words from the world

Namaste
"Welcome to Nepal" hurls the wide-smiled Nepali officer giving the passport back to me. He's just appended the precious key which opens me the door of this heavenly country for outdoor activities. I plan to stretch my legs onto some paths of the Himalayan foothills. The country has the distinctive feature to harbour a part of the Himalaya range in the north (the highest mountains range in the world with 8 of the 14 above-8000-meter summits whose legendary Everest climbed in 1953 for the first time by Sir Edmund Hillary and the sherpa Tenzing Norgay) and jungle scenery in the south.
Getting out the airport, the tourism office arranges me transportation and hotel for 10$.
In the beginning of this month of September, the monsoon still pounds the country and the surroundings of the capital city are green. This capital and its Chinese neighbour are incomparable. Old tottering jalopies stroll onto the rough roads. Ill-fitting buildings and smiling Nepali people put up the Kathmandu scenery. I reside in the Thamel district that is tantamount to the Khao San Road in Bangkok. Every backpackers' facilities gather in this district : restaurants, guesthouses, travel agencies, deep "mountainous" connotation libraries, local craft and trekking outfit sellers. With all the tourist-inherent side issues. Marijuana dealers mix with begging children and touts. The pleasure to be Nepali for about fifteen days doesn't make forget the distress of a country which is counts among one of the poorest in the world.

I meet an Italian I embark on visiting the city with. We walk through the market and stop at the sacred and colourful Durbar square.








We walk for one hour to reach Patan, an outstanding assembly of Hindu temples. The access to the temple is forbidden to the non-Hindus and from outside, we observe the religious ceremonies. The temples are beautifully carved. I discover the traditions of this religion; I familiarize myself with its precepts and its rules. Hindus wear the tika, the forehead-painted third eye, the one that sees everything. We become soaked with this religious aura before heading back to our lively district.










East from the Thamel district, one of the most popular Buddhist temples in Kathmandou is called Swayambhunath, not easy to say it in a conversation without mispronouncing a syllable. Built on a hill, a scheming stupa occupies the central position of the religious area. In the area around, faithful people and tourists lean on to contemplate the unstructured houses of the capital.







On the other side of the city, the temple of the lord of the beasts Pashupatinah is dedicated to the Hindu religion. Below the temple, the sacred river Bagmati flows, and it's the scene of my first cultural shock. From the other bank, I'm a witness to the cremation rites. Pieces of timber are piled up to a stone slab, the orange-shrouded defunct's body lays out on this wooden bed. The tradition wants the son to walk three times around the body before putting a flaming torch inside the defunct's mouth. A last loop by way of farewell and the purification can start. Several stakes occupy the bank. A crying kid who will respect the rite until the end tears through the silent atmosphere. Emotionally too hard to bear, I prefer to move away. The Bagmati banks deal with the death with a different angle, without anything relative to our culture and I believe we need time before stomaching that kind of experience. Even if everybody knows as Marcel Pagnol said : "the life is a beautiful story that ends bad."








I clear away negative vibes from my spirit walking towards one of the biggest stupas in the world, the Bodhnath stupa. While a procession of followers paces clockwise around the stupa, a wind of positive energy cheers me up. The multicoloured Buddhist flags move about. After the painful scene of the cremations, I need to mix with this crowd and to find again a little bit of inside peace.