Flying to Lukla

Two weeks ago I flew out twice of Kathmandu with Agni Air, each time on a Dornier 9N-AHE. The first one landed back in Kathmandu while the second made the rather scary landing in Lukla. This morning I flew back from Lukla in one of those.


Considering that this happened 2 months ago, I was a little concerned, but aware that the authorities would probably be a little more cautious.

It's a tiny plane that takes about 14 people at one time. There's even a flight attendant onboard who gives out cotton balls (for your ears) and sweets.


It's great if you sit right in front, because you get to see everything in the cockpit.


I wasn't quite sure what the GPS was meant to show. I assumed it worked only because I survived all three flights.



I still got a kick out of the seat belt and no-smoking sign.

Dashain Tika

The nice thing about having a cancelled flight on bijaya dashami (the 10th day of the festival of Dashain, which was last Sunday) was that I was able to go to L. and S.'s house for dinner that night. Not too surprisingly, there was quite a bit of meat, but what I was really looking for was receiving tika.

Tika, also known as 'tilak' in India, is a mark - typically a red dot - placed on one's forehead and is meant to symbolise the 'third eye'. Unlike a bindi, a tika can be worn by men as well as women. Though primarily a Hindu practice, it has been widely adopted by Buddhists in this country. On bijaya dashami,  it is common practice for elders to give tika to their juniors.

The tika I received was made with a red paste - I'm not sure if it was sandalwood, or just clay (my olfactory senses are somewhat dampened when I'm in Kathmandu). In addition to the red paste, some leaves from a grass / herb / plant I did not recognise was placed behind my left ear. Finally, I was presented with a little envelope containing some money! Made it feel a little like Chinese New Year.

So yeah, best cancelled flight ever.

Guides and Porters

Last night, an English guy at my guest house here in Namche mentioned that despite his attempts at speaking Nepalese (sic) with people on the trekking routes, he found quite a number of guides quite unfriendly, especially if he wasn't part of that guide's group (and since he didn't have a guide). He said this unfriendliness, bordering on hostility, was much more evident in areas past Namche, but people further down in the Dudh Kosi valley were much friendlier.

I can't really say that has been my experience, although I've spent most of my time in Khumjung, where groups just tend to spend the day to acclimatise before heading back to Namche. I did notice one of two guides today on my walk to Thame were not particularly forthcoming with conversation at rest stops, but most of the guides (and porters) seemed quite keen to know where I was from and where I learnt Nepali. One porter even decided to lag behind his group to chat to me about his Bachelor degree in English Literature and Rural Development - we joked that trekking in Khumbu counted as 'homework' for his Rural Development course.

The guides also seemed more than happy to tell me which path to take and how long it would take to reach the next village each time I asked them. This was in stark contrast to the English guy's experience (he said that some guides refused to tell him if he was going in the right direction, since he wasn't part of their group). As I was having lunch in Thame, one guide even came up to me to chat about where he'd been - he'd taken three guests up to do the 'three passes', but two of them got sick along the way, so he was left with one trekker from New Zealand.

My feeling is that two things are at work here. First, as a 'Western' foreigner he is seen as having more money and not taking a porter or guide is viewed negatively. He mentioned in Tengboche, when the guy at the guest house asked him if he had a porter and he answered in the negative, the reply from the owner was 'typical'. For some reason, it seems more reasonable for me to be travelling alone, perhaps because I look more Nepali (?) and even though I could be some rich foreign Japanese / Korean / Chinese person, helping me out for nothing seems more reasonable because I look more like family to them.

