The MONKEY TEMPLE

In Kathmandu there is, on top of a small but steep hill, a very special place. It is a Buddhist temple and although its proper name is Swayambhunath Temple, everybody know it with the more familiar name of monkey temple. There are in fact tons of monkey roaming around. Really funny animals. And if you spend just a couple of minutes looking at them, you can really see how familiar they look. To me, they really look like small people, especially when they are taking care of their babies ...

The temple is actually a set of small temple and a stupa, with a lot of shops on top of a small hill. Very cozy. It is a very nice warm feeling to see a very small village, with people of all the ages, that is living around this temple ...

The stupa is definitely the nicest religious building in the complex, and these are some of the pictures that I took there. On the stupa there is the profile of Lord Buddha, with his three eyes. The nose is painted with the same shape of the number 1 in Sanskrit (even if it looks like a question mark) and represent the unity of the Buddhism religion (or at least, this is what I was told). Really beautiful ...And these are some of the pictures that I took in the evening from the monkey temple, we really spent a perfect day up here. I simply loved it ...

BACK to KATHMANDU

Kathmandu, Nepal. Even if it looks like ages now, I was here just a couple of weeks ago. But it was just one day and I didn't really have much time to really explore it. Then I was too busy organizing the Everest Base Camp trekking. It is such a shock, after 2 weeks of pristine Himalaya landscapes, to land here and look around. So probably still in a high altitude withdraw, we decided to have lunch in the restaurant on the highest rooftop terrace in town, and this is the view ...

... really shocling! But it is so nice to have such a big choice of food and stores. So different from the mountains. After the lunch, we spent all day around. The number of people around was really overwhelming. But it was nice to be among them. Difficult to describe. But I had a very warm feeling. And the colors and the shops. Everything here is so different from the mountains. At the same time you understand why people leave the countryside and come here, in the city, to live. Here in Kathmandu you can really find whatever you want. Probably not what you really need in life (happiness), but some sort of surrogates of it (material possessions). Even if it sound naive I was myself really amazed to see so much goods on sale. I can't imagine the shock of a person who grew up in the mountains moving here ...

FLYING over NEPAL

It took us almost 3 hours to get on the plane, but at the end we did it. We flew from Lukla back to Kathmandu. And the flight has been an incredibly exhilarating experience. I was seated in what I call the lucky seat. The only seat in the plane with a convex window. Putting your head into in, you can actually have a 180 degrees view during the flight. An amazing exciting feeling, especially if you have a short, low altitude flight like ours. For 45minutes I really felt like I was taking special pictures and here are some of the pictures that I took ...... and for one day I felt I had an eye bird ... :)

CELEBRATING

Here we are. This is the last day of our descent. Today we are back to Lukla. And tomorrow, weather allowing, we will take the flight back to Kathmandu. We will go back to the crazy world of airplanes, cars, multistory buildings, bulb lights and always available food. But we are happy. We feel like we have achieved something up there. But I will definitely miss these mountains and the amazing lifestyle that I had up here in the mountains. And I will miss also Jake and Lisa.

In few days we will have to split again. They will go back to China. And I will continue my trip thru Nepal. And because we felt like we had to celebrate all this we decided to drink some beer after dinner. Actually we had also an apple pie. But that is too boring to write about. So here are is our small, low profile celebration for the end of the Everest Base Camp 2007 trekking ...

it was really nice to cheer to our achievement. Of course we didn't really do anything so special. Lots of people does the same everyday. We just went trekking for a couple of weeks. But still, to us it was a great achievement. To me the Everest Base Camp has always been a mythical place and I never expected to have the chance to visit it. But I did. Ans I feel so lucky! And I did it with one of my best friends ever, Jake. We met four years ago, when we became roommates in Los Angeles. And here we are again together even if he lives in China and I am soon moving to Seattle ... a beer was really well deserved. And I loved also to cheer with my new friend Lisa. We met in Kathmandu and in few minutes we decided to go together to the Everest Base Camp trekking. I really hope we will manage to have more adventures together. And of course I loved to share this adventure also with local people, like Vishu, our guide, and Gunishu, our porter. Without them all this adventure was not going to be possible. They really made it happen for us ...

