days to reach Thorung La and cross over into the arid Mustang district, where Tibetan culture still flourished.

It took us about a week to reach the Manang Valley. The trail started at less than 3,000 feet, among green hills dotted with banana trees, rice terraces and water buffalo. Women in bright-colored saris slashed rice straw with small sickles. The trail followed the gorge carved by the Marsyangdi River and was once used mostly as a trade route before it gained popularity as a trekking path in the 1970's. We came across several villages each day, all of which had simple guest houses that made convenient stops for tea, meals and lodging.

Some days presented tough challenges, with ascents of 2,000 feet over six hours or more of walking. I carried about 30 pounds in my backpack, most of it winter gear for high altitudes. By the time we reached the Manang Valley, at more than 11,000 feet, I was in the best shape of my life.

It seemed that Jit and I had exhausted every topic of conversation during our time together, from marriage (he had courted his second wife while guiding treks through her village) to politics (he was sympathetic to the Maoist guerrillas who were waging a ''people's war'' in western Nepal). I noticed that Jit pulled a string of prayer beads out of his pocket several times a day and counted off each bead in his hand. Under his breath, he whispered over and over the Buddhist mantra that in the Himalayas appears on everything from prayer wheels to stone tablets: ''Om mani padme hum,'' which translates roughly as ''the jewel is in the lotus.''

Like more than 85 percent of Nepalis, Jit was born into a Hindu family. But as an adult, he began to feel more and more uncomfortable with the animal sacrifices at Hindu festivals. After helping guide a trip to Tibet, he began converting to Buddhism. That was about 12 years ago, and he was still in the process of giving up carnivorous temptations like goat and yak meat.

On the trek, daily life was reduced to its most fundamental elements. I got up every morning at dawn, as livestock began moving about the village. I went to bed after some postdinner stargazing. I walked, stared at mountains, ate rice and lentils (with minimal stomach problems), wrote in my journal, slept. The only real decision I had to make each day was where to stop for the night.

Sweat dripped from my skin, dirt clung to my clothes and smoke from kitchen hearths occasionally filled my lungs. Bathing became unnecessary as my standards of cleanliness changed. I met dozens of Nepalis in their home villages, from farmers to yak herders to Buddhist nuns.

But much of the trek also passed in silence. The quiet enveloped me in a way that seemed as intimate and as luxurious as silk.

I soon realized that all the pursuits that drove my existence in New York meant nothing here. Not only that, but I had no identity in these mountains. I was completely anonymous, just a person wandering the trails with no past or future. Perhaps this was a step toward what Buddhists called the loss of the ego.

Over the first week, the scenery changed from subtropical vegetation to brown earth that lay barren in the Himalayan rain shadow. Villages at higher elevations consisted of multistory stone houses with ladders and flat roofs. Prayer flags fluttered from rooftop poles, and rows of prayer wheels lined the entrances and centers of the villages.

The larger settlements had white-walled monasteries, or gompas, whose dark, musty chambers housed clay statues of Buddhist deities, sculptures made of pungent yak butter and wall cubicles that held holy books wrapped in orange cloth.

In the village of Upper Pisang, at 10,825 feet, I realized how important these institutions were to the spiritual life of a community. All the men of that village were helping to build a new gompa atop a ridge overlooking the valley.

A dozen or so volunteers sawed wood beams in the center of town; others dragged stones to the construction site using sleds made of yak hide. They had been working for a year and had at least another to go. Once completed, the gompa would house a half-dozen lamas, or Buddhist priests, and would be the largest for miles around.

A man overseeing the construction, Churung Gurung, told me he had come by bus and foot from Katmandu to work here for six months. Like the other laborers, he was born and raised in this village, and he was obligated to answer the call for help. ''A lot of these men came back from other places,'' he said. ''They left their families and jobs. This is something bigger than any of us.''

In the sprawling hillside village of Braga, at 11,025 feet, I came across the oldest gompa in the Manang Valley, called the White Rock monastery because of the color of the sandstone formations into which it was built. After eight days of trekking, Jit and I had decided to rest for a day in the valley to become acclimated for the climb to Thorung La.

The landscape was among the most dramatic of the entire circuit, with 25,000-foot peaks that plummeted down to the valley floor. These included Annapurna III and Gangapurna, whose glaciers fed turquoise lakes.

