dfast

SIKKIM: Under Kangchendzonga

dfast on November 16, 2010

The border crossing into India is another of those little outposts which you feel represents banishment for the official working there. Mr. L.A. Wadhia fusses irritably with the

Katheryn crossing the border

“wrong” answers on our forms (Port of Disembarkation?; flight number?): he has the inner numbness of someone who has spent far too long taking what he knows to be ridiculous, seriously.

The stamp is officiously given, and we are ushered by a hovering tout from there into a jeep (actually the Indian version: the Tata Sumo) going to the town of Siligiri, and then directly into another to Gangtok, Sikkim. The good thing about traveling by jeep is that they fill up at the departure point, and don’t (usually) stop for additional riders until the destination. The bad thing is the passengers are squeezed in tight, and except for the front seat have a limited view of the scenery. We are, unfortunately, right in the back, and the scenery, as we ascend the valley of the Testa River, is amazing.

Sikkim is an Indian state tucked up between Nepal, Tibet and Bhutan – how can you go wrong with that? With China demanding expensive and restrictive conditions on travel to Tibet, and Bhutan imposing a $200/day/person fee on a visit there, Sikkim appears to be our only oppurtunity to explore the area. A special permit is required to enter Sikkim, but we obtain that relatively hassle-free at the border at Rangpo, while our jeep waits. From there the road slithers dramatically onward and upward. Rays of sun dice through a lush jungle of tree ferns, giant bamboo and flowering broad-leaves, and the river is frothing white far below. Gangtok should really be approached by horse-caravan slowly ascending the ancient stone-paved trade route; we are 100 years too late for that. The constant low-gear jostling to overtake crawling diesel lorries around dusty washed-out hair-pin corners may diminish the romance, but the trip from Siligiri now only takes five hours.

One hundred years ago Sikkim was an independent Buddhist kingdom ruled by a dynasty called the Chogyals. The British had duplicitously lopped off territory including Darjeeling from their southern flank, but the Chogyals held their own against pressure from China, and the Raj, until Indira Gandhi’s India banished them in 1975 on the instigation of the now-majority Hindu population. We are sitting in the garden of a hill-top monastery while a monk tells us this history. He is ethnically a Bhutia, who along with the Lepchas migrated from Tibet and brought Buddhism with them. There still is, he says, a lot of resentment against India over the banishment of the Chogyal, who is now in Bhutan, and tension between the Bhuddist and Hindu populations occassionally flares into violence. Like many of the “Tibetans” we talk to, he makes a face when we ask if he has travelled in the rest of India, and waves his hand as if getting rid of a bad smell.

And it really feels – especially with the permit formalities at the border – that we are in a different country. Gangtok, we concur, is the most pleasant Indian state capital that we know. For one thing it is spread along a steep ridge at 1700 m, and from our balcony we have a clear view of the presence that dominates this entire state: Khangchendzonga, at 8,208 m the third highest mountain in the world. Gangtok also has that most blessed and rare feature in a country over-run with vehicles and bullied by drivers with an incessant hand on the horn – a long pedestrian mall at the center of town. But even better, the people are without exception sophisticated, kind, friendly and charming, and it doesn’t take long before we are in love. Many Bengali tourists come up here from the plains for a cool-weather vacation, and where there are Bengali tourists there is great food. Every masala dosa, every hot tandori roti taken with a view out across the valley – after the basic fare in Nepal – is a rapture. It takes four days before Katheryn is able to walk the steep streets without wincing from her back injury, but we are happy to just rest up here after what seems like a lot of hard travel.

The view is great from Gangtok, but the place to go for the real vista is Pelling, 110 km away, which means 6 hours by jeep. One again it’s a mad spaghetti road through jungle and mountain, but the highlight has to be the rest-stop in Ravangla, where a group of kids run after us shouting “Auntie, Uncle, wait!”, and press bouquets of marigolds on us.

We get a room in Pelling where we don’t even have to roll out of bed for a sensational view. The morning coffee on the balcony is perhaps the most spectacular we have ever had. As if that wasn’t enough, a 1.5 km stroll away is Pemayangtse Gompa, one of Sikkim’s oldest monasteries, built in 1705. The “Perfect Sublime Lotus” Gompa is probably as close as we will come to Tibet for now, so Marguerite, this one is for you. There is no photography allowed inside the main gompa, but the walls are covered with 300-year-old paintings of deities, gurus and demons from the Nyingmapa branch of Tibetan Buddhism, and energetically-depicted statues of Buddha and the Rimpoches are behind glass at the back. The wooden floors are worn smooth under our bare feet and the smell of butter lamps and incense permeate the timbers. By the thin light of the deeply-recessed windows we climb a creaky staircase to the upper level, where a deep drum interspersed clashing cymbals has been playing since we entered. The drummer is in a room behind a curtain, so we sit on a ledge in an adjoining room and feel the vibrations pulse through the walls, the floor and ourselves.

The second capital of the Chogyals is now just a ruin that can be seen on the spur of a hill just below the monastery, and we make friends with a pretty dog in the grounds who seems to want to guide us there. Much of the route is through a forest reserve, where massive climbing ferns 10 feet high cascade down to the path. Only thick stone walls remain from the old capital, but with soaring views in all directions including, of course, Khanchangdzonga you understand why they built here.

All of India is on one time zone, and as far east as we are it gets dark early, around five o’clock. And at 2100 m, in November, when it gets dark it gets cool. We get dressed up for the evening in long johns and down jackets, and head out to our new-found favorite place for a tongba. “Tongba” is a large pile of fermented millet served in a wooden tankard. Hot water is poured on top, and the milky, slightly sour potion is sipped through a bamboo straw. Tongba is found where ever Tibetans are throughout the Himalaya and it warms, rehydrates and gives a mild alcoholic buzz. We find a delightful Tonga spot in Pelling, called the “Step Down” restaurant. A dark stairway descends off the road into a room made out of rough planks with three rickety tables. The only window has no glass, just a curtain of aging cloth. The kitchen fills with locals and laughter and warm light, and our matron brings us the big wooden tankards with, possibly, the best tongba we have had yet. The power fails and candles come out and I’ll happily take the Step Down any day.

For all of the latest videos, go to youtube and search for kebeandfast to see all the choices.

