Suman, whom I stayed with for a time in Kathmandu last year, is all right. His family is all right. His parents are sleeping in a tent: the house in the village of Dhulikel where I stayed with them has collapsed. The Dharahara tower, iconic symbol of Kathmandu whose 213 steps I climbed in September, is a stump. The Kasthamandap, the ancient wooden ( Read more... )

Flights from Himalistan are famously subject to delay or cancellation due to fog, rain, or other adverse meteorology. Leaving the business class lounge when the flight is called, I go through immigration and see there is a duty free shop. Wondering whether I can spend my last few hundred rupees I dash in and find disappointingly that it has no gift ( Read more... )

A power cut one evening. I walk up to the shedra rather than sit in the dark, and was given dinner there. Afterwards Phuntso walked me part way back. I say 'Maybe the power is back - there are a few lights there.' He says, 'I think those are fires in the potato fields to keep the pigs off.' People sleep there all night to protect the potatoes from ( Read more... )

A mushroom festival in a local village. The village itself, which I had vaguely pegged as a great local metropolis (it is accorded some importance in the majestic History of Himalistan which I have got a small part of the way through), is a large but empty temple and a few houses along an unmade road. The festival is of mushrooms generally and the ( Read more... )

I don't know how many Tibetan Buddhist monasteries there are in the world, somewhere in the thousands I imagine, but I would bet large sums that this is the only one where the monks go round singing to themselves and what they sing is 'The foggy foggy dew' and 'Molly Malone ( Read more... )

Walked into town yesterday, following the forest path the students showed me a couple of weeks ago. It is even more dramatic than I remembered; there is a riot of plant life, including all kinds of the most extraordinary mushrooms, and at several points there are views of the sweeping valley and mountainside opposite on the right. They say you ( Read more... )

Today is the festival supposedly commemorating the anniversary of the Buddha's first teaching, and there were celebrations up at the 'shukti' or 'throne' of the important local fourteenth-century philosopher, high up above the monastery. I met a group of school students who had walked up the extraordinarily long and steep forest path from town on a ( Read more... )

Well appointed though my quarters were in other respects my housemate and I wanted to cook very different food in the same small kitchen; besides which he accidentally locked me out of the house twice running. So I petitioned Rinpoche to be moved elsewhere, as a result of which I have been evacuated to the Guesthouse. ( Being built for visitors, this was beyond my wildest ideas of luxury )

Wandering out late afternoon after rain all day. Tashi, the Rinpoche's monk attendant (his Ananda, as I think of him) hails me and says he is taking me to Rinpoche. He leads me past a house near mine to a wooden shed which I understand to be an outside bathroom of some kind. Incomprehensibly he opens the door, ( Read more... )

I have not died but have no internet of any kind in the monastery. I've escaped to town for a night so here is a brief catch up of the past couple of weeks since arriving in Himalistan, which I shall follow up in a separate post with a vignette from yesterday.

( Read more... )