Night

Keeping with my fascination with light in images (specifically moving light), and photographs of Nepal at night, here are some more shots. Take note, in the first shot, of the large burning pile of garbage that relates to my previous post regarding the trash collection bandh that has been plaguing the city for the last 3 days.

Nepal’s bandh culture

Bandhs, or strikes, are seemingly all the rage right now in Nepal, although from what I understand the bandh culture is nothing new here. Dislike something? Throw a bandh. Mad about something? Throw a bandh. Protesting something? Throw a bandh. Have an itch? Throw a bandh. Bad security? Bad wages? Bad hair day? Lack of landfill sites? Microbuses getting torched? Food prices too high? All of these things are acceptable reasons for strikes here in Nepal. So much so that bandhs are seemingly more common than mosquitoes after a nice summer rain. Take this past Friday for instance. Saturday’s newspaper reported 8 different bandhs across the country, two of them right here in Kathmandu. Earlier in the week, some upset students torched a microbus, so the Transportation Entrepreneur Union called a strike demanding better security for their drivers and increased vigilance dealing with acts of vandalism. The strike took place yesterday and continued into today leaving many people without ways to get around town. Now granted both of the demands being made are reasonable, important issues, that by all means need to be addressed. However, it would seem that there’s a logjam in the works somewhere as I doubt that this will solve the problem and instead has just caused 2 days of havoc for people trying to get around the city. The sidewalks at the local bus parks have been piled 6 deep with people waiting for the few vehicles that are actually still running. The one fortunate thing is that today is Saturday so most people are off from work anyway.

The next bandh that affected the city yesterday and today was a strike by the trash collectors due to a dispute over landfill space. Apparently all of the valley’s garbage is deposited in one place and people in that area are getting a bit upset about it (understandably). They’ve closed the area which has put a halt to trash collection in the valley leaving large stinking piles of garbage on the streets – not to mention leaving the government scrambling trying to find a new place for all the trash. Walking around yesterday I didn’t realize that a strike was on and just figured that they were a bit behind in pickup…wrong; how naïve of me. In addition to these two bandhs, there were 6 more around the country, bringing different aspects of daily life to a screeching halt. Now granted, a transportation bandh, or a garbage bandh are not quite as bad as the occasional city wide bandhs put on by the Maoists where literally everything gets shut down, but they’re still bad enough.

This brings me to the title of this post, “Nepal’s bandh culture”. Now I’m all for workers rights and unions and speaking out for what you believe in and all of that great stuff that usually keeps power in check and gives the little guys a voice. However, I have to call all of this into question here, because it seems to happen so often (for instance, according to the Himalayan newspaper, trash collection has been suspended on 53 separate occasions in the valley since 2005 causing there to be 207 days where trash could not be collected) that it has become ineffective. I’m not really sure what to suggest that would get things rolling, but I would like to suggest that the bandh is no longer the best approach.

**As a small amendment, I wrote this post and then went for a walk around the city to do some photographing. The trash situation is actually much worse than I had initially realized and if it continues into tomorrow and the next day I think some roads will start to be blocked by large heaps of trash.

Around Kathmandu

I spent numerous hours wandering around the small streets of Kathmandu’s markets several days ago and these are the best shots that came out of that experience.

Pashupatinath revisted

It would seem that I’ve been on bit of an impromptu hiatus this past week. I’ve only had my camera out a couple times since returning from Lamjung. However, I do have some new images to share with all of you, so here we go. Earlier this week I decided to make a second visit to Pashupatinath, the big Hindu temple on the eastern edge of Kathmandu. I had been told, and read as well, that the best time to visit Pashupati is early in the morning, between 7 and 10. Supposedly this is when most people visit to pray and it’s not uncommon to see the ascetic religious guys practicing yoga and chanting and whatnot. As it turns out, the day I chose wasn’t excessively busy nor were there any exceptional acts of religious piety taking place. I was a bit disappointed, but ended up with some decent shots anyway. I doubt I’ll visit Pashupati again due to the excessive entry fee (500 NRs per day). I’ve heard from numerous people that the money doesn’t even return to the area to keep it clean and well kept, but rather just disappears into someone’s deep pockets somewhere, which is frustrating. The other thing about Pashupati is that as a foreigner it’s a rather overwhelming place. The number of tour guides there seems to be more so than anywhere else I’ve been so far, and you have to be persistent with them to get them to go away. Also, there are a large number of homeless, beggars, and religious men looking for alms. There tend to be a larger congregation of these people around exceptionally religious places, and as I’ve discussed before when you’re whiter than white and taller than most you're an easy mark. At any rate, here are the photos, enjoy.

