|
|
Picnic Trekking - continued... |
|
It was another gorgeous bright morning, so I think our first rainy day was just a fluke. I felt fine, but not at all hungry, so I spent most of the time sitting in the sun, warming up at last, and watching the world go by like an old woman. On the edge of our camp terrace nearest the village was the village fountain. In fact there may have been more than one fountain in the village but what is certain is that nobody really has running water in their house. The fountain arrangement was very similar to the one's you find in villages in Europe. A tap lets the water into a large stone trough so you can do the laundry and washing and so on. A little girl from the village was very busy all morning doing chores, first she washed the pots using dirt to scrub them, which I'm sure works very well as long as you rinse them well. She was very thorough about cleaning the pots. I thought maybe she was taking the opportunity to check me out, just as I was checking her out. On the other hand, maybe she was just putting off her next task, which was to fill churns with drinking water and carry them back to her house. It has to be said that she wimped out at this point, and her grandmother ended up carrying them for her. This little girl was one of those happy, confident kinds of kids that everyone likes. For some reason, she made me think of Heidi, and I spent a lot of time wondering what her life was like. I doubted very much that she was educated in anything other home care. I wondered what it would be like for her in just a few years to be married off and go and live maybe in a different village, like her sister-in-law. She was so obviously loved by her family, and felt so secure, I wondered if she could carry that confidence with her to a new home. Soon we set off walking, this time we did not go into the woods, but followed the edge of the terraces, using the same paths that the villagers use to get around. The paths are very deeply eroded probably from water, but in a few areas there are signs of stone paving as you find on our pack-mule trails. In fact, it was very much like our own area, except that these paths are now getting overgrown and hard to find at home. We were walking along with the a young couple, the brother and sister-in-law of the little girl, and another younger brother. They were on their way to visit her parents in the neighbouring village. Just now, since people can not grow crops at this altitude, they have quite a bit of leisure time. As we went lower, we passed a lot of people going to and fro on the path and it looked like most of them were going visiting. Eventually we started to head down steeply, and everything changed. The houses here are built of thick stone with straw flooring. They are not huddled together in a village, but spread out, each one probably surrounded by its own parcels of land. I can recognise these types of houses, since they are just like older farms at home, similar even to the house we now live in! There is one room for the people and animals probably with an internal fence to separate the animals from the cooking area. There is a storage loft and there is a terrace out front for threshing or to pen the animals in summer. I forgot to notice if they had chimneys, which are a relatively recent and rare invention, although we take them so much for granted. There are still terraces everywhere down here, but many of them contained fresh, green crops. Nearly everybody is out working and each house contains usually only a single adult, often a grandmother and the children who are too young to be useful. One of the things I noticed which was interesting, is that although the adults and older children are washed, combed and smartly dressed the toddlers are filthy and look as though their hair has not been touched since the day of their birth. I wondered if it a custom, or maybe people are just too busy, but anyway it seems as though personal care only begins when you are old enough to deal with it by yourself. We asked our guide whether his village was like this, or like the higher altitude one and he said like this one. Of course he lives in Katmandu now, but he comes from a village and hopes to retire there eventually. We kept going down and down occasionally crossing the stream bed where the older kids were grazing goats and eventually reached the main river. The river is dammed and a large iron pipe runs down alongside it. This is where Katmandu's water supply comes from. As we continued downward after lunch we entered a narrow gorge, still following the river and pipe. We passed a small hollow cave containing a brightly painted lingam and shortly after that we came to yet a third kind of village. Here the houses are built up against the walls of the gorge, often two or three stories high, but in many respects they are more like the higher altitude homes. They are put together like stacked open fronted cubes, so the whole forward facing part of the house is potentially open. Alternatively, wooden shutters can be drawn across to form a fourth wall. There are no windows. We began to pass a lot of people again, and gathered that this must be a major pathway for funnelling people from all over the mountains into the valley. Many of the houses here have some small business going such as a store or a cafe. Then quite suddenly the gorge opened out and we found ourselves in the centre of a village square. Half of it seemed to serve as a bus depot, probably to collect or drop off all those people who came from the mountains. The other half was filled with goats, chickens, bikes, cars, kids playing and women chatting. Not at all like a village at home where you're lucky if you see a soul. Soon we were picked up by our tour company and whisked off to look at monuments. In conclusion, I would say that this trek was more interesting than I could possibly have imagined from a cultural point of view. We got to see how ordinary people's homes and lives changed with altitude, how they farmed and raised animals, different aspects of religion and spiritual life, military installations, water supply installations, some natural habitat, and of course we learned a lot in general from talking to our guide. Not bad for an out of season trek! |
|