There are lots more great photos – and this time I’m not joking – by going to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/croquet

NEPAL: FOR THE LOVE OF PAVEMENT

dfast on November 7, 2010

The unstoppable force of India collides with the immovable mass of China and Nepal is the balloon squeezed between the two. The pushing continues: the Himalaya are still fracturing upward and the government is still simply fractured by the impact of it’s giant neighbours. The China-supported Maoists won an election in 2008, but intractable issues with the India-backed Congress Party made governing impossible, and the only hope was that a new constitution would lay the groundwork for a return to normalcy. Now the negotiations over the constitution are in a deadlock, there is no functioning legislature, and no end is in sight. But actually, most people barely notice.

Sure, civic functions like garbage collection are sporadic; the plastic bags of refuse discarded on the street when we arrived are still there days later, mashed into the potholes by traffic and picked over by dogs, cows and crows. Our friend Malik explains that the garbage collectors are from the villages and in the Maoist camp, and if they don’t want to work no one will make them, and they have all taken two weeks off for the holiday of Dusain.

Our timing, in that regard, is very fortunate. We arrive at the tail-end of Dusain, and our jewelery-makers are drifting back in from the villages, so our orders can get started. Everybody knows about the increase in the price of gold this last year; the same is true of other metal. Copper, tin and zinc are all more expensive, and silver had increased 50%. This means we are buying a lot less silver jewelery, and a lot more copper, brass, and “white metal” (steel, aluminum, and – Malik shrugs his shoulders – whatever they have). We still manage, of course, to get some extraordinary pieces, including lots more styles of rings, and some very dramatic Afghani-style cuffs. And singing bowls. Our most popular bowls last year were the antique “thado-bhuti”, which come from the Tibetan border regions and are, according to the famous Tuladhar brothers, Ishwor and Suman, up to 100 years old. We spend a morning in an ancient room in the old city of Kathmandu with Ishwor, each one of us in turn handling the bowls and making them sing and selecting from his stock 30 of the thado-bhuti, based on their tone and quality. They will be a little more expensive than last year, but if you pre-order from us now we will reserve them at the old price. Drop us an email if you are interested.

When all our orders are done, Malik suggests we make an outing to Nagarkot, which is a village on a ridge outside of Kathmandu with a glorious vista of the terraced foot-hills set against the snow-capped Langtang Himal. We leave the city on the road that leads to China. Now it is a horribly dusty construction zone of constant pot-holed diversions – but soon it will be Nepal’s only four-lane divided highway. Geo-politically, you could probably read something into building a free-way to China, and leaving the road to India – the one we will take tommorow – to rot.

Kathmandu holds a special place in our affections, but it is still a noisy, polluted Asian city, and we are craving something a little less frantic. Rather than head into the mountains – the destination of almost all of this year’s bumper-crop of tourists – we journey down to the plains to an area of forest and rice-fields bordering India known as the Terai. The famous destination here is Chitwan National Park, home to a dwindling population of tiger, elephant and one-horned rhino. I have a disabling aversion to group tourist activities, so I am confined to the hotel while Katheryn has a wonderful time riding into the park on the back of an elephant named Circli, even though her party doesn’t see any major wildlife. What we can both do, however, is rent bicycles and explore the beautiful surrounding villages where the rice harvest is in full swing.

If the main road from Kathmandu to India – which takes us by Chitwan Park – is bad, the road east across Nepal is legendary. Granted, much has been paved since the bad old days, and the journey has been reduced from unbearable to merely uncomfortable. We decide to take two days to do the 440 km, breaking half- way at Janakpur. We leave Sauraha early the first morning, advised that the best way to get from the village to the main highway is by horse cart. That seems reasonable, except that no horse carts appear, and we are forced to make bad puns about falling into a trap. Eventually a curious pick-up driver stops and we negotiate a ride with him. Getting transport mid-route is always a bit of a risk, since buses generally arrive full, and carrying our luggage as we are it is difficult to get on and hope to secure a seat. Janakpur is also an unusual destination, and after flagging a couple of buses to a halt and getting no satisfaction we decide to go 20 km the OTHER way, to the major town of Narayangarh, and hope to get something from a terminus. Instead we are dumped at a noisy junction in the middle of town. It always happens, though, that when you simply throw yourself into the sub-continent, you are taken care of. Someone asks us where we are going and leads us to a Nepali-labeled hole of an office, and someone else sells us a ticket to Janakpur, leaving at 10. There is enough time to go for a bite at a simple place next door, and Katheryn gets entertained by a young girl intent on dancing for her while simultaneously reciting the English alphabet. Then someone grabs our bags and runs off announcing our bus has arrived. The bus is packed, but two seats are cleared for us, and with our bags in the aisle getting climbed over by the standing passengers we head off. Only the last part of the trip, 7 hours later, is really bad. That’s when the pavement has disappeared and we are bucked off our seats as the driver takes on the potholes as if they are trolls in a video game. Then again, Katheryn reminds me of the part where the rest-stop is just the side of the road, and she has to squat partially-concealed by some bushes as a group of curious cyclist ride past. Or the part where she has to hand our bags out the window to finally get stowed properly and wrenches her back in the process.

And so it is, with Katheryn barely able to walk in the morning, that we prepare for the next leg, to Karkabitta, on Nepal’s eastern border. The bus originates in Janakpur at least, but at first glance it doesn’t inspire confidence. It’s been twenty years since anyone cared what the interior looked like, and the cushion on our wooden plank bench is so ragged I pick up the whole thing and change it with another that is marginally better. We are right behind the driver, which allows Katheryn to brace herself on the wheel well, but the speakers from the stereo are six inches from my head, and we spend most of the trip wearing earplugs. It’s not everybody’s idea of fun, but it’s what we do, and I love the fact that we are in a relatively remote and beautiful part of the world surrounded by people who accept our presence here with so much hospitality, and there is a price to be paid for that privilege. Katheryn, as always, maintains her sense of humour, and coins two apt phrases: ” He’s got balls of nerves” as the bus holds the ribbon of asphalt for as long as possible against oncoming traffic; and the immortal ” For the Love of Pavement!”

Be sure not to miss these videos of the experience: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF3pdGGMUsk; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY_9P1-0xcw; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfY_eIA94I0; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IxYz1Lwbpc; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP6ZGem87Oo. Or just go to youtube and search for kebeandfast to see all the choices.