YAK YAK YAK YAK

The animals that we saw up in the Himalaya? Yak Yak Yak Yak. Yes, not a lot of wildlife here, but a lot of yaks ...They are really a blessing for this corrugated piece of planet called Himalaya. They are really strong animals. They like to stay in the thin air. And here they are used for everything. The Sherpas load them as much as they can. Sometimes even too much ...And of course, here it is cold and far away for the middle east oil wells, the people figured out, that they can burn the daily production of the yaks. Yes, here people burn dungs in the stove. And believe me, they really work. And they don't even stink ...... and when the people up here is tired of their vegetarian Dhal Bhal Talcurry, they go for a yak stake. I didn't try it. Even if I am pretty easy going with the food, the way the Sherpas are carrying the yak meat didn't really meet my expectations. But apparently the crows liked it ...And of course they give also milk for a very good cheese. The car industry should really use the yak as a model ... I dream of cars that we can feed with grass, that can create something similar to the dung to warm up our winter days, that will give us food and that will be 100% biodegradable ... maybe I am just dreaming ... or maybe not. Thinking about it. Why do we need cars?

DHAL BHAT TALCURRY

Trekking in the Himalaya is a great experience. It is challenging. It is exciting. It is peaceful. But there is something that I am sure I won't miss once I will be done with this trekking. It is the Dhal Bhat Talcurry. Dhal Bhat Talcurry is a dish. It is actually three dishes in one. Dhal is a very light lentil soup. Bhat is boiled rice. Talcurry is boiled vegetable with curry. And last, but not least, it is the national dish here in Nepal. And it had a great advantage ... you have free refills of it. Which is just great after an entire day hiking. Here Jake and Lisa, sooo happy to have something warm to eat ...... and it is just great the first days. Still good the second day. Definitely too much the third day. So after eating the same dish at lunch and dinner for three days, we had enough. At least I had enough. My brain needed some variety and some pasta as well. It is pretty funny because I spoke about this to our guide and I told him that when I am really hungry I need to eat pasta or bread. And he answer that for him it is the same, with the difference that when he is really hungry he needs to eat rice ... :) It made me realize how much our traditions are influencing our taste ... Last, but not least. The only people that were truly happy about eating Dhal Bhat Talcurry everyday for weeks were the English folks that I met. But that is understood. These poor guys have only fish & chips and pudding as national food. And maybe that can explain why they summit first, back in 1953 with Sir. Hillary, Mt. Everest ... :)

SHERPAS & TOURISTS

We are still on our way down from Everest Base Camp to Lukla, and I am having a lot of time to think about this trekking. And I am realizing how many new things I discovered in the last 10 days in the mountains. About the Himalaya mountains. About trekking in the thin air. About the Everest climbing. About the Buddhism. About the Sherpas. About the impact of the tourism on the environment and the economy of these small Sherpa communities. But there is one thing that is difficult to accept. It is the way we, tourists, use the Sherpas. It is a real dilemma. Look at this picture. On the left the day pack of a tourist, and on the right an average load for a Sherpa. And in the other a couple of Sherpas carrying uphill the kayaks for tourists, who most likely will go home bragging that they have done kayak in the high mountains of the Himalaya ...... in these pictures there is all my dilemma. In a way, we are giving them a job and we are helping them. In an other way we are using them to carry our backpack up in the mountains, which is really a shame. But without that we wouldn't be really able to enjoy the mountains, I guess. But again, what about the Sherpas? Did hey ever enjoy these mountains? I am not really sure ... at the end I don't think there is really the right answer to the question if it is right or wrong to hire a Sherpa. And I think we should also have the same dilemma when we buy goods coming from China, where the labour cost is so low that is allowing us to purchase goods, here in the Western World, for incredible bargain prices. But I am happy about something. This visit to Nepal, did help me once more to open my eyes and to realize while we are resting, there are billions of underpaid people in the World who are really the backbone of the economy ...

BUDDHISM in the HIMALAYA

We are continuing our way down from the Everest Base Camp to Lukla. And now that we are below the tree line, we can enjoy the beauties of the mountains mixed with the local culture. And here in the Himalaya, both in Nepal and in Tibet, has a lot of ties to the Buddhist religion. Strange religion. A religion without any war in its history. A religion which is more a philosophy than a religion. A religion which doesn't even have a G-d. A religion that I am slowly starting to learn and to love. Something that I really love is the simplicity of the Buddhist architecture and symbolism. These for examples are prayer flags. They put them in places where the wind blows, so the wind itself can carry the prayer everywhere and to everybody ...Or the amazing mani rocks, where the mantra "oh mani padme hum" ritmic and ripetitive prayer is painted again and again and again ...Or the wonderful Buddha face painted on the stupas. I love these faces with 3 eyes. The 2 yeas and the wisdom eye ...Or the gompas, the Buddhist monasteries, where the people, the colors, the wonderful mountains surrounding are really giving you an inner peace ...... it is really a shame that we had so little time to really understand all these wonderful places and the real meaning of these religious places. Because this trip, like all the others that I did was really a trip to allow me to better know myself. And the Buddhism is a great religion to understand who we really are and what we really want from our life ...