Bhaktapur

(I've been having some internet issues, so this is long overdue.)
September 15, 2011

This past weekend I got out of Kathmandu for the first time and went to Bhaktapur for two days. Historically, the three cities in the Kathmandu Valley (Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur) competed for dominance in Nepal. Eventually Kathmandu won out, and Patan is now more like a suburb of Kathmandu, but Bhaktapur is this wonderfully preserved historical site about an hour southeast of Kathmandu. The only industry there is tourism, but because you actually have to pay a steep admission fee (or steep compared to other things here) to enter the town center, there are less beggars etc than in the tourist parts of Kathmandu.

The first day I was there with my host family for Indra Jatra. It’s a Newari festival celebrating the end of monsoon season and my host family is not Newari so it was not an elaborate event, but just like everyone in the US gets Christmas off, everyone here gets Indra Jatra off. The family belongs to a cooperative society, which is basically a 200 member group that pays into a pool and the elected board awards loans to members as needed, and the interest on the loans goes back to everyone else in dividends each year. It’s kind of cool example of how the community here steps in to fill needs that the government and private sector has not. Banks haven't traditionally had an efficient or effective loan system, so your neighbors step in. Every year, they have an annual meeting in Bhaktapur and I was invited to join. On the surface, it was a lot like a Labor Day BBQ. But there were some key differences, including the fact that our main course was killed and chopped up right next to the picnic tables. Can you imagine sitting in Wash Park and having an old man with a machete pull up a tree stump and chop up a (formerly) live goat for you to eat? No one else seemed at all distributed by this. But then again, they all got a great laugh last week when I asked why the neighbors had so many roosters on their roof. Clearly the answer is to eat them in a month or two.

When the cooperative society had to attend to annual meeting type business, Radhakrishna sent me off with his son Manish to see Bhaktapur. I still have a pretty visceral reaction to the constant wave of commands I get in Nepal. The idea of an independent child (or woman at any age) is a foreign concept here. But I am getting better at just doing as I am told, and then doing what I want later (thus the two days in Bhaktapur). So off I went on the back of Manish’s motorcycle into central Bhaktapur.

Just like in Kathamndu, I had the opportunity to see two Bhaktapurs. Manish first took me to the historical parts of Bhaktapur, but these aren’t places that really mean much to the modern day Nepalese, so the tour consisted of about 45 minutes of “this is very famous statue, take picture,” “this is very old temple, take picture,” and then we were off again to see his favorite places.

"Very famous statue, take picture."

We met up with his “sister” (I still have no idea how they are actually related. I know he only has one sister and she is in India (which is why I have a room with them) but they call everyone here “sister” and “brother.”) and we took a hike up to one of the four goddess temples located just outside Bhaktapur. I would never have gone to this place on my own, but it was so cool to see a functioning temple that has not become completely commandeered by the tourism industry. The temples here function more as community spaces than purely religious spaces (the cooperative society picnic was actually at a temple, I found out later). I guess if I grew up in a religious household this might not be strange to me, maybe a church would be my community space, but here everyone coexists so peacefully. The different castes all practice slightly different variations of Hinduism and then there are Buddhists mixed in, but everyone just goes and prays at the nearest temple, regardless of which god it honors. I like that a lot.

One of the goddess temples outside Bhaktapur

After coming down from the temple, we went to Siddha Pokhari, which is basically a gigantic man-made koi pond. It’s evidently a popular date spot and a good place to watch the sunset. People also come here and buy these various sized food things to feed to the fish. Some are small and easily gobbled up by the fish, but others are big and the fish have a really hard time getting the food in their mouth, so while they are fighting to get the food (it looks like a seal pushing a beach ball with its nose), teenage boys try to reach in and grab the fish. A little cruel, I know, but oh so much fun to watch. After that it was back to the cooperative society picnic for meals three and four of the day (still trying to adjust to the quantity and frequency of food consumption here).

FISHIES!!!!!

The next day I decided to go back to Bhaktapur and do all the actual touristy things. All the temples are already starting to blend together, but in Bhaktapur, there are these amazing woodcarvings in all the temples. I was shocked at how well they had held up, since the heyday of Bhaktapur was in the 17^th century. But, you know, even with a changed mindset of temples as vehicles for art, there is only so much I can absorb in one day, so instead of doing the full Lonely Planet walking tour, I headed up into the hills to a temple Radhakrishna had pointed out the previous day, Changu Narayan. So much for my tourist day.

Changu Narayan is the oldest temple in the Kathmandu valley, built back when the rest of the valley was under water, and it’s now a world heritage site. It’s the first temple (or religious structure, period) that I’ve been to that just felt special. You take this bus up 6 km outside Bhaktapur up on top of a hill, then walk through a village until you arrive at the very very top, where there is this big temple. It’s not even the prettiest temple I saw that day, but it just feels magically, I can’t quite describe it. Changu Narayan felt like a place that you would go to find some peace.

Changu Narayan

Apparently the village surrounding the temple used to be the biggest village in Nepal, but now it is this sad little village that desperately wants to be on the tourist circuit but is not. The whole village sits outside their shops waiting for tourists—I only saw maybe five other foreigners—but they are not aggressive about it, which was a nice change. I bought some souvenirs and had lunch at this little tree top restaurant/guest house and talked to the owner and her son for a bit. He’s studying tourism in Kathmandu and makes the 1.5-hour commute each day, three hours in a bus for four hours of class!! He told me they have probably 10 patrons a week for food and 4 for overnight stays. At about 250 rupees ($3.50) per meal and 500 ($7) rupees per room, that’s not much income. Apparently the US has committed $270,000 over 3 years to build a museum and refurbish some of the temple and the family seemed really hopeful that this will help drive tourists there. Part of me hopes it will, because the family was so nice and it is such a wonderful place, but I would hate to see this place turned into what Durbar Square in Kathmandu has become.

I was already a little bit sick with a common cold (too many new germs and pollutants and pollens here) but after Monday I got much, much sicker. My host family thinks something I ate in Bhaktapur must have had some unclean water in it or something. It’s been hard to explain that my usual approach to illness is to ignore it until it gets so bad that I can’t get out of bed and then eat a lot of chocolate and watch Sex and the City reruns until I get better. Here, the approach has been to “take rest full day,” eat rice mush instead of rice at every meal, and sample all sorts of WHO recommended treatments. I’m glad I live next door to a doctor, who can assure my host family that I am not very ill, I just haven’t had a lifetime to develop an immune system against Kathamandu grossness. I think I'll be back up and about tomorrow, but the consensus around here is that I’ll likely get sick every time I come back into the city. I’m hoping the wisdom of the group is wrong. Come on immune system…

My doctor ordered Kathmandu look. Cute, I know.
It's giving me what I like to call my "inverse goggle tan."