And there are lots more photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/croquet

BANGKOK: PLEASE KEEP CLEANING

dfast on November 4, 2010

The sprawling city of Kathmandu outside my window, a crazy quilt of flat-roofed five-story buildings lapping up against the green hills surrounding the valley. But it doesn’t seem any more real than any number of places we have been in the last few weeks. If I stop to think about them, I can re-create every sensation of a gusty wind tossing falling elm leaves across the street where my sister lives in Winnipeg; or the last serving of summer on flat-calm English Bay as Michel drives us to the airport; or the humid smell of the stairwell of a cheap hotel in Bangkok enhanced by long-haul flight sleep deprivation. That is the nature of the moment: it slides back into the glass and becomes a memory even as you raise it to your lips to taste it.
As anyone who has prepared for a long trip and has to sub-let their place knows, the title of this blog isn’t only about the quirky sign in that damp, spit-stained stairway in Bangkok. In fact, Katheryn started the clean-up almost as soon as the sale season ended. Sometimes it seems like the best part of the trip is when we have checked our bags and are through security and are at the departure gate and everything is DONE! In the same way that there is a Law of Nature that states you will fill all available space in your pack, you will also fill all available time before you leave. I call it the Law of Just Enough; ten minutes before Michel arrives to drive us past the last bit of summer on English Bay, we are still sweeping floors and shutting drawers.
But then we are boarded, and we taxi, and we are filled with that marvelous rush of power as the jet engines thrust our nose into the sky. The landing gear retracts and the next few minutes are the “Bardo” of air travel – that in-between state described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead – where the noise of lift-off has gone and the aisles are quiet since the flight attendants are still buckled down and even the babies are too surprised to cry. We bank to the north and point out all the territory we spent the last six months covering – the Gulf Islands and Vancouver Island on the left; Bowen and the Sunshine Coast on our right. Within minutes we are over Cortes and Marina Island. The pilot flies low and dips his wings; Brent, did you catch it? For the next 16 hours flying time we futilely chase the sun. There is an unbelievable amount of mountainous frozen wilderness on the flight path from Vancouver to Bangkok.
It is midnight local time when we land in Bangkok. We have traveled 15,000 kilometers. Both these facts are meaningless to my body and my brain, which have only one insistent command: find a bed. And so it is, after sharing a taxi from the airport with Heidi, a woman from Kamloops heading to Bhutan to go trekking, that in that deliciously pungent florescent-lit humidity sailing on the strength of a third, or fourth wind, I am commanded – politely – to continue cleaning.
The last time we were in Bangkok, of course, the streets were a battleground between soldiers and protesters. Many people asked us before we left how things are now, and we honestly didn’t know. It doesn’t take long on our first morning to notice one casualty – tourism. Hotels are empty and businesses are hurting. Over the next few days the feeling of a battered and bruised city is re-enforced. There is a recurring pessimism in the people we talk to, more deeply troubling coming from a culture ingrained to put on a smiling face. There is a lack of the vibrancy that we love; bullet pock marks in the buildings and even piles of sand bags are still there, as if there isn’t the energy to clean them up, or a sense that to do so is futile. In the north there had been record rainfall and here in the city people are bracing for the coming – real and metaphorical – flood.
What can you do? : don’t spit; keep cleaning.

Check out these videos of the trip:Vancouver to Bangkok via Hong Kong

A quick Bangkok minute

And apologies for the delay in sending our the first blog: several upload attempts failed due to poor connections in Nepal.

BANGKOK: Saturday 10.04.10

dfast on April 13, 2010

On Saturday night an extraordinary and heartbreaking scene unfolded on the doorstep of our Bangkok neighbourhood, resulting in a clash between the army and “Red Shirt” protesters that left 21 people dead and over 800 injured. We left the area about an hour before the violence occurred, and I strongly encourage you, if you can, to take a look at the video that Katheryn put together: Bangkok riots 10.4.10

We had been out of Bangkok on the island of Koh Tao for the last two weeks, but that blog has been superceded by the drama of recent events. Because of the upcoming Songkran festival, when transportation can be difficult to book, we decided to return to Bangkok last Friday. Unknown to us it was also the day the Red Shirts planned to stage their “biggest ever” rally, and has been the case throughout these protests, it resulted in traffic gridlock hell. It also resulted in something the Reds had not tried before: the occupation of the downtown shopping and business district. Whether this was the final straw for a government that some viewed as weak for not cracking down on the protesters, we don’t know; but things changed on Saturday.

The normal morning tranquility of our little riverside enclave was disturbed by two black military helicopters doing repeated forays low over the rooftops. Never mind: our plan was to go in the opposite direction of the blockades to Jatuchak Market, on the north side of town. It soon became clear, however, that the situation wasn’t normal, as the traffic on the street was backing up, and no buses were running. No problem: can’t let a little protest get in the way of our shopping. We go with plan II, which is to walk to the amulet market and buy the fun little acrylic Buddhas for the shop. Coming back, loaded with 50 Buddhas, we have to cross Ratchedamoen St., on which the protesters have been camped for a month. Well, we think, may as well see what’s going on…

We are well within the Red’s territory when two falangs (foreigners) hurry across the street to intercept us. In a surprise move, one pulls out his badge and says he is undercover with the Thai police. We’re packing a lot of Buddhas; could this be a bust? In a heavy German accent he informs us that we should not go any further, it is too dangerous: clashes have occurred; tear gas and rubber bullets have been used; and a car bomb has gone off. Good reason, we think, to go back to the hotel. And get the cameras.

We have followed the situation in Thailand closely over the years, and we have a good feel for a dangerous situation, and a well-developed sense of self-preservation. We approach the area cautiously, from the back alleys to the north. In my case, I have been coming to this neighbourhood for almost 30 years, and I know it well; but I have never before seen heavy armored vehicles in the square by Wat Bovorniwet. The military have bottle-necked the access to Tanao, the street on the east side of the world’s favourite back-packer haunt, Khao San Road. The soldiers look stylishly futuristic in a game-boy kind of way, clad in hi-tech body armor. For all of the latent violence represented by their equipment, there isn’t a feeling of hostility in the air. Locals are in the street, and some bring the soldiers food in take-away containers. Tourists from Khao San walk through the military lines taking pictures; many of the soldiers take photos of themselves and their buddies with their cell phones. Katheryn even has a young guy offer her part of his dinner.

