Nepali New Year

We got up early enough to see sunrise but with not much hope of actually seeing anything. Consequently, we weren’t at all disappointed when we saw nothing…or at least a depthless expanse of grey mist and cloud, in which a tiny, pale red disc slowly appeared. The only effect of this magnificent ‘sunrise’ was to turn the clouds a little pink and show up all the filthy dust and yellow smog that was floating around too. We duly went back to bed and didn’t bother getting up until well past 10 o’clock.
After breakfast we got the hotel to send for a taxi and made our way down to Bhaktapur. Rather than drive straight to the gate of the historic old town, I got the driver to drop us off on the main road about 1km out. I proudly took Don down the roughly-hewn drive to the site of the new Samata School, where the construction of the bamboo huts was almost completed. It had only been one month since I’d seen the bare skeleton frames around the edge of a square of wasteland. Now the classrooms just needed to be roofed and then they would be ready to be ‘plastered’ with cowshit and painted white on the outside. It obviously wouldn’t be long before the school was ready to open its doors to the children of Bhaktapur…and another goal would be reached on the long road to Uttam’s dream.
From the school we strolled into town and I showed Don around some of the ancient delights of the city – including the rather ribald and genuinely graphic religious art in the National Gallery. A lot of the thangka art depicting the Hindu pantheon often seems to have rather explicit representations of goddesses being ravished or demons being messily disposed of. We had a good little schoolboy giggle at the naughty bits but had to admit that we were impressed by the quality and age of these eye-popping cultural artefacts. I noted that Bhaktapur was a whole lot busier than it had been on my last visit…and yet very few of the extra visitors appeared to be the still-absent tourists the place had been lacking previously. Instead the streets were jammed with locals and traders and we saw at least one squabble over a prime spot in the market square. This strange crowding was a mystery to me at first and it wasn’t until we got back to Thamel in the evening that we realised it was the Nepali festival of Bisket Jatra, celebrated particularly in Bhaktapur with a giant tug-of-war over an enormous fertility pole erected in the main square. Bisket Jatra is the local equivalent of Hogmanay and the following day (Don’s last) would be the first day of the Nepali New Year. We left the crowds to their milling and headed back to Thamel to do some souvenir shopping and prepare ourselves for a big night out with Mahendra and Edd at the Dohori. At some point we popped into Lotus Gallery and, after weeks of silent coveting, I finally took the plunge and bought my Ganesha Thangka by Prem Lama. Don looked long and hard at some other contemporary/traditional Tibetan art for him and Vickie to put in the house but, in the end, he wasn’t sure about buying something without consulting her.
We had an extremely amusing few hours at the Dohori with Mahendra and Edd. Plenty to drink and eat as well as plenty of foolishly, dangerous dancing – all the more foolish when you consider the size of the average Nepali man next to Don, Edd and I. I’d lost a considerable amount of weight on the trek (maybe as much as 15kg!) and Don took great delight in calling me Stick Timmy all evening…but I was still a giant amongst the slight locals vying for my space on the dancefloor. When we could dance no more but felt the urge to drink more beer and try our hand at games of high skill in hand-eye co-ordination, we adjourned to Tom & Jerry’s and attempted, amusingly, to play pool. Anna was there to meet us and it didn’t take a great deal of inebriated flirting for us to establish that our attractions were mutual. Fortunately, she obviously didn’t see good pool-skills as a prerequisite in her amours and, lucky for her, neither did I. Despite the fact that he was leaving the following day, Don had somehow contrived to leave me with some excellent company for the remainder of my time in Kathmandu. He and I headed back to The Great Wall at a very late hour with only a morning of packing and shopping to wake up to on his final day.