The second thing is, and I didn't have the heart to tell the English guy, was that his Nepali was simply awful. He said he greeted people on the path with 'Namaste' (the ubiquitous 'hello'), followed by 'Kasto chha?' - a phrase Lonely Planet says means 'How are you', but one that I have rarely heard uttered to strangers. When he said the word for 'water', it sounded just like 'pony', not 'paani'. When he tried ordering in Nepali at the guest house, I had no idea what he was saying. Not that my Nepali is great, but at least I've had lessons and I've been able to hold conversations with people (even if it's only about where I'm from and what I do and where my family live and what they do...). I suppose when people hear him speak Nepali, they might just think 'why on earth doesn't he just speak English'. Again, being 'Western' usually entails a knowledge of English, whereas in my case, it's more acceptable for me to speak in broken Nepali because there's less expectation that I know English.

Just my two cents here.

Sherpa Evidentials

For the past week I've been here in the stunningly beautiful Khumbu (the region just south of Mount Everest), visting my friend Sara who's been doing her PhD research in the village of Khumjung (famous for its Hilary School and yeti scalp). I spent five nights in Khumjung and am now back in Namche Bazaar for another four, before heading back down to Lukla with Sara on Friday. Sara's went off to the Gokyo Valley on Saturday, while I stayed on so I could go to Tengboche on Sunday for the second last day of the Mani Rimbu festival where the monks wear masks and perform dances all day (but more on this later).

One of the other reasons I'm up here is to help a professor back in Melbourne with some Sherpa data. The first task is to collect (and transcribe -ugh) a story about a Jackal and Crow that she'd first heard years ago when she was writing her thesis on Sherpa. I've collected 6 stories so far, and barely transcribed one, with the help of one of the girls at the guest house I stayed at in Khumjung. Given my limited Nepali and even more limited Sherpa, the work is pretty slow-going and I will probably have to find some Sherpa speakers in Kathmandu when I get back to do at least one more transcription.

The second task is to look at evidentials in Sherpa. Like Tibetan, which it is closely related to, Sherpa requires the speaker to state how one knows a certain fact. For instance, in saying 'He is Sherpa', there are potentially three forms of the verb 'is' that can be used: one when it is a personal knowledge that he is Sherpa, one when it is a well known fact that he is Sherpa, and one when you are inferring he is Sherpa. Note that in English, it is just as possible to make these three distinctions by adding the phrases, "I know...", "it's  well-known fact that...", and "I think..." The difference is that in Sherpa you have to state how you know that fact.

These are three distinctions that are supposed to exist in Sherpa, as I have read in the small grammar section of the Sherpa-English dictionary. I don't dispute these distinctions, but anyone who has had to check these distinctions with native speakers of Tibetic languages can tell you what an absolute PAIN it is. It's never as simple as asking someone, "How do you say, 'He is Sherpa' in Sherpa?" Speakers invariably use the same evidential form in such translations - yin - but when I offer yinza and yinno' as alternatives, they tell me that both are acceptable too. Of course, few people can tell me when each one is used, and it would take hours of ploughing through recorded conversations or texts to actually work out when each form occurs (unless you happen to be a linguistically aware native speaker).

Then there's the linguistic obsession with paradigms. Anyone who's had to learn verb conjugations in an Indo-European language will have experienced this, systematically going  through verb forms like 'I am', 'You (singular) are', 'We are' etc, along with their question forms 'Am I?', 'Are you?', 'Are we?' etc.

The reality is that it is not always possible to get a full set of these forms. It is surprisingly difficult to get the form 'You are' in the affirmative, simply because it's rare to go up to someone and tell them who or what they are. It's far more common to have that as a question - 'Are you ...'. Conversely, it's nearly impossible to get the interrogative forms 'Am I?' and 'Are we?'. Speakers will tell me, 'No, no, that's not a question' and simply reject the fact that 'Am I?' or 'Are we?' can exist as questions. I suppose their reasoning is that you don't need to ask those questions to someone else when you're asking about something you're supposed to know about yourself.

Am I going slightly crazy? Yes, I suppose I am. Might go for a short trek tomorrow out of Namche to clear my head. It's one of the advantages of doing fieldwork in this part of the world. Photos will follow as soon as I get back to Kathmandu.