There is a no-man’s-land on Tanao St. between the military and the Reds where even the most brainless of Khao San backpackers doesn’t go. However, by taking a back alley we end up at the Burger King at the junction of Khao San and Tanao, in the Red Shirt camp. We linger for a while, but the sun is down and it’s getting too dark for pictures. We walk to the front line of the Reds, facing the military 50 paces away. Unlike the soldiers, all they have, it seems, is flags and sticks, but they too seem fairly relaxed. When someone hands us face masks for protection from tear gas, we figure it’s time to go.

It’s a surreal situation, walking up Khao San. All of the businesses at the Tanao St. side are shuttered, but further on more and more are still open, proving once again that if the world were ruled by tourism it would be a happier, stupider place. There are two large restaurants facing each other across the road, playing loud music, with full tables spilling out onto the sidewalk. Both have arrays of large screen T.V.’s, and all of them are showing the same footage from this afternoon: the fighting a few blocks away. We stop, and soon all the passers-by, Thai and falang, are clustered watching the scenes of tear gas and truncheons, while the diners at the tables continue with their fettucine.

An hour later and a little farther away, we ourselves are having dinner. Over the ambient noise of the street and the rustling of leaves in the nearby temple, we hear the popping which from a distance no normal person would believe is gun fire. And a louder bang, again muffled and dismissable. The helicopters are still flying, but without lights; in the night they are ominous moving waves of sound.

In the morning the city awakes to the tragedy. There is still a lot that isn’t clear, but it is obvious that the decision to displace the protesters by force was a poorly conceived, badly executed operation. Perhaps, as some claim, the Reds fired first. The bang we heard was a grenade fired at the soldiers. The military claim they didn’t use live ammunition, but the shutters and walls around Burger King are pocked with holes. 17 civilians and 4 soldiers died Saturday night, most from head wounds or asphyxiated by tear gas. The official count is 858 injured. The military claim it stopped the operation to avoid further civilian bloodshed, but eyewitnesses report complete confusion and disarray.

And yet, after all of that, there is still a degree of normalcy in the city. The Reds are still entrenched, and the army is licking its wounds. That life goes on is a testament to the resilience of the Thai people. Ultimately it is that strength of character which will get this country through the current morass of polarized political petulance that it is in.

BANGKOK: The Heat is On

dfast on April 2, 2010

For a video view, check our: Red Shirt Rally

Some of you may remember a little over a year ago when huge protests closed Bangkok’s airport for over a week. Those were the “Yellow Shirts”, and they were unhappy with what they saw as a flawed election. The result was that the Prime Minister was removed, and a candidate agreeable to the Yellows, Abhisit, was installed in his place. This year it’s the “Red Shirts” who are protesting Abhisit, and the day we fly into Bangkok from Bali we get caught right in the middle of their demonstration.

We had no news of what was going on when we were in Bali, except for one brief and enigmatic clip on a hotel lobby T.V. that the manager smilingly dismissed as “nothing”. It turns out it was a bizarre episode (which a Newsweek top ten article rated the “strangest act of protest of all time”) in which the Reds dumped buckets of their own blood on the parliamentary steps. By the time we arrived the Red Shirts had turned one of the busiest streets in Bangkok – Ratchedamoen Ave. by Democracy Monument – into their camp, and were running “mobile protests” from there which were paralyzing the city. At the airport when our taxi driver heard we wanted to go to Phra Artit – a small street in the same neighbourhood – he gave a disgruntled laugh, and we spent the next 15 minutes trying to communicate what the problem was. All he could come up with was “accident”, and we were left pondering what sort of accident could turn a large area of Bangkok into a no-go zone.

As we got closer we were able to figure out that it was the Red Shirts, and that we could drive only as far as their barricades at the Golden Mount. It was 2:30 in the afternoon, in the hot season, and it meant we had to walk for a further ½ hour with all of our luggage. The Red camp was a little like the Yellow camp we went to last year, but less festive. Of course Red protest accessories – T-shirts, head-bands and foot-clappers – were for sale, and there were plenty of enterprising noodle carts and foot massage tents. At the main stage just off Democracy Monument the usual polemical-sounding speakers were trying to harangue the audience, but the heat put pretty much everybody into an anesthetized stupor. We soldiered on up Ratchedamoen. Even my fingers were perspiring. Usually eight lanes of kamikaze traffic, it was surreal to walk down the middle of the empty avenue.

Despite the histrionics of the protest, and the disruption of the traffic, the Red turnout has been less than expected, and the government doesn’t appear too disturbed by it. For the moment they have the army on their side, and it is the army which is the real power-broker in Thai politics. The wild card in all of this is the health of the King. He is 83 and has just been in hospital and appears fragile. All the expats and long-term visitors we know here are extremely concerned about the situation. For a start, when he goes, the entire country will shut down for a month. After that it may really get chaotic, with a protracted country-rending conflict being a distinct possibility. Never mind us falangs, this is the last thing most Thais want, but it is a subject that is almost impossible to broach.

BALI: The Night of the Ogoh-Ogoh

dfast on March 26, 2010

Nyepi is Balinese New Year. This year their calendar will be changing from 1931 to 1932. Nyepi is better known, however, as “Do Nothing Day”, an enforced day of rest when all movement outside is banned (the airport is closed), no human sounds should be heard, and no lights shown. It is taken seriously: in case of a medical emergency, we were warned, the Nyepi committee has to be consulted, and special permission given to go to the hospital. Although Bali is Hindu, and the observation of Nyepi is enforced by Hindus, there is certainly no equivalent in India: it seems impossible there could be one universally accepted moment of silence in that charged up country.

India, though, would really like the day before Nyepi. Like Mardi Gras to Lent, it is a day of noise and processions before the big renunciation. The purpose of the festival is to lure troublesome spirits out into the open, scare them away, and then when they return pretend that the island is deserted so that they won’t see any point in stopping and settle somewhere else. The day before Nyepi people sweep out their houses, purify them with burning incense, and leave beautiful offerings in front of their doors on the street. In the meantime, elaborate foam and papier mache diabolical figures called ogoh-ogoh are being built. The streets around Ubud are full of these creatures. Many, like the one on our alley, seem to consider huge breasts and pointy nipples especially fearsome.