On our rest day, I struck off alone to follow a trail more than 3,700 feet up to a remote spot called Ice Lake. As I searched for the trail head, I heard loud drumbeats coming from the white gompa above the village. The monastery was built 500 years ago by the Kagyu sect of Tibetan Buddism.

After entering a doorway flanked by sculptures of deities, I walked down a gloomy hallway along creaking floorboards and saw three lamas in red robes sitting on cushions along one side of the main chamber. Dozens of candles and incense sticks burned on the altar, and more than 100 terra-cotta statues from Buddhist mythology lined the walls.

The eldest of the three lamas led the others in a series of baritone chants. One of the younger monks occasionally pounded a drum hanging from a rafter, while the other clashed a pair of cymbals. The ceremony was hypnotic.

When the senior lama noticed me, he beckoned and motioned for me to lower my head. He then tied a string around my neck and pressed a tikka, or small dot, of red powder onto my forehead. I thought optimistically that these blessings would help on the ascent to Thorung La.

But two days later, as we slept in the settlement of Letdar, a snowstorm left two inches of powder on the ground. Parts of the trail were slick, and the storm was far from over. Nevertheless, Jit and the other guides at the lodge suggested that all the trekkers push onward.

As snow whipped through the air, I followed Jit along a sliver of a trail that clung to the steep west bank of the valley before climbing to the Thorung La high camp, about 2,040 feet below the pass. At one point, I almost slipped on a patch of hardened snow to what surely would have been my death. At 3 p.m., we stumbled exhausted into the high camp lodge where some two dozen trekkers, mostly from Europe and North America, were holing up for the night.

Outside, the last flakes drifted down as the sky began to clear. Ice covered the windowpanes. I wore four layers and still lay shivering in my sleeping bag. At 15,700 feet, I had a minor headache and shortness of breath, and found it impossible to get any real sleep.

The last stars were fading from the sky as Jit and I joined dozens of other trekkers in the early morning climb, the beams from our headlamps piercing the darkness. Our aim was to reach the pass before the fierce winds started. We trudged through the snow, putting one foot in front of the other. The sky turned a paler and paler blue, until the first rays of dawn flooded the white landscape with the kind of magical golden light found only in the mountains.

We marched in a slow line, stopping every 10 minutes to catch our breath. Some people had pounding headaches. Others stumbled to the side and vomited. I was aware of every part of my body -- from my sweat to my aching muscles to the air in my lungs -- in a way I had never been before.

At the same time, I felt again that profound sense of nonexistence that I had experienced throughout the trek. Despite all our pretensions, we were just ragged animals scurrying across the crust of the earth. Everything else was an illusion.

After two hours of gasping for air and climbing over false summits, I looked up and saw a mound of prayer flags that marked the top of Thorung La. Jit was already there, grinning beneath his baseball cap. I wanted to collapse as I took the final steps, barely realizing that at 17,765 feet, this was the highest I had ever been.

Beyond the pass lay the stunning high desert plateau of Mustang. I would hike six more days through villages there and down the Kali Gandaki gorge, among the deepest in the world, before completing the circuit and heading by bus on to Katmandu.

Part of me undoubtedly would have regretted it if I had had to stop short of Thorung La. But as I stood atop the pass and stared at the fluttering prayer flags and distant peaks, I also realized that crossing it had never really been the goal. Well before that day, I had found what I was searching for in coming back to the Himalayas. The real challenge would be keeping it alive on my return, like cupping a stick of burning incense against the mountain wind.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04E3DA113EF932A25751C0A9679C8B63

(I am based in Hong Kong)

Posted by Ed (354 days ago)

The Other Side of Katmandu

IT'S been almost 50 years since Nepal first invited Western visitors to trek its ancient trade routes, and 30 years since its capital, Katmandu, became a hippie mecca. More recently, in the wake of Jon Krakauer's best-selling book ''Into Thin Air,'' the image of the mysterious Shangri-La has suffered. Katmandu has been reduced to a polluted staging ground for mountain adventure, while the trails themselves sound as crowded as the Long Island Expressway on a summer weekend. One friend advised that I visit neighboring Bhutan instead. ''Nepal is finished,'' he told me.

