God's What?

Short Version:
We explore Kathmandu, and check out the Pashupatinath Temple

Long Version:
Our first night in Kathmandu was a noisy night in hard single beds, with a no-hot-water bathroom attached. This was followed by a room-change negotiation with hotel management, which in turn led to a sunny rooftop penthouse room. With hot water. And views. And, as Lovely Wife put it, if you have to be sick*, better to be sick in a nice place than in a grim, unpleasant, noisy one.

From our rooftop perch, we** did some eyeballing of people going about their daily business. Said business bore both similarities and differences to life as lived in other places; brothers scrapped energetically across multiple rooms until halted by their spoon-wielding, baby-carrying, sari-clad mother; a small child watched Kung Fu Panda on a small TV in a dimly-lit furnitureless room above a combination restaurant/grocery store where chain-smoking men sat talking deep into the evening. No nudies spotted, unfortunately.

The tourist bit of Kathmandu is called Thamel, and it's quite nice. Especially compared to other bits of Kathmandu. We spent a few days in Thamel, getting gear sorted for the trek, wandering from overpriced trinket store to overpriced trinket store, familiarising ourselves with the location and operating principles of the Indian embassy (more on that later), and getting to know our guide-to-be while seeing the sights of Kathmandu, starting with the Pashupatinath Temple. As non-Hindus, we weren't allowed inside the temple proper, but the gatekeepers were more than happy to take our money (again, significantly more for tourists than for locals) and the parts of the sprawling complex on the far side of the Bagmati River were open for us to wander at will. The complex climbs uphill*** from the river in a series of ramps and steps, from terrace to terrace, and eventually to the lower edge of the Deer Park, where various deer spend their days stuffing their cute little faces with bits of greenery handed through the fences by tourists.

The hillside terraces housed various temples, smaller and less holy than the main attraction. Many of the smaller temples had one or more of the following:
- bells, for ringing or taking photos of, depending on your ethno-religious background
- statues of cows, weatherworn and often kind of cute
- statues of the Shiva Lingam, for worshipping or tittering at****
- holy men (sadhus), for sneakily not paying to take photos of
- beggars, for not giving moneys to

We managed some sneaky unpaid photos of sadhus. And some sneaky unpaid photos of crippled, arthritic, leprous beggars. But none of the funerals, despite the fact that there were a lot of them happening, and that they were quite far away from where we were, meaning the chances of being caught snapping something we oughtn't were pretty low - unlike the beggars and sadhus, who yellingly waved mutant club fists and gestured benevolently, respectively.

We saw funerals at many stages from our perch on the far side of the river, from the decoration of the platform and the preparation of the body, through the participatory, wailing and gnashing of teeth stages, to the dissipation of the last wisps of smoke rising from the expired pyre. People were bathing, clothed, in the waters of the Bagmati. Most of them seemed to be men - the women, as it turned out, were upstream, near the monkeys.







* = Delhi Belly is real, and unfun. It's not dissimilar to the Montezuma's Revenge we encountered in Mexico

** = May have just been me

*** = At the time, we thought it was quite steep. It's likely that our guide was more than just a little horrified by our reaction

**** = Shiva Lingam is one of the most commonly found worship symbols throughout the Hindu world. Literally translated, it essentially means "God's Cock." Someone in rural southeast Auckland, NZ, decided it would be a good name for their cattery (Shiva Lingam, that is, not God's Cock. I'm not entirely certain that the NZ Companies Office would allow the registration of "God's Cock Cattery," or, indeed, "God's Cock [any type of business]." Can someone please try, and let me know how you get on? Thanks), which has always been a great source of amusement on Hunua bike adventures.