The procession of the Ogoh-Ogoh begins after dark. They are paraded down the street and into the main square by the royal palace, held aloft on bamboo platforms by the groups who made them. Often they are accompanied by gamelan orchestras, and once they reach the square a frenzied running about occurs, with the huge demon figures tossing like ships on a stormy sea, and a loudspeaker extorting the crowd to stay out of the way or risk serious injury.

Fortunately we have chosen a comfortable retreat for Nyepi day. Hotels are down to a skeleton staff, and ours is letting us use the kitchen. We cook a little, use the pool, and basically follow the injunction to do nothing. There are only three sets of fellow guests. One is a French photographer now residing on the remote island of Sumba, and helping the locals address a chronic water shortage by digging wells. He is accompanied by a friend from a tiny adjascent island, and they are taking their cooking seriously, pulverizing fresh spices into marinades and cooking soups, sauces and a whole chicken. A pair of Dutch ladies subsist on toast and mah jong, and a lone Spanish guy insists his soda crackers are all he wants, until the mounds of chicken and rice win him over. The biggest surprise on Nyepi, however, is the Balinese couple who have a small plot of land on the other side of a small canal, just opposite our patio. It is a relatively deserted place anyway, and the last thing we are expecting is to see someone there on Do Nothing Day. Yoga and his wife, unfortunately, spend all day scooping gravel from the canal for the foundation of a new building. They can’t be seen from the alley, so all day they labour on, even though the Nyepi police at one point warned us against moving a chair too loudly in the restaurant.

After Nyepi is over we ride up to one of our favourite places, Tirta Gangga. We have pared down our gear to the absolute minimum, and both of us and our pack fit on a 110 cc Honda scooter. Set between two volcanoes, in the midst of verdant rice fields, Tirta Gangga is glorious. From our balcony we look over the hibiscus and frangipani and bougainvillea in the garden, the jungle-lined bowl of terraced rice fields, the smaller volcano, Gunung Seraya, to the east coast and the sea.

Katheryn, in the early days, spent a wonderful time in a quiet hamlet out on that coast, Jemeluk, snorkeling endlessly in a splendid coral garden. She hasn’t been back since, but it is only 30 minutes or so away, so we take our beach gear and do a day trip. Fortunately the winding road down to the coast is still fabulous. Jemeluk has now merged with its bigger neighbor, Ahmed, into a continuous strip of resorts and hotels. The black pebble beach never was much of a draw, and it is still lined with brightly painted outrigger boats, as before. We rent a mask and a snorkel, and I am the first to go into the water. Then Katheryn takes her turn. It is depressing. Almost all the coral is dead. There are still some colourful fish, but they are outnumbered by a steady current of plastic rubbish. We intended to spend the day, but it is stinking hot on the sand, and there is no reason to stay. There are still wooden salt-drying racks along the coast, and Ahmed is famous for having some of the best sea salt in the world. But even when we stop to buy a bag it turns into an unhappy scene, as other vendors run over and thrust identical bags at us, at identical prices.

Riding back over the hills we get caught in the only rain we have had since we’ve been here, a soaking downpour that leaves brown rivers flowing over the road. There are still lots of motorbike riders out, but most of them have jackets or ponchos. We just get soaked. But it’s a good rain to get soaked by, tropical rain, and afterward the plants all rejoice and exhale simultaneously and the air is so rich we bathe in it as much as breathe it.

See some more of our Bali photos (more Ogoh-Ogoh) at https://www.kebeandfast.com

Also, we were stymied by slow downloads when we posted the last blog, so if you were disappointed not to be able to see the latest videos, now you can! The rest of our Nepal videos are at the end of the last blog, but here is one to whet your appetite: Bad Road Movie. From Bali, you won’t want to miss the hilarious Pig Dance. There are also: From Calcutta to Bali; Hiking and Biking in Tirta Gangga; and the terrifying Night of the Ogoh-Ogoh.

BALI: Umbul alert

dfast on March 15, 2010

Before you place your advance orders for Balinese umbul-umbul (temple banners) we will take you far from this equatorial island back to a chilly morning in Kathmandu.

It is pre-dawn, and we are flying through town in a taxi, apparently to the Eden petrol pump. This is the first step in a long sequence of events that will all have to synchronize over the next five days in order for us to make pre-booked train and plane connections to get to Bali, and at the moment it is looking a little dodgy. Our driver is finishing the night shift, and is charged on speed and red bull. He comes to screeching halts to ask for directions. At one point Katheryn gasps when there is a thump and a creature goes hurtling over the bumper. Katheryn thinks it is a school girl but it is only a pigeon.

When we get out I am still dubious we are even at our destination. We have booked seats in a Sumo – an Indian-made jeep – to the border town of Birganj, but all we have to prove it is a scrap of paper which reads “Govinda Gee. Opp. Eden Petrol Pump”. Our driver picks the pigeon off the grill, retrieves our packs, and speeds off. We are on a congested, dusty, ugly down-trodden stretch of road on the east side of Kathmandu, where buses, mini-vans and jeeps all stop and shout and vie for passengers. Touts grab our precious piece of paper, study it, and direct us one way or another, and in this fashion we arrive at the office of Govinda Gee. By 7 AM, our supposed departure time, it looks like there is a consensus that we have seats on a Sumo, and by 8 we are underway.

The arrangement is less than luxurious, but tolerably; we are in the front, the seat is worn out, and Katheryn has to sit with the stick shift between her knees. It gets worse when we hit the “new highway” which at this point is a 4-WD track through the mountains. It’s first and second gear all the way and some of the hairpins are so steep that the tires spin and throw rocks as we make the corner. However, we make it to Birganj in a mere 5.5 hours, a trip that by local bus can take more than 12.

Some of you may remember our famous “Escape from Birganj” story three years ago, when we were caught here by rioting and curfew, and had to sneak out past road blocks at 4AM. We find a room at the same hotel that we stayed at then – The Everest – and congratulate ourselves on the success of Step One.

Step Two starts the next morning, and involves crossing the border into India. This should be fairly straightforward, but India recently (8 weeks ago) changed its rule on multi-entry visas, basically rendering ours void. It took an entire day at the Indian consulate in Kathmandu, more money, and a half-inch stack of photo-copied documents to get permission to cross this border, and the lone office working out of a derelict shed here still isn’t sure about it. He tells us we are the first people in our position to have the authorization to enter since the rule came into effect – everyone else he has sent back to Kathmandu.

