Graffiti Art

Saroj at the gateway to Bandipur

Bandipur's Khadga Dev Temple, which didn't make it into the documentary, contains the sacred sword of Mukunda Sen, the ancient King of Palpa. I was told that the sword bends and vibrates and grants superhuman strength to the priests who worship it on the festival day when it is taken out. Always covered, it is passed first to the Kame (Blacksmith) priest, the blacksmiths being father to the sword-goddess, and then to the Magar priest, the Magars being the warriors.

Saroj and I misjudged the distance from Bandipur way down the hill to Siddhi Cave, and we ended up walking down the hill for most of the morning. We were attacked by leeches for the first time, although I escaped with only one tiny bite. Passing the shrines at the entrance, we made our way into the cave. In the cave I met a young man who had come from Dumre and we continued further than I had ever been into the cave, down a long slippery ladder and past an underground lake. We continued down a very narrow crevice with water flowing through it until it became too steep and tight for us.

The next day Saroj and I parted ways. He drove his motorcycle down to Chitwan and I continued by bus to Pokhara. I stayed in Lakeside in the usual touristy areas and I read and ate some pizza while looking out over the bar scene. The next day I met my bhaai Min, who studies in Pokhara but is from the village of Tangting, across the valley from Sikles. I had been to Tangting twice before (see Return to Tangting), but never in the rainy season, and I was unprepared for how difficult it would be to get there. We took two buses, one which had to ford through a river (on the way back the river had gotten too deep and we had to wade across), and then continued up the side of the hill on foot for five hours through the pouring rain. When I finally came to Tangting, it was dark, I had 34 leech bites on my legs and the beginnings of a fever and sinus infection that kept me pretty grumpy for the next four days. But I was staying with old friends who cooked me rice and lentils and water buffalo meat and gave me strong home-brewed liquor as 'medicine' and let me sleep the rest of the next day. During the rainy season, Tangting seems to rest inside a cloud 24-7, which made walking its cobbled streets a beautiful and eerie experience.

I walked down the next day and made it back to Pokhara. I had planned on taking a plane flight to Jomsom, but the Jomsom airport had been closed for four days straight due to bad weather, and for three days in a row after that I arrived at the airport at five in the morning only to see my flight cancelled. It was a good thing, though, because I had a chance to recover.

This guy did not have a chance to recover.

On the third day I decided to cancel my plane ticket and take the bus route from Pokhara to Beni. After Beni the roads are very unreliable during the wet season because of constant landslides. At the site of a landslide, the bus stops and all the passengers walk across until they arrive at the other end, where there will hopefully be another bus or jeep waiting to take the passengers to the next landslide. In this way I ended up in Tatopani and stayed in a trekker's lodge. There I met Sanjeev, a driver from Delhi who was making a pilgrimage to Muktinath Temple in Mustang. We travelled the rest of the way together. Tatopani is famous for its hot springs, which I enjoyed early the next morning before embarking on a series of quick jeep rides and hikes across landslides (the longest hike of the day was about an hour and a half). On the path I saw sadhu holy men on their own pilgrimages to Muktinath, European and American trekkers, Australian educational development workers, and local villagers and students. At one point we traveled in a jeep hired by the development workers, which stopped to pick up a sick person in a village to take them to a health post further along the road. We often had to wait for jeeps to fill up with passengers, or for bus drivers to finish their meals, but soon enough the emerald green forests became dark brown scrub hillsides and we arrived in Jomsom early in the evening.

Why are you smiling, you fool?

At Muktinath I started feeling the wintry cold and the altitude. There was a drizzle, and we passed some tourist lodges and Buddhist monasteries before making the slight ascent up to the main temple complex. There Sanjeev did puja at the Muktinath Temple to Vishnu and bathed in the sacred 108 water taps (head-achingly cold water in the wintry air). He filled a water bottle with the sacred water for later use. We visited the Buddhist temple where the 'self-arisen' natural eternally burning flame is contained, and then we headed back. I got stuck crossing the river by myself for about twenty minutes, and one of the buses broke down and had to be pushed down the hill to a small town, but we returned to Jomsom with daylight to spare.

The cast of adventurers: a pilgrim, an American, and a butcher.