Annapurna Base Camp

Namaste all!

Since my last post I have been hanging out at HACERA farm for a bit before heading out to trek around Nepal. Nepal is famous for the trails it has through mountains and forests. Not only do they go through the highest mountains in the world and some of the most diverse forests, there are also special trails called “teahouse treks”. Teahouse treks are trails which have small collections of hotels strung along the otherwise fairly untouched path. So, you can take only a light backpack and walk for literally weeks in the mountains, staying in lodges the entire way. No need to carry heavy tents or food!

I first decided to walk around the Langtang range but that didn’t really work out. There was lots of rain, and part of the trail was collapsed. Lots of rain also means no views of the mountains! I turned around and made my way to the Annapurna Range, which is a more popular tourist destination. It’s a little more developed and the weather was a little better. I met up with a Korean guy by accident and we decided to go together into the center of the national park. We decided to walk right up to the feet of the biggest mountain, into what is called “The Sanctuary”. It is so named because it is a basin surrounded by peaks, with only one entrance.

In total I took ten days inside the park, usually walking about 6 hours a day with my backpack. Without further delay, here are some photos :-).


Me looking ridiculous in front of a suspension bridge. There are many of these, and often ice cold glacial water is raging underneath. On a warm day it's not bad but when the weather is cold and cloudy you can imagine falling through the rickety boards and not making it out...


Sheep! Although this is a national park, there are quite a few people living inside making a living.


A picturesque little Nepali town in the morning. Most of the town's money probably comes from the tourist industry. In the morning it was amazing to see the sun come up over the mountains, then ten minutes later the entire place flooded with fog as the dew evaporates.


View of Annapurna South at night, with a full moon. I stayed two days at Annapurna Base camp; the foot of the tenth tallest mountain in the world, 8091m. The base came is about halfway up at 4031m.


After my hike I went back to HACERA neighborhood, did a quick course about Permaculture then headed up to Namo Buddha Resort, just a little broken hearted. I'm hanging out at NBR these days, ostensibly as the farm manager, or so I'm told. Sometimes I feel like the general in War and Peace who knows the best thing he can do is show approval when his lieutenants suggest something. But it's a great chance here to practice the cycle of permaculture redesign. So I'll be staying here at least 4 or 5 months, with a break to travel around with my Dad during the Christmas season. It should be interesting!

Hanging out with the Himalayan Magpies and wondering about the names of the common weeds of Nepal,
This has been a note from Yours Truly,
James

Bullshit, Cow Shit and Building Houses

Indian people in rural areas just love shit :-). It’s used in ceremonies, fermented to make biogas for cooking, put it in the garden. It’s dried out and used in the fireplace for cooking and to make the fireplace itself. They plaster their walls with it, and cover the floor with it too, both inside and outside. It’s even mixed with urine and used in some medicines! Yep, people love shit. A few Indians I met were pleased to proclaim that Indian cows make the best shit and urine in the world.

When Vandana Shiva was given the Bullshit Award she was happy to receive it. Actually it’s a great, funny example of the difference between the organic mindset and the mindset of the World Bank guy who gave it to her. He didn’t mean it in a nice way, but unknowingly she took it as a complement! It depends on how much you value shit from cows and bulls :-).

People only do these things with animal dung of course. I’ll be polite and not talk about the human waste disposal issues. Cow dung, as far as I can tell isn’t used for anything irreplaceable but it sure is an omnipresent material in rural India. It turns out it’s the same in rural Nepal.

Today we spent part of our day flinging shit at the walls and smearing it around :-). We plastered the outside of a building with a mix of cow dung, rice husks and silt/clay. This is the normal plastering material for houses in rural Nepal, as in India. In India the material is being replaced by cement and some sort of low quality paint that has to be frequently re-applied. The cow dung looks much better, and the well maintained houses in this area of Nepal look quite smart with their smooth beige walls and thick strip of red paint around the bottom.

The inside of the walls in this area are often made of mud and stone, two age-old and time tested materials for building houses out of. In my travels I’ve seen a mixture of composition ranging from almost entirely stacked stone in Almora to pure mud in Bengal.




Rural Canadians are not such lovers of cow dung and I haven’t ever seen it used in this way there. I have seen a couple of people using a mud and chopped straw mix though. People call this cob, and if made and used correctly it can be quite a useful building material.

I think my favorite houses are made entirely of bamboo, thatch and coconut husk. It is possible to make the entire house (in a warm climate) out of these two materials! This is done in parts of Laos. The walls are woven bamboo strips, the floor split bamboo, and the roof is thatch although I suppose it could be bamboo shingles. Bamboo can be used to make the gutters, and used as piping and electrical conduit also. Rope made from coconut husk is used to bind it all together. This rope is soaked in water then tied. It shrinks when dry, making a solid joint. These houses are so simple they can be made by children, as shown in the photo below :-).



Good Night and Good Luck my friends!

Welcome to Nepal!