The next step is to get on the 10AM train to Calcutta; again, normally a routine operation we’ve done one thousand times, but now, even though we booked berths a month ago, we still aren’t confirmed. What we have is a berth between us “R.A.C.” – Reserved Against Cancelation – which means someone down the line has to drop out in order for both of us to have a bunk. A businessman opposite has managed to squeeze his daughter, wife, and mother-in-law into one bunk – against the rules – and laughs when I say they should add another AC sleeper car. “I’m surprised there is a train at all! I’m surprised there is a road at all! All they used to have here was oxcarts!” And it’s true: we are in the notoriously-poor, lawless part of India, Bihar, where even motorized transport can’t be taken for granted. Fortunately the seating situation gets resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, and the Maoist insurgents don’t blow up the tracks, as they have been prone to do.

Our scheduled arrival time in Calcutta is 4AM. We will the train to be late, and succeed, and arrive at 9. The rest of the trip: flight to KL; overnight; flight to Bali is hardly worth mentioning. We are even picked up at the airport by our friend Peter, and driven to a hotel – with a swimming pool – that he has booked for us: that’s how easy this has become! However we have come a long way from Kathmandu, 46 hours of travel in 5 days, which leads us to the umbul-umbul.

Thanks to everyone from the last blog, by the way, who made a request for some of our Nepali treasure. The response was great but there’s still lots left in case you’re just now getting around to thinking about it.

If you visited any of our sales last year, you probably noticed our tall, elegant banners outside. These are Balinese umbul – ceremonial banners – and there was so much interest in them that we constantly regretted that we only had our five display pieces. Now we have agreat source for them in Wayan, umbul, umbrella, and ceremonial cloth maker. They are all 5 meters tall and will retail at our sales for $16. We are stocking the colours you see in the photo (for a bigger image double click it) although quite a few (we cleaned out Wayan’s stock) are in limited numbers. As a special offer* and if you order NOW they are on sale for 5 pieces for $60 or 10 for $100. Keep in mind how charming they would be at all those parties, weddings or special events coming up this summer. If you are interested, let us know by email: katheryn@kebeandfast.com and we will set aside your selection. When we are back in Canada in the middle of April, we will contact you about payment and delivery details.

*It is the Nyepi festival here tomorrow, Bali’s famous “Do Nothing Day”, when everything, including the international airport is closed, and no one goes outside, turns on the power, or anything. More on that later.

Here are some of the videos from Nepal. Check them out!

Boudinath, the stupa of the relic

The Better Road Movie

and soon to be a classic Bad Road Movie

also TONGBA! is a lot of fun

and there are two more cityscapes: Durbar Square, Patan and Kathmandu

FIRST DIBS FROM KATHMANDU: And save 30%

dfast on March 4, 2010

Greetings to all our family and friends! Thank you for your emails and updates. It sounds like we missed a pretty good time in Vancouver; we weren’t sure whether the tremor we felt here was the shock wave from Chile or Canada jumping up and down after the men’s gold medal on Sunday.

We are now in Kathmandu, a place that doesn’t really care about the Olympic Games. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t know how to celebrate. One of the year’s biggest festivals, Holi, just finished. Somewhere there may be something religious about it, but mostly it’s an excuse to get very boisterous and spray everybody with water and coloured dye. The city shuts down, since if the water bombers from the roof-tops don’t get you, the roving bands of teenage boys will.

Apart from that, we have been busy getting our Nepal shipment together. It is one of our favourites, since we get to work with Malik, our Tibetan jeweler, and scour the bazaars of this most interesting of cities. And we have found treasure!

As a special offer to you all, we are posting a selection of our findings here, and if anyone is interested in something let us know, and we will save it for you. In addition, if you commit now, we will mark it down 30% from the retail price. Our shipment will be underway soon, and should arrive in Vancouver early in May. When it arrives, we will ensure everything is in good order, contact you, and take your credit card information for a 30% deposit. At that point it depends where you are as to how we will get the item(s) to you. Delivery can be arranged in person, if we are in the vicinity, by post, or at one of our sales events. For those dates see our 2010 sales schedule on the blog home page or on our website (https://www.kebeandfast.com). Enquiries can be made to katheryn@kebeandfast.com.

Last year we ran out of singing bowls early on in the season; this year we have found a great source. We have made contact with the Tuladhar family, brass and bronze casters from Patan, where metal-work is an ancient tradition. Yesterday we went to their workshop on the fringes of that town, and watched as they cast bronze bowls in a manner that hasn’t changed for centuries, except for a power-grinder and polisher to finish the process. We learned the difference between the brass machine-worked bowls, which are cheap but loose their timbre after a few months; the cast bronze bowls, which are nice but uniform and rather characterless; the hand-beaten bronze bowls, which are things of beauty; and the old, used beaten bronze bowls, called thadobhuti, which are heirlooms, and have the most fantastic songs. We have purchased only the last two types of bowls. For pictures and sizes see below. We also have one magnificent lost-wax-cast brass Buddha from the Tuladhar brothers. It is the only one we will have this year, Sakyamuni in the “Calling Earth to Witness” mudra.

And speaking of treasure, we have our best selection of Tibetan and Nepali art ever! The political situation in Nepal drove our friend Govinda to India. A collector for many years, Govinda took all of his goods to a warehouse south of Delhi. He has some absolutely amazing pieces – rice grinding boards 7 m long and a metre thick, carved from a single tree-trunk; huge ceremonial doors from Naga villages – but what drew us to him in the first place was his Tibetan doors. These doors are made in Tibet from original doors, but the painting is often more recent, say 15 to 25 years old, done on canvas which is glued to the door, often with plaster embelishments that create a raised-finish, metallic-looking detail. We have two doors: one has the Buddha Sakymuni, and one a Tibetan king.

Also from Govinda are some original tribal carvings that we only have a few pieces of. These come from Nepal, and are often quite whimsical – like the fanged mask with granny glasses, or the stack of cats. One of my favourites is a three-piece door frame, all elaborately and boldly carved. The pieces all come apart, and are great sculptural panels on their own, but we think it should be kept as an integral unit.