My girlfriend, Rachel, and I arrived in Katmandu at the beginning of April, as the premonsoon heat began to warm up the city and the surrounding valley while clouding our view of the Himalayas. Our taxi from the airport dropped us in Thamel, the low-budget tourist section of town, which many Westerners think is all there is to Katmandu.

Even if one arrives directly from America, Thamel hardly delivers a culture shock. Signs are in English and most restaurants can deliver a generous slice of apple pie topped with a scoop of ice cream. We even checked ourselves into the Mustang Holiday Inn, although the name was apparently the only link between our quaint guest house and the international chain.

To see old Katmandu, we strolled 15 minutes south through narrow dirt streets underneath dusty, ancient brick-and-wood buildings to the city's legendary Durbar Square, a motley collection of temples and pagodas clustered around Hanuman Dhoka, the old royal palace. Our guidebook had good information about the monuments of Durbar Square, but we hardly had a chance to consult it that day. Despite its historic significance, the square remains a noisy, bustling center of trade and worship for most Nepalis -- and accordingly open to all forms of traffic. (A couple of days later, a local newspaper reported that the area was in danger of losing its designation as a United Nations World Heritage Site for just this reason.) A few touts sold quick temple tours, and there were several souvenir shops, but sightseers were an afterthought here.

Just as we might have centuries ago, we moved between two lumbering elephants with their anxious owner and a steady stream of porters and farmers carrying loads of vegetables to market. The next moment we had to dodge the swerving motorcycles and trucks belching thick, sooty smoke. The pollution from the motor traffic and the omnipresent dust formed an unpleasant cocktail, and I noticed that many Nepalis resorted to wearing white dust masks as an antidote. Like most visitors, we quickly headed for the hills.

We hired a guide and a porter and embarked on a 13-day trek to the isolated Langtang Valley, a narrow strip of semiarid land sandwiched between two mountain ranges just a few miles south of Tibet. The valley was settled by Tibetan immigrants several hundred years ago, and people still reside there, surviving on a combination of subsistence farming and tourism. Langtang is hardly undiscovered, but it draws far fewer visitors than the better-known trekking regions surrounding Mount Everest and the Annapurnas.

I read that pollution had become an increasing problem in those other areas, forcing authorities to ban nonrecyclable water bottles. We were pleased to find the Langtang trails, as well as the basic accommodations along the way known as teahouses, quite clean. Visitors and residents appear to have benefited from an eco-tourism campaign designed to teach villagers everything from sanitary waste disposal to how to cook an American-style omelet.

Our trek began with an eight-hour drive from Katmandu to Dhunche (pronounced doon-chay), a sleepy town that serves as the trailhead for the region. From there, it was a three-day hike to Langtang Valley. Neither of us had any technical climbing skills and none were needed on the well-traveled main trail. Thanks to our porter, Dep, the hiking was tiring but rarely overwhelming. At first we were grateful for the company of our guide, Changba, too. He handled our negotiations over room and board and identified mountain peaks with great aplomb. When questions turned to flora and fauna, however, we quickly discovered the limits of Changba's knowledge (or perhaps it was his English). As the trip wore on, we vowed next time to keep the porter, but lose the guide.

We spent much of the first few days ascending a steep canyon just below the valley that was thickly forested with bamboo, then crossed a narrow suspension bridge over the powerful Langtang River. The entrance to the valley itself was marked by a fragrant rhododendron grove and framed by immense granite cliffs. The mountains are undoubtedly the main attraction in Langtang, but the Tibetan culture, seemingly untouched by lowland Nepalese influence, almost ended up stealing the show.

We savored our night in the village of Langtang, a medieval congregation of stone buildings covered with plain wood shingles, where the thin air at 11,500 feet mixed pleasingly with the smoke of yak dung fires. As the sun was setting, we looked out of our wooden teahouse and saw a woman herding her sheep home below the snow-covered saber-toothed peak of Langtang II.

The next day, we continued our walk up the valley to Kyangjin, essentially a group of teahouses clustered at the base of several imposing mountains. Kyangjin serves as a staging ground for day trips to nearby peaks and longer mountaineering expeditions. It also has a small Buddhist monastery, or gompa, and a Swiss-owned factory that produces yak cheese.

