So the continuing adventures of one naked man in kathmandu.
Anyway.
One evening I decided to go see the monkey temple, syuanbo nath. That
is an approximation of the spelling. But to me it sounds like soyombo,
the name of the symbol on the mongolian flag.
The monkey temple is located behind the hotel I was staying at. Based
on all the maps and what everyone said, it was a relatively easy walk.
It looked to be almost a direct walk as long as you got to the main
road. I made sure to double check with the men who worked at the
concierge desk about getting to the monkey temple. They said as long
as I left through the back gate of the hotel, it was easy. Right
there. You could see it from the road. So tall!
So I grabbed my camera and a cardigan and headed out. So easy. Right
there. Should be able to find it in no time!
I’ve learned never to trust. Anyone. Who says. So easy. Right there.
You can see it from the road.
I start walking along the road and proceed to get more stares than I
have the entire time I’ve been in kathmandu. Apparently, not so much a
road tourists walk down. So I walk and see small residential streets
and gardens and people riding six to a tricycle. I keep looking up as
I round bends thinking that around the next bend, I’ll be able to see
the temple looming in the distance.
Eventually I stop in a minimart, freak the woman behind the counter
out by asking for a coke and saying ’syuanbo nath’ with an upward lilt
to my voice and a shrug? After doing this a few times she smiles and
points down the road in the direction I was going. Wonderful. I finish
my coke that I only bought to get directions and head down the road.
Five minutes later it forks. And no, I can’t see the temple from where
I am standing.
But I do spy a taxi driver! I run over and ask him which road leads to
syuanbo nath. Then spend five minutes reassuring him that I in fact
love to walk and do not want to have a taxi ride. No matter how cheap
it is. He says I should turn left at the road up ahead. So I clarify a
few times that I should turn that way, using hand gestures, English
and my soon to be pointless nepali phrasebook. Yes yes, go that way
and follow that road.
I am uncertain as I seem to be heading deeper and deeper into
residential territory. And I still can’t see the temple. But I don’t
want to turn back, I don’t want to get into a taxi, so my only option
is to press on.
After walking and turning down various and sundry roads that people
keep gesturing toward, I find myself at a seeming dead end of a field
with what appears to be a new development on one side and old
condemned housing on the other. And two girls, one carrying a baby,
dead in front of me. So I walk forward and the one not burdened by the
baby takes off at a fair clip laughing rather maniacally at the one
weighed down by the future. I do the whole ’syuanbo nath’? shrug
action at her. The two girls speak amongst themselves and then the
girl who ran away comes trudging back and intimates that she will take
me to syuanbo nath.
So I start following this petite girl through the housing development
and down these random residential roads on the outskirts of kathmandu.
I keep trying to strike up conversations with my lonely planet nepali
phrasebook. You know, in this phrasebook and their other phrasebooks,
they have a little quiz at the back. Which traveler are you?: 1: the
one who speaks English slowly and loudly at the locals and is
discouraged when they don’t understand you? 2: the one who misses all
the jokes and fun and never meets anyone new on your travels? 3: the
one who is cracking jokes with all the locals and has other travelers
queueing up to borrow your phrasebook? If you want to be number three,
carry lonely planet phrasebooks with you!
Crap.
CRAP.
CRAP!!!!!!!
The pronunciation guide is atrocious, they don’t have a corresponding
nepali to English portion of the book which would have come in QUITE
handy, and the organization is quite simply, bollocks. Not at ALL
useful for striking up any conversation that diverts from would you
carry my bags and how much for the momos?
After getting ridiculous stares and shrugs of ‘I don’t know what the
hell you’re saying but I hope you don’t think it is nepali’, I gave up
and just enjoyed walking with someone who was so kind as to go out of
her way for a total idiot. On the walk we met a kid on his way to
school at one of the many boarding schools we passed by. He was
carrying some heavy gallon jugs and could speak a bit of English. We
were followed by some little ones for a while and gained some smiles
and laughs from people we passed. I imagine the conversations were,
who is she? Oh, she’s a lost tourist trying to see the monkey temple.
Why didn’t she take a cab? Oh, she’s cheap. Or stupid.
We finally start seeing signs of the temple and climb up and up and up
many stairs. On the way up, my guide points out all of the monkeys
that the temple is famous for. Loads of baboons. i keep stopping to
take photos of the baboons. not because I really care so much for the
baboons, but because I can’t climb the stairs as fast as my guide and
rather than look like an utter gross tourist wimp out of shape lady, I
decide to look WAAAAAY too enthusiastic about the monkeys. She may not
have been fooled. I justified it to myself not with, well you’re a
lazy slacker with the working out at home why did you think you could
gazelle up stairs now, but rather with my GOD the altitude is a
KILLER!