Here is the price list for the items on offer. Please note that G.S.T. and P.S.T. will be added, as well as any additional shipping costs.

SINGING BOWLS:

Hand-beaten bronze large (23 cm. diameter, 1.4 kg) retail $150. SALE PRICE $105.

Hand-beaten bronze medium (14cm, 500 gr) retail $55. SALE PRICE $38.50.

Old bronze thadobhati (18 cm diameter 800 gr) retail $110. SALE PRICE $77.

Brass Buddha (26 cm, 2.76 kg) retail $300. SALE PRICE $210.

TIBETAN DOORS approx. 60” X 36″ retail $900. SALE PRICE $630.

NEPALI FOLK CARVING:

Round-eyed mask retail $25. SALE PRICE $17.50.

Goat boxes retail $60. SALE PRICE $42.

CENTRAL INDIA: Caves, ruins, and a very big tree

dfast on March 1, 2010

From Aurangabad and the cave temples of Ellora we start to arc north on our big loop through central India. The next destination is another great cave temple site, Ajanta, older and if possible even more impressive than Ellora. After that we continue on to an extremely old Buddhist pilgrimage site, Sanchi, via the infamous industrial city of Bhopal, and then, somehow or other, back to Delhi. This is the “hard travel” part of our trip. We have to find local buses, trains, or other transport as we go. There are no schedules, and no reservations.
The first leg, from Aurangabad to Ajanta, is an easy one. Although there is no English – numerically or alphabetically – at the bus stand, lots of people direct us to our bus, which is just pulling out, and magically still has seats. It drops us directly in front of the only reasonable accommodation in the village of Fardarpur, and just like that we have arrived and are settled in.
We are definitely objects of curiosity when we take a stroll through tiny Fardarpur, but the attention is unanimously friendly, and even heart-warming, as when a bullock cart of villagers lumbers past and everybody in the back – mostly women and girls – waves and flashes brilliant smiles, and keeps waving as they trundle up the road. It has been eight years since we were last here, and I remember buying a cold beer at a small shop just north of the town, but now I can’t find the place. We ask a small knot of young men, and they say it is 2 km further. There is an auto-rickshaw beside them, and I say I’ll take that, but everybody, including the driver, agrees that he will charge too much. One guy flags down a 100cc motorbike, tells him what we want, and Katheryn and I squeeze on board. Our driver’s name is Ali. He is about to move to Ireland to be with a girl he met, and has no idea what to expect. We complete our errand, and Ali refuses any payment, even a contribution to his gas money.
Ajanta is a jewel. The 30 caves were carved by Buddhist monks, the interiors covered with stupendous frescoes, and the whole thing was abandoned by the end of the 5th C. The stunning paintings weren’t seen again until 1819, when a British army officer stumbled on the site, following the Waghora River hunting tigers. There is still only the same approach, up the Waghora valley, into the box canyon where the caves form a horseshoe in the cliff face. Those of you who know Ajanta know what an amazing place it is. I won’t go into the details here, but let the pictures speak for themselves. More can be seen below, or on our flickr site, of course.
The next leg of our journey, from Fardarpur to Jalgaon, although short, could be a problem because we have to flag down and board a bus in mid-route, and you can see, if you watch some of our bus videos like this one: bus through Madhya Pradesh how full the buses can be. As it turns out, the bus nearly empties out when it stops, and we actually have a selection of seats to choose from. Jalgaon itself is just a transit town on the rail line, but it has a nice hotel, the Plaza, whose charming owner greets us warmly. There is a waiting list of 29 for the train we want to catch to Bhopal the next morning. It is an early train – 6:30 a.m. – and by the time we get to the pre-dawn platform, our seats are confirmed. This is all just too easy! Where is all the hard travel I was dreading?
Bhopal will always be associated with the worst industrial accident of all time, when a gas leak from the Union Carbide plant seeped out into the city, killing 20,000, and destroying the health of 120,000 more. Admittedly, that isn’t likely to be a big draw for visiting the city, and since we didn’t find anything else that is, I would say give the place a miss. We arrive on the eve of the loudest Hindu festival of the year, Shivaratri, and are in a room directly across from a temple. The blaring broadcast, the manager says with conviction, will stop at 11 p.m. What he didn’t tell us was that the marble tile cutting in the next room wasn’t going to stop until the room was finished. The din in the room is unbelievable, and, tolerant as we are, we have to move when the shriek of saw cutting stone drowning out the blasting loudspeaker becomes too much.
Sanchi is only a speck on the map 69 km from Bhopal, but still we weren’t expecting the bus to take 3 hr. to get there. It just crawls along through the Madhya Pradesh countryside, stopping every few hundred m to let off or pick up (mostly) passengers. People seldom get on singly, but in extended family units. The strongest – the young men – make it on first, and with the aisles already full, it often leaves old women or children to be crammed together in the doorway. The situation looks grim until the next stop, when another 8 or 12 or 20 people somehow manage to squeeze in, and then it gets worse.
Sanchi is the oldest site on our route – it has been a pilgrimage destination since the 3rd C B.C., when the Emperor Asoka built a domed stupa over a relic of the Buddha. The stupa still stands, and Buddhist pilgrims still come – a group from Cambodia are here with us – but what Sanchi is famous for are its four gates. Called “Torana” they consist of two stone pillars supporting three horizontal beams, and they are the best, earliest, carving in India. The sculpture really is spectacular, but we had hoped Sanchi would be the kind of peaceful hamlet it would be nice to spend a few quiet days (after Bhopal) in. Unfortunately it’s just a rather unattractive strip on a busy road, and we decide to move on, the next day, to a beautiful spot we know, Orchha.
This involves picking up the (packed) bus from yesterday, which continues onto the town of Vidisha. From where we have to hope for seats on the six hour train to Jhansi. The good news is we get into one of the upper class compartments; the bad news is that we were sold the wrong kind of ticket at the station, and have to pay a “fine” of 500 rupees. In Jhansi station, before we head out to the village of Orchha, we try to buy tickets for our last leg, to Delhi. It’s such a chaotic scene that I am in line for an hour and a half before I get to the window and then I can only get us on a waiting list.
It’s a hassle getting out to Orchha, with taxi drivers telling us “there are no buses”, but it is worth the effort. The village of Orchha is sandwiched between a massive palace and a huge temple from the 17th C., and the countryside is dotted with ruins. We spend a day cycling around and are attracted to a giant baobab tree standing alone on a hill. It is a tree that seems to be older than its country, to have created the magical landscape around it.