Portraits

I was going through my photos the other day, and I noticed that I’ve accumulated quite a few very nice informal portraits and wanted to share them with you all.

Travel

Unfortunately I don’t have any photographs to accompany this post, so my narrative description and your imaginations will have to suffice. I returned to Kathmandu on July 14th after spending a week in Chitwan and Lamjung attending various meetings and visiting friends with Ram. I discussed the trip between Kathmandu and Lamjung previously, I think in the Besishahar post, so you already have a fairly good idea what its like. However this trip back was truly absurd, and not in a good way. I’ll start by saying that nothing happened to the micro that I was in, so that’s good, but we got stuck in about 4 traffic jams due to what should have been proclaimed national “let’s not watch where we’re driving day”.

First off, its key to understand that getting to and from Kathmandu, no matter where you’re going involves traveling on one single solitary road. This one road leads in and out of the valley and extends to a town called Maugling, which is about 4 hours west of Kathmandu. From there, the road splits depending on where you’re going. That means that even if you want to travel somewhere east of Kathmandu, if you intend to travel by bus or micro, you have to first travel 4 hours west of the city, and then return in the other direction. Now, the next point is that this road, the one that goes in and out of the valley, as well as all of the other roads in the country are by no means a 2 lane highways. To most of us from the states it would probably resemble more of a one-way road with room for parallel parking on one side. The road lies along the contours of the land and dips in and out of valleys and around corners and is rarely straight.

Alright, now for a recount of the accidents:

1) Apparently a truck and bus decided to collide on a small bridge going around a hairpin turn completely blocking off the entire road in both directions. We were backed up in traffic for several miles and probably close to an hour before we were able to get through. Now of course, being backed up in traffic in Nepal is nothing like being backed up in traffic in the states. Forget about lanes and lines and patiently waiting your turn to go. Traffic was stacked three cars across (yes that’s right three cars across on a 1.5 lane highway – don’t ask me how this is possible) with every driver jockeying for position and taking any opportunity to speed around or ahead of other vehicles in line, passing on the left, passing on the right, anything goes. All of the bus passengers from the accident were stranded on the side of the road, some took to walking and others were just jumping in any car that came along with extra room.

2) We passed a truck that was pulled off to the side of the road with its entire front smashed in. Not sure what happened, but it didn’t look good.

3) After the first two accidents we came around a corner to see a crane that had been brought in and positioned on the side of the road to pull a bus out of a trench. The bus apparently ran off the road and was so far down that I couldn’t see any part of it.

4) Last one. Just when I thought we were in the clear and there weren’t going to be any more problems we passed another truck that was transporting huge trees into the Valley. From the way it looked, the truck tried to pass another vehicle and didn’t have enough clearance on the right side of the road. The right rear wheel had slipped off the road into the drainage trench that’s built into the road to control water runoff and the truck was tipped over on its side leaning against the closest mountain.

Like I said – truly, truly absurd.

This is Nepal

On my first visit to one of the villages in Lamjung about three weeks ago I was walking through the fields with Ram and we stopped at a spot that overlooked a lot of small village houses and rice fields; Ram turned to me and said simply “This is Nepal”. I knew what he was getting at, but it’s taken me another few weeks to really appreciate it. To him, and as I’m starting to understand, to a lot of other people as well, the real Nepal doesn’t lie in Kathmandu, Pokhara, or any of the popular tourist destinations; the real Nepal is to be found in the small villages where people work hard year round cultivating the land and living a generally subsistence lifestyle. In contrast, Kathmandu is a bustling metropolis of a city where traffic and pollution rule, and while the valley has seen a sharp and continuing influx of people since about 1990, the majority of people (about 80%) still live in the villages of Nepal working the land much as people have for countless generations. That said, the country is not the untouched traditional society that many might make it out to be; most village homes have electricity and television now, and the cell phone is just as prevalent here as it is in the states. The photos below are part of my ongoing attempt to capture a bit of the essence of village life.

Patan – Durbar Square

Two days ago I made a visit to Patan, an area to the south of center city Kathmandu across the Bagmati River. Numerous centuries ago (I’m not sure of the exact time period), Kathmandu consisted of three separate cities or Kingdoms: Kathmandu, Patan (also known as Lalitpur) and Bhaktapur. Each place has its own Durbar Square (Durbar means palace) where the royal palace for that area is situated. The main street of Durbar Square in Patan is home to many interesting temples and whatnot. Some of the best shots from the day are below. Patan is also known as the city of handicrafts and the streets are overrun with craft shops selling just about everything including thankas (buddhist deity paintings), metal works, pottery, masks, jewelry etc. My trip to Patan was also my first successful to and from journey using public transportation which can be tricky to figure out here so that was nice.