Culture and Religion

We ended our time in Chitwan with a fantastic cultural show. The village hall was packed, mainly nepalese and Indian but a few tourists and everyone vying for the front seats. The dance troupe was about 30 strong and started with a very rousing stick dance. Twenty young men ferociously dancing in a circle with an interplay of sticks connecting backwards,forwards, under and over - it looked slightly dangerous.Then singing,drumming,more sticks,fire sticks and a very strange peacock dance. Good fun. 

A bit of a sad farewell to Matt at the bus station yesterday. He's off to Lebanon,Turkey and Greece. He decided to follow in the footsteps of Alexander the Great and make use of the classical studies he took in year 13. Its been great having him along for the trek and safari. He heads back to Kathmandu while Bry and I are off to Tansen a hill station in the Palpa district of the lesser Himalayas. Buddha our guide in Chitwan looked rather perplexed when we said we wanted to go to Tansen and it soon becomes obvious that not a lot of tourists head this way. You might have guessed that my agenda (mountains and animals) is over and Bry's agenda (off the beaten track?) has kicked in. 

The bus is very local and the trip very hair raising. I decide I need to convert to some form of religion because I end up closing my eyes and praying at least every 10 minutes as yet another head on collision is so very narrowly avoided. For some unknown reason we're offloaded and transferred to another bus in the middle of nowhere and if anything this bus driver is crazier than the last. In the end I plug in the haunting vocals of Elbow(great new album - The take off and landing of everything) and it provides the perfect soundtrack to watch the mass of humanity passing alongside. It's definitely better when I can't see what's happening up ahead. 

Tansen is an ancient town of cobblestone and brick and very steep streets. It clings to the mountainside,has hardly any flat areas and no other tourists. It does have a very well respected mission hospital the UMN or united mission Nepal which is part of the reason we've come here. Today we joined a tour around the hospital with a few others- a german doctor who worked in pokhara for 9 years treating leprosy and a newly arrived Finnish orthopedic surgeon. The hospital provides free health care for the poor, has 160 beds, a staff of 400 of which only 10 are expats,does over 3000 operations a year and runs on an annual budget of 2 million dollars a lot of which comes from donations. I did get the feeling that it pays to be Christian to work there though. Interesting in a country where Hindu and Buddhism overtly coexist in harmony but there's very little evidence of Christianity. But they are clearly good people doing good work.

There's not a lot of accommodation options in tansen so we are staying with a family in a home stay. Seems like a good option, friendly and comfortable. Dinner is a naweri traditional meal, flattened rice, soybeans and a fiery curry. We sit in a courtyard under an inky sky and a golden moon. It's nice to be back in the mountains where the air is clearer. 

Namaste Sandy