Under Machhapuchhre's Shadow

Pokhara is about as different from Kathmandu as you can get. It feels like a very modern city - women dressed in Western clothes and driving motorcycles, flower nurseries, hybrid cars, waste bins on the main streets ("use me!"), even a blood drive in front of a bakery. It's smaller, cleaner, cheaper, less noisy, and easier to navigate than the capital. However, lest you forget you are still in Nepal, this modernity is mixed with unpaved streets, fruit sellers on the sidewalks, electricity cuts, cows and buffaloes grazing in empty lots, pedal sewing machines set up in shop doorways, age-old traditional dress, and dozens of small Hindu temples.

Manoj, the father of the house, acts as the volunteer tour guide, showing us the sites in the form of early morning walks. On the morning of my third day, he took the other volunteer, Josh, and I to a Hindu temple across the city. We walked past a sign with a picture of a cobra on it that Manoj told us meant, "Don't piss here: home of a snake god." We crossed a deep river gorge on a swaying suspension bridge made slippery by the night's rain. We climbed stone steps past men and women selling flower offerings and reached the temple - a courtyard complex atop a hill, though we couldn't see far because the rain that had started again. There were small stone carvings and offerings placed against one large central tree, all covered in red and yellow tikka powder, a table outlined with small unlit lamps, a small temple building with a holy man crouched under his umbrella near the door, a golden cow statue, and a stone corridor below the hilltop for animal sacrifices. My favorite: to one side was a small little guillotine for coconut sacrifices.

Another morning Manoj led us to a large Tibetan Buddhist monastery atop a hill above the house. It was lightly raining as we climbed the steep hill, but inside the compound we forgot the rain. The main building was incredibly carved and painted in brilliant, breathless colors. The silk curtain over the doorway billowed in and out with the sounds of chanting coming from inside. In spite of our nervousess about causing a disturbance, Manoj convinced us to go inside the hall, where the monks, most very young, were sitting in rows and reading chants from traditional books of loose sheaves. Occasionally the monks in the center of the room would play enormous gongs and long low-toned horns that made the whole building with energy. To one side was a shelf of books, and in the center of the back wall was an enormous golden statue of the Buddha surrounded by neon lights flashing red, green, and yellow. The walls and ceiling were painted with scenes of nature and what I suppose were bodhisattvas in jewel-toned colors. Some of the monks stared at us in a very friendly way, and one gestured for us to sit. We perched on a pile of cushions in the corner, absorbing the sounds around us as they mingled with the early morning light.

Our longest morning outing began with a bus ride in the blue predawn light. We could see Machhapuchhre, the mountain called Fishtail that dominates the Pokhara skyline, rising palely, its snows almost purple. At the end of the bus route we climbed hundreds of stone steps up a green hillside until we could look down into the river valley below, where clouds came and went in white misty threads. We climbed up farther above the city, and we could see the shapes of distant mountains through the cloud, some edges touched with gold by the rising sun, and then the lake - Phewa Tal - and the lakeside strip of Pokhara beside it. At the top of the hill was the white dome of the World Peace Pagoda. Its sides hold four golden statues of the Buddha, four events in his life in four different places. The hilltop pagoda offers stunning , unobstructed views of the Annapurna Himal - or at least it would, if the world had not been blanketed in cloud. The clouds shifted fast in the early morning light and we caught glimpses of the snow peaks between the golden mist, but it wasn't until we were descending through thick forest towards the lake that the mountains really showed themselves. If only we had stayed on top a little longer! At the edge of the lake, sparkling in the bright sunshine, Manoj arranged for a man in a colorful canoe to paddle us languidly across the water to Lakeside, where a bus took us back home again.

During the day while the kids are at school, the other volunteers and I can do what we please. Lina, a young girl from Latvia, and I learned how to navigate the buses and together we explored the fringes of Pokhara. Our first destination was to the south: Devi's Falls, supposedly so named because someone named David or Mrs. Davis (depending on who you ask) once fell in and drowned. Upriver, you can see that the water has begun to carve a gorge, but here it cascades heavily under the earth into a cavern of black rock, sending up spray and glimpses of rainbows, and continues on invisible. I don't know where, if ever, it reappears on the surface. Next stop were two caves north of the city, Mahendra Gufa and Bat Cave (I never learned its Nepali name). Mahendra was nothing special: a narrow muddy stone hallway lit by electric bulbs. At the back was a stream sacred to Ganesh and a holy man selling tikka. Bat Cave was a little better because there were no electric lights and no pathway. We brought our own flashlights and climbed over the wet rocks looking for bats on the high ceiling; there was one small cluster of maybe 25 bats that hung motionless in the beams from our lights.

The International Mountain Museum is housed in an impressive building on large grounds, but the museum itself is not so good. The first gallery, on Nepali mountain peoples, had interesting photos and clothing displays, but little to no explanation. I enjoyed the comparative photos of Nepali mountain life and life in the Alps - children playing by a mountain stream, a man plowing with a wooden blade and an ox, women carrying tall baskets of cut stalks. There were hundreds of photos from different mountaineering expeditions, including an impressive display of the Hillary and Norgay ascent of Everest, but many of the other photos were badly faded or damaged. The yeti exhibit was atrociously funny with a model of the yeti that looked like a prop from a B-rated horror film.

On the last day at the orphanage, I bought the kids mangoes and the ingredients for pasta and banana lassis - we had a feast for tiffin before playing Bingo for chocolates. Then - "To the Magic Tree!" said the boys, and off we went on an evening walk. We stepped carefully along the thin walls between the flooded rice paddies to the east of the house, then up a steep hill and around a few houses to the tree - a branching giant sitting in the dip between two hills. The boys told me that if you put your right hand against the bark, bow your head and close your eyes, the gods are sure to hear your prayers. When we descended the other side of the hill, the tree, silhouetted against the setting sun, certainly looked magical. We climbed down into a green valley beginning to fall into the shadow of evening and waded through the water at the edge of the paddies until we reached a small temple on the edge of a swampy lake - the home of a cobra god. A black statue of a snake with red eyes rose out of the water. We raced past the temple and into one extended arm of the city, and as it was getting dark we hurried up the steep steps to another hilltop Hindu temple, where the boys ran in circles ringing the bells, and on to the gumba, the monastery. We reached home in the dark, a bit mud-splattered and bug-bitten but laughing at the speed of our evening tour.