After hiking back down the valley, we spent three days on a side trip up its southern ridge to the holy lake of Gosainkund, which Hindus believe was created by Shiva, who receives more adoration in Nepal than any other Hindu deity. It is easy to understand the devotion to the volatile god when you are walking next to rivers that continue to carve deep canyons out of mountains rising to the sky. Gosainkund becomes the focus of worship every August when thousands of pilgrims come to the lake to honor Shiva. Our few days in and around Gosainkund provided the best views of our trek. One particularly clear morning we enjoyed a spectacular panorama of what seemed a giant Himalayan rock garden: neighboring mountain ranges dominated the foreground while faraway ridges could just be made out in the distance.

The trek gave us a different perspective on Katmandu. Out in the terraced farms of the Himalayas, the city looked less like an entry point for tourists or the polluted capital of a developing country, and more like the main trading post of a mountainous, rural region. One man we met (who spoke English -- unusual outside of Katmandu) told us that when he was young his father had to hike 21 days to reach Katmandu and trade his goods in its markets. These days, the man hikes eight hours to the nearest road and catches a bus to the capital. We returned to the city refreshed, and I was ready to give it another chance.

I ROSE early our first morning and walked back to Durbar Square just as the sun peeked through the thin clouds over the royal palace. The temperature was a cool 70 degrees, and this time I understood the square's charm. Tourists and automobiles were gone, and the vegetable sellers dominated the space, even using the temples themselves to display produce. Some Nepalis shopped while others made morning offerings to the gods. The portly Hindu elephant-headed god Ganesh, stuffed into a humble one-story pagoda, was getting most of the attention. A line of 40 to 50 Hindus waited to present rice, flowers and incense to the god of auspicious beginnings before heading off to work.

As long as one avoids the polluted main thoroughfares, Katmandu is a great walking town, and I spent my mornings strolling the city's smaller streets. I fell in love with the compact Asan Tole, a central trading junction in the heart of the old city, which boasts many spice and garment sellers as well as a disproportionate number of wandering holy cows.

One block southwest of Asan Tole -- the street, like most in the city, has no name -- is the entrance to Sweta Machhendranath, a well-attended pagoda temple in which both Hindus and Buddhists worship. As it is everywhere in Katmandu, religion is inseparable from daily life, and the solemn statue of Buddha marking the temple's location is trapped between a shoe salesman and a kitchen outfitter. In contrast to the bustling center, I found the city's outskirts sobering. There was no commerce to hide the poverty that continues to plague many Nepalis, despite domestic and international development efforts.

NEPAL is sandwiched, physically and philosophically, between the Hinduism of India and the Buddhism of Tibet. One day we paid homage to both great influences by taking a taxi from Katmandu to Pashupatinath, one of the holiest Hindu sites on the Indian subcontinent, and then walking about a mile and a half to Bodhnath, the spiritual center for Nepal's large Tibetan community.

Pashupatinath is a collection of Hindu temples east of the city center built around the Bagmati River. We could not enter the main temple, which is only open to Hindus, so we climbed the complex's terraces, looking down at the cremation ghats on the river. Rachel photographed the colorfully dressed ascetic worshipers, known as sadhus, who squatted in small stone shrines dotting the hillside.

After an hourlong walk along a dirt road, we arrived at Bodhnath, Nepal's largest Buddhist shrine. We circled the huge white-washed dome, known as a stupa, gazing at long lines of Tibetan prayer flags in various stages of decay. We slipped off our shoes and stepped inside the nearby Sakyapa Gompa, a temple featuring an ornate smiling Buddha and the soft chanting of unseen monks. Rachel, who traveled to Tibet several years ago, felt that Bodhnath offered a far better sense of practicing Buddhism than most of what she had seen in the Chinese-controlled homeland.

It is hard to imagine returning from Bodhnath, the symbol of a lost Tibetan age, to a hotel in Thamel, the most westernized place in the Himalayas. One minute we were surrounded by Tibetan monks and the next by a group of young Israelis. The music of Lauryn Hill and the signs for pizza and Coke did not bother me as much as they would have the first day we arrived in Nepal. Now, they seemed less like intrusions and more like part of the melting pot: desirable products on sale in the vibrant trading post known as Katmandu.

I also found myself comforted by thinking of Shiva, the champion of creation and destruction. Nepal is far from finished, I realized, but only Shiva knows what it will become.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B03EEDB133BF93AA25750C0A9669C8B63

(I am based in Hong Kong)

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