Take off take two

More than a week ago, on Sunday 17 October 2010 (or Ashwin 31, 2067 by the Nepali calendar), I had the priviledge of facing the crush at Kathmandu domestic terminal, getting on a plane, getting to the Himalayas, before being told that the flight would be turning back to Kathmandu.

The alternative would have been this. The landing at Lukla - my destination - is not the safest in the world. It's basically a runway facing a cliff. The weather had been bad all week and it was a small miracle that the weather cleared just enough for the two flights before mine to land.

I was quite glad that we turned back, though I can't speak for the French trio I met who'd also been on a flight that had been turned back the day before. I was also glad that the pilots / airline didn't feel the pressure to land the plane, given that out of the previous 7 days, 5 days' worth of flights to Lukla had been cancelled. An aviation catastrophe of another kind.

So I made my way back to the Kathmandu domestic terminal the next day. The ladies at the counter remembered me and since there was a free seat on the first flight of the day, that was the flight I got. I suppose it helps when you're 'that foreigner who speaks a little Nepali'. It also helps when you don't throw a tantrum at the check-in staff for not seeing your name on the list of 'confirmed seats', causing you to wait around for 1.5 hours until you get them to check the list again only to discover that hey, your name was on the list all along...

And yes, the plane landed in Lukla that day.

Leaving...?

I've got a flight from Kathmandu to Lukla in the Solu-Khumbu region (the Everest region) tomorrow to visit Sara. Never mind that it's bijaya dashami or the 'big day' (or more appropriately 'victory day'?) when families get together, businesses are mostly shut, and according to the people at my guesthouse, no taxis can be found on the roads of Kathmandu. Also never mind that the weather is meant to be absolutely shite tomorrow morning, meaning my flight might just get cancelled and I will have to find a non-existent taxi back from the airport to Pakanjol / Thamel!

Oh the joys of travel. At least if my flight gets cancelled, I have an invitation to a friend's house where I will get yummy food and receive tika. In any case, I'll see you all in two weeks!

Sacrifice

I suppose it was partly to satisfy my morbid curiosity that I decided to venture out early this morning (or as early as I could) to Kathmandu's Durbar Square. Along the way, I saw people carrying their roosters and ducks (usually held by the leg and hanging upside down) with them - a common sight over the past few days. I also saw a few headless goat carcasses being skinned close to a little roadside shrine to Durga that had been erected some days ago.

I quietly slipped into Durbar Square, playing with my mobile as I walked past the ticket office for foreigners and looking suitably disinterested in the festivities. Women were lining up outside a few smaller temples with puja plates in their hands. Families were lining up to worship / touch / rub their hands on other temples. But by far the longest line was to enter the Taleju Temple, which is only open once a year to the public.



Of course, the main reason I'd come was to watch the goats being sacrificed. I had expected a lot more temples to be covered in blood, and the thought even crossed my mind that the red brick used to construct many of them was appropriate.

Contrary to expectation, the sacrifices seemed limited to one area at Basantapur Chowk. When I first entered the square, I mistook the sound of the executioner's blade striking the ground for the firing of a bullet. There was already a crowd of people and while I didn't get a front row viewing spot, I was still able to use my camera and outstretched arm to record what was happening and to watch it again later.

The first animal I saw sacrificed was a buffalo, followed by a goat. After that I didn't stay much longer around the square. It wasn't that I was disturbed by the actual killing - in these better organised sacrifices, the method of execution was quick and clean (unlike home sacrifices that can be badly executed and extend the suffering of the animal). The stress of waiting to be killed while the priests do the blessings, could equally be likened to the stress of waiting while the animal in front of you is getting slaughtered at an abattoir (though never having been to an operational abattoir or having had the experience of being livestock, I really can't speak for the goats and buffaloes here). Anyway, while it wasn't enough to convert me to a life of vegetarianism, it was a good reminder of what happens before I select my meat at the butcher's or supermarket.

*WARNING*
Some readers may find the following image and videos disturbing.

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