Hello all! Unlike most of my other blog posts I haven’t been inspired to write this one about something specific. I just have some spare time :-). Internet access is good in Kathmandu and I’ve decided to spend a few days in the city just hanging out, meeting some people, trading books, getting a haircut etc. before going to the farm I’ve chosen.

I will be going to HASERA farm 40 km to the east of Kathmandu. It’s a permaculture farm run by someone who seems to really know what he’s doing. I went to the Nepal Permaculture Group office and he was there so I met him and we talked about the farm. Unlike a typical WWOOF situation where you trade labour for room and board at HASERA you pay for room and board and there is more focused learning which may or may not include the usual farm work. I like situations like this because I feel more free, even though they are quite a bit more expensive than WWOOFing. HASERA is charging 450 Rs per day which is about $6.50.

Two days ago I learned about something which may disrupt my pleasant farm stays and romps through the Nepali Himalayas. A Latvian woman is being held incommunicado and without due process as a prisoner in a Nepali jail. She has been held there about 5 months after what seems to essentially have been what Amnesty International would call an “enforced disappearance”. Nepal is known to have a problem with enforced disappearances, as reported in the AI 2008 Annual Report. We only learned about her existence through informal channels. She was apparently arrested for being in a national park without a permit. Because she doesn’t speak English she cannot speak to her jailers and it seems they have decided to simply keep her in jail because of it. Obviously I want to learn more about what’s going on and see what I can do, including contacting Amnesty International. The Russian Embassy has known about her for two weeks or so, and has not freed her. There is no Latvian embassy in Nepal so this is another problem for her. Her family has sent the Russian Embassy money to buy her a ticket home and help with getting her out, but the Embassy apparently has just kept the money. Yesterday I was supposed to have had a meeting with a Russian/English speaking tourist who has spoken to her but it didn’t happen. I hope I don’t have to stay in Kathmandu any longer than I already have because I am getting anxious to go to a farm after almost 20 days in cities and travelling. But I can’t just leave her to the mercy of the nation states who would apparently just as soon let her rot in jail than go home. If I don’t hear from the person who has spoken to her by tomorrow I will go to the farm and be in touch as much as possible from there. When I remember what the Canadian state does, torturing people in specially built torture prisons in Syria apparently for kicks or electrocuting Polish people at the airport because they don’t speak English I am concerned about this person who has wandered into the grip of an irrational, powerful, brutal and uncaring organization.

On the bright side Kathmandu is much nicer than Delhi. The streets are more thoroughly paved which cuts down the choking, eye itching dust. There is a level less honking although it’s still annoying. The streets tend to be smaller and more pedestrian friendly, at least in the Thamel neighborhood where I’m staying. The food is less greasy and less spicy (spicy food makes me sick, I've discovered). Accommodation is a bit cheaper. It’s just generally smaller, quieter and more functional. Although taxi transportation is a lot more expensive you can generally walk where you want to go. This is the relatively nice area.

When I’m in some of the bad areas of the city I begin to compose poems in my head about the bad things and the insanity of city life, the rotting rats on the street, the masks people wear to escape the pollution and the con artists who will take advantage of your vulnerable and confused state to steal whatever they can.

Like most asian cities I’ve been to, locals in the tourist areas love to play Harass The Tourist. The goal of the game is twofold: make tourists dislike being in the tourist area, and get money from the tourists. Players are stationed every 10 to 5 meters and their goal is to thoroughly badger any foreigner to buy a tibetan violin type instrument, umbrellas, hash, hire a rickshaw or any number of other things which they probably have no interest in. I’ve realized that communication with such players or “touts” is not on a conscious level. If you look at them in the face and say “I’m not interested in buying what you’re selling” then this will actually encourage them, even though they understand English perfectly well. Paying attention to them at all is taken as a signal to become more persistent. This is really unfortunate because it shuts down rational language-based communication. I can dream up a number of humorous counter-games to play with the touts because their behavior is so predictable but I try not to be a jerk like that :-).

If you score well in the Harass The Tourist Game then you can play the Rip Off The Foreigner Game. Fewer players get to this level but it is also a popular national past-time. Rickshaws take you to (closer) places you didn’t pay them to take you to, and people are constantly trying to charge inflated prices or lying about various things, coming up with various schemes. The goal is to try to get as much money as possible for as little effort, of course. I come across this sort of thing at least twice a day. No wonder I don’t like cities. I think these negative social behaviors which appear in the city are symptoms of something really wrong with this way of organizing a society. Of course people who follow Buddhism don't do these things and I've met some great people in Kathmandu. Approximately 11% of the population identifies as Buddhist.

Note: When I speak about “India” or any other country name in the following writing, I mean the government of the state, which I don’t assume even represents the interest of the majority of citizens.

