Lukla to Khumjung (I)

After landing in Lukla, it then took me three days to get to Khumjung, the village where Sara was doing her PhD fieldwork. Even though I landed at 7am, and had a porter, I could've made it to Khumjung by nightfall on foot. Of course, there's the issue of altitude sickness / acute mountain sickness (AMS) - the risk of it developing into something much worse than a headache and nausea was enough reason to take it slow.

Day 1 was pretty easy going. I got in early on the first Agni Air flight at 7. Found a young porter named Pemba (he said he was 17, though that changed to 16 on the third day) from Lukla. I had a quick morning tea in Lukla, before setting off for Phakding. We could've easily made it to Monjo, which is much closer to Namche and Khumjung, but Pemba reckoned it would be cheaper in Phakding and he seemed happier to spend the night there because he had friends and family in Phakding.

(A note on pronunciation, aspirated 'ph' in Nepali is in free variation with 'f', so 'phakding' can be pronounced either as 'puck-ding' or 'fuck-ding'.)

On the way to Phakding


The village of Phakding


Where I stayed in Phakding - neither the Yeti Cyber Cafe nor the 'Herman' Bakery Cafe were open though.


By 10am, we had arrived in Phakding, which meant I had a lot of time to kill. Thankfully, there were a few short walks / climbs around to do. I decided to cross over a bridge few tourists heading up to Namche would've crossed, since it only led to a few villages on the other side of the Dudh Koshi (literally 'Milk River').

The Dudh Koshi


The bridge was a little more rusty than the other bridges on the main path.


Most suspension bridges on the main path between Lukla and Namche looked like this.


On my walk past the small village of Sano Gumela (incidentally sano means 'small' in Nepali), I met an old Sherpa lady and a young Tamang girl carrying a basket, with the strap around her forehead, as is the fashion across much of the region. The girl was quite shy, but the old lady was quite happy to share her thoughts on a number of things. Sadly, much of what she said was lost on me. She did say in Nepali that she was going to the nearby monastery. I tried asking her if children were still speaking Sherpa at home in her village, but I'm really not sure what the response was. I think she did say that there were many non-Sherpa people in the village, including the young Tamang girl who was with us.

She was quite a fearsome woman, stopping every so often to pick up a large rock in the middle of the path and throw it to one side. Yet, when a train of dzopkyo (a yak-cow hybrid found at lower altitudes) came up the narrow path, bells aringing, it was so funny to see her running back in my direction like a little girl, getting us to find higher ground so that the train could pass us.

The old Sherpa woman, who kindly posed for a photo after she saw me stopping to take pictures of the landscape.


Suffice to say, it was an interesting little side trip I had around Phakding, though the next time I go up, I'd probably want to stay at Monjo - the next morning's climb was pretty hard...

Volitionality and passing gas

In Sherpa, like in other Tibetic languages, a distinction is made between volitional and non-volitional verbs, meaning that when you describe an action in Sherpa you usually need to specify if it is either 'on purpose', or accidental. In English this distinction is sometimes made lexically with verbs of perception, as in the difference between 'seeing' and 'looking' (or 'watching') as well as 'hearing' and 'listening'. However, in Tibetic languages, this distinction extends to most other verbs as well.

While there are some interesting pairs, my favourite one so far from the Sherpa-English dictionary is:

སླེན་ཤོར་ pen shor (v.inv) = to fart (involuntarily)

སྤེན་གཏོང་ pen tong (v.vol) = to fart

How volitionally can one fart?

Yuan

This is not a Nepal-related post, but just a little comment about this page from Johnson, featuring puns on the name of the Chinese currency, the yuan 元.

It has surprised me that even people on BBC World News (no link available unfortunately) pronounce it as 'you-ahn', rhyming with 'one', like all the puns suggest. In fact, it should be pronounced closer to 'U-N', but as a single syllable, i.e. /ɥɛn/ or /yɛn/. It's surprising because the BBC employ people trained in phonetics to research these things, so that they pronounce names as close to the native language as possible if there is no standard English pronunciation.

And it's even more frustrating for me to hear yuan being mispronounced - it's in my Chinese name.

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.