So we get up to the top and it is striking. Amazing. Beautiful. A
perfect white stupa looking out over the city. Loads of people walking
around. I take a quick photo and then take a few of the city view. My
guide walks up to one of the shrines near the stupa where there is a
red ochre substance and people use for tikka, or red marks of blessing
and neatly daubs her forehead, then beckons me over and daubs mine as
well. I feel a bit like a poser as I’m not Buddhist and so should I
really have this red clay on my forehead? But I don’t want to brush it
off either. so we then begin our descent down the other side of the
hill.
On the stairs on the way down are two dogs stuck together, ass to ass.
They aren’t whining or straining to get apart or anything. Just
hanging out, asses together, panting a bit in the heat. My guide just
brushes past them with a nonchalance I can’t quite muster. Mainly
because I project extreme irritation and anger onto them. Frankly,
were I a dog stuck to another dog, I’d be upset. I’d probably bite
anyone that walked past me. And be thinking, ummm help a sister out
here will ya?!?
I’m trying to decide at this point how to let my guide go. I don’t
want her to think I’m such an absolute ninny I can’t get home by
myself, plus it is hot, I’m tired, and I imagine she is as well. It
certainly wasn’t in her day’s plans to show me around. But when I try
to communicate that I’m fine and such, she keeps walking and gestures
toward another temple nearby. So we start walking toward that, seeing
more monkeys. Baby monkeys are unfairly cute. Little old man faces and
huge ears and all spry and bendy. I’m utterly charmed by the monkeys
until one runs right up to my guide’s ankle and grabs at it all angry
like. Then I start to believe the monkeys mean us harm. Monkeys may
now be up on the fear list with geese and ducks.
We go to another temple with three large golden Buddha statues. It is
gorgeous and crammed with people staring at my tikka. (yes, all about
me, not about the buddhas.) then we start walking back the way we
came. We get some cokes from a woman who calls me yankee and spends
twenty minutes trying to figure out how to tell me the price when
she’s holding a calculator in her hands that I’m trying to look at to
see the price. Then we continue going back the way we came, through
the residential areas and finally end up at the field with the bright
new housing development on one side and the condemned buildings on the
other. On this walk back I tried using the phrase book again with no
success. But then my guide grabbed it from me and started flipping
through it. She would find pertinent questions and ask me by pointing.
How old are you? What’s your name? What do you do? I’d answer her and
ask back (clearly, I don’t remember her name. but I do remember that
she was 20.) as we near the field I expect her to gesture me off and
am trying to remember the value of rupees to show my appreciation for
the guided tour and her time. But she gestures me into the field and
then points at one of the houses that I had guessed was condemned and
beckons me in. for a minute I think of all the lifetime television for
women movies starring tori spelling I’ve seen (mother, may I walk with
danger?) and realize none of them took place in Nepal. So I follow her
in.
immediately off of the front door is a small hallway leading to
stairs, which she quickly climbs down. There are no lights in the
stairwell or entry way, so I tentatively put my fingertips on the wall
til I feel something like a rail and skim the rail down, hoping that
the stairs are sound. They are and I go into a small room with the
girl and baby from earlier and a young man that I quickly surmise is
the baby’s father. So we all sit around for a while, me and my guide
on the small bed and the other two on two chairs against the window
wall, trying to talk, using the CRAP lonely planet phrasebook. The
baby is adorable but very solemn and keeps peering at me from under
her dark brows. Her mom eventually puts a beret knit cap on her head
at a jaunty angle. Whenever I run out of things to say or they fall to
speaking rapidly in Nepali, I chat at the baby in a mix of nonsensical
sounds or asking her what she thinks I’m doing there. They ask me if
I’m hungry and I say no, that I should go before dark. Though this
sentence took maybe three seconds to write, that exchange took a good
fifteen minutes, as I tried to find a phrase that remotely covered
that in the book. Instead what I ended up saying was sunset no before
sunset hotel go. Maybe.
So my guide leads me back up the stairs after I leave the second coke
that I’d bought behind for the husband and sister to share. Then the
guide and her sister start chatting about how to get me back to my
hotel. At first they think I’m staying in thamel, the tourist area
everyone stays at, but when they find out I’m at the soaltee, they are
much relieved and decide to just walk me all the way back. There is a
lot of passing of the phrasebook and random bits of conversation. The
sister asks for money at one point, or tries but my guide shushes her.
Long after dark has fallen and I’ve started wondering where in the
hell in the kathmandu neighborhoods I am, we come upon the back gate
to the hotel. At this point, this girl has taken a good four hours out
of her day and walked way the crap all over the hills with me. So I
hand her my phrasebook with 1000 rupees in it to say thank you. I wish
we’d been able to talk more and that I could have at least remembered
her name.
Tags: Kathmandu, Monkeys, Stuck-together Dogs