See lots more fabulous photos at https://www.kebeandfast.com and don’t miss the videos:orccha palace , sanchi ,and ajanta.

BOMBAY TO ELLORA: Maximum city to ancient cave temples

dfast on February 23, 2010

An overnight train takes us from Jaipur to Bombay. There is no pressing reason for us to go to Bombay; it’s just one of our favorite Indian cities, and we haven’t been here fortwo years. The humid coastal air, the grand colonial architecture, the vibrant culture, and the dynamic intensity of an entire country-worth of people compacted into a pressure
cooker of a space make this a place like no other. And then there is the food. If India is a collection of countries within a country, Bombay is India within India. All of its diverse parts are here, and there are just too few meals within a day to enjoy them.

On the flip side, all of its diverse parts don’t always get along. Pitched battles are currently taking place on a number of parochial fronts, all fueled by a xenophobic “Maharashtra for Marathi only” party, the Shiv Sena. Most of the city’s taxies aredriven by “Northerners”, typically from Bihar, and they have been given 40 days to learn Marathi or be tossed out by the Sena’s goons. Bollywood, of course, lives in Bombay, and its biggest star, Shah Rukh Khan, came out with the seemingly-innocuous statement that Pakistanis should be allowed to play on Indian-based cricket teams. For this the Sena is screaming patriotic invectives at him, and tearing posters off theatres, and threatening to riot in any movie house which shows his latest film, which is to be released this weekend. The biggest story, however, happened today. Rahul Gandhi, scion of the Nehru clan, son of the martyred Rajiv, heir apparent to the venerable Congress Party and P.M.
in waiting is visiting the city. The Sena said it would meet him with scores of black
flag waving protestors. Not only did the protestors fail to materialize, but Rahul, in a
masterstroke, abandoned his planned helicopter itinerary, and walked over to a suburban
station and got onto a commuter train. Everyone, including his own security, was
dumbfounded. You can’t over-estimate what the commuter trains mean to Bombay, and now everyone is enthralled with Rahul, and the Sena is left huffing and blustering, looking deflated and foolish.

From this maximum city on the coast to the ancient abandonnedof the interior is only a half-day train ride. On the train Katheryn gets to
talking with two young women beside her. They are Muslim, and although they are following events in the city closely, they are scared to be overheard talking in public about them. We are heading Aurangabad, named after the (Muslim) Moghul emperor, Aurangzeb. The Sena are great revisionists, and want to change the name to something more “Hindu”, as they did with Bombay/Mumbai. But there are too many Muslims here like Katheryn’s friends, and so far it has not been possible.

The Emperor Aurangzeb, (d.1707) in fact, is buried not far from Aurangabad. The remarkable thing, for such a perceived iconoclast, is that three km from his tomb there is the greatest treasure of Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain sculpture in India. The cave temples of Ellora pocket a two km stretch of this limestone escarpment. It’s still a mystery as to “why here”, and why the ancients chose to carve caves into solid rock rather than build temples; but in Ellora it’s the effect that matters. The monastic communities lived at this site for over 500 years, carving the whole time, until they abandoned it in the 12th C. The Buddhists got started first, at a time when a new revisionist moment was formenting in their religion. For 1000 years the appeal of Buddhism had been the simplicity of the teachings of Buddha
and the lessons of the ascetic rigor of his life. Early on there were never even any depictions of the Buddha in a human form: he was always implied by a footprint, a wheel, or a collection of geometric shapes called a “stupa”. The new teachings that were practiced at Ellora were probably coming from Eastern India, and as they developed they became known as ‘Tantra”. Tantra envisioned complex cosmologies around the Buddha, powerful associated figures like Bodhisattvas, and esoteric rituals designed to fast-track what had been a slow evolutionary approach to the final goal: Nirvana. Here in Ellora the monks were working to create what was in effect an Enlightenment Machine. In each new cave, at each new try, they were refining it further. They used the most powerful tools at their disposal: pure compassion symbolized by the Bodhisattvas Avalokiteshvara; enormous figures of the Buddha, his hands forming esoteric gestures to instruct the initiated; and, most importantly, the monks put all the elements together to form three-dimensional mandalas which are the cave temples.

Times change and so does royal patronage. By the 8th C. Buddhism here was in decline, replaced by its revitalized older sister, Hinduism. If the Buddhist art here is cerebral, typified by rows of slightly different Buddhas, the Hindu sculpture are visceral. Take the huge panel of
Shiva as Gajahasta at the entrance to cave 10. This god is not advocating a course of sitting meditation. This is a god you worship because you are terrified of his power. He takes the biggest thing the sculptor can imagine, and elephant, and pulls it into a thin sausage above his head. He skewers a demon with one arm, collects his blood to drink with another, and causes mayhem and death with the others. His face screams with a primal roar; there is no reason in his eye, just pure, fanged destruction.

The rest of the Hindu sculpture also draws heavily on that elemental energy. It was a time when the cult of the Seven Mothers was popular. The sage Lakulisha was its proponent, and their images, and his, are found throughout the site. In the dark recesses
where the Seven Mothers are carved, they are always presided over by the skeletal goddess of death Kali; you can imagine the more extreme practices of Lakulisha taking place here. The big attention-grabber at Ellora, however, is the Kailash Temple. It is a massive
undertaking, from the 8th C.: a monolithic sculpture of a temple carved from solid rock; a cave in reverse. Deep trenches were cut out of the rock face defining the temples dimensions, and then the carving was started from the top down. It’s one of the truly audacious ancient works of art on the entire planet. All the temple courtyards, sculptures, shrines and sanctums were hollowed out and now you, and busloads of tourists and school kids, can wander through it, taking dark stairways to different levels, and wondering how it is possible to take a defining photo in such a tight space.

Many thanks to Helen for all her help in solving some of our technical problems. She has also updated our 2010 sales schedule, which is now posted on our website https://www.kebeandfast.com. The photos of our recent trip through the ancient sites of the interior shouldn’t be missed, and you can find them there by going to the flickr button at the top of the website page. There are also some great videos – go to youtube and search for Kebe and Fast. Just to give you a taste of some more Ellora pictures…

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