Through the Couch Surfing network I’ve been able to meet some interesting people, including some Nepalis who know a bit about the political situation here and a French person working on political documentaries about the country. The recent political situation in the country is very unstable. It seems that India wants to control Nepal so they have killed the royal family in an attempt to set up a puppet government, (in concert with the US; India and the US seem to work together). It is in India’s interest to keep Nepal politically unstable with a crippled economy and therefore a dependent trade partner. China and Russia are concerned about the threat of a strong US (Indian) presence right next to them so they have started meddling in Nepali politics as well.

India is a controlling power in Bhutan as well. I had an image of Bhutan as rather picturesque, with a benevolent King interested in “Gross National Happiness” rather than GNP. But I’m told that Bhutan’s Finance and Defense departments are almost completely controlled by India. The Royal Family has a deal where they can have their family, wealth and image of control as long as India can control these two key departments. In the early 1990s many people were ejected from Bhutan because they did not support the King; India was a major force behind this ejection because India to a large extent controls the King.

Someone I met yesterday shed some light on the Tibetan situation. He said that the main reason China invaded Tibet was to prevent it from being controlled by the US. So the idea of a Free Tibet, is more complicated than simply ejecting the Chinese. Any sovereign Tibet would have to defend itself constantly from incursions both by the two giants US and China.

On the relatively bright side if people in Tibet can manage to escape into Nepal - although many of them get injured very badly crossing the mountains - then they are generally given sanctuary here. Also they can freely enter India, going to Dharamsala or a different place. Recently the Chinese has put pressure on Nepal to send Tibetan people back for imprisonment/torture etc. but the Nepali people have protested and so far have sent nobody back.

I’m getting to try some Tibetan food which has been interesting. Momos are like a thin walled perogie. Thukpa (pronounced more like tukpa) is a noodle soup with lots of garlic, and Thenthuka (pronounced more like tentukpa) is another kind of soup with flat, square noodles, sliced potato, greens, onions and grated carrots. Momos are generally steamed and often not very spicy.

The number one thing to do in Kathmandu as far as I’m concern is to go to the Garden of Dreams. It’s a fairly small walled-in garden which you have to pay to enter and it is beautiful. There are so many little beautifully designed areas, with waterfalls, stepping stones leading through ponds, huge trees, and beautiful flowers. It reminds me of the scene in Lost in Translation when Scarlett Johansson walks through a beautiful park in Tokyo. The whole garden is has Wi-Fi access.

Deported!

So I got kicked out of India. And so did my German friend Jens. For him his visa was up and extension refused. For me it was a bureaucratic error.

To make a long story short, people with visas over 6 months are supposed to register with the government within 14 days of entering India. Registration is supposed to be done with a major office specializing in registration, or with local police in the area you're staying in. The police in Chhatarpur, M.P. are incompetent and didn't know how to register me. They refused to do so when I asked them to, actually. The Indian government has decided I am responsible for their incompetence and is deporting me for not registering. I did everything I was asked to do and could do but apparently that's not enough. It took them 9 days and 4 office visits in Delhi to decide this.

I'm sad that I won't be able to visit my friends in India as planned. But, as Vinod Bhave said, It is good to flow like water and not get stuck in one place.

Last night I took a 15 hour train to Gorakhpur and will take the bus to the Nepal border tomorrow. I hope to become involved with WWOOF Nepal and do some trekking to experience some of the "wisdom of the mountains" (as John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, would say). I will likely have to take some down time in Kathmandu which is fine. It will take me time to decide which trek to go on or to obtain a WWOOF host. Maybe I can try my hand at couchsurfing.

It's a big decision for me in the next few months which direction to go in after Nepal; to New Zealand and Australia for a taste of home and some serious farm studying from people who know their stuff or to Isreal/Palestine area to get involved in a different kind of non-violent activism?

Any suggestions dear readers?

Stolen!

The lock on my door
Faith in the people around me
My peace of mind
Broken, Stolen

How does honesty bless one mind and not another?
Why, fair honesty, do you leave a brother
Abandoned in the darkness
Of the soul.

When I came back from the University my lock was broken open and people had gone through my things. They stole only money. The lock was broken open with a rock, delicate little thing that it was. At least they didn't take my passport or bank card.

My first reaction was just to leave early. I just didn't want to be here any more. I can my things right quickly enough and be gone on the bus in the morning.

But I stayed to finish my work. Today is my last day, and I'll take the bus tomorrow morning down to Dehradun, stay there for a night and head off to horrible, big, dishonest, polluted Delhi. As you can tell I'm not looking forward to it. I hope I can stay in the Buddhist quarter but the two hotels I would stay at I can't phone properly because the phones don't work well enough.

I long for the apparent honestly of the Malay people, or the Thai. And their competence in organizing systems too, like phone, bus, etc. And their general cleanliness. But I'll stay here for three more months, perhaps my next destination will refresh me.

I am going next to Kota to visit my friend Ram which I hope will be very nice.

Fruit and Thieves

These have been the dominant themes of my life, as of late.

I found some great books at D.B. Pantnagar University. I confess I had kind of low hopes because I have come across some pretty shitty writing in this country from people who supposedly have higher degrees. But I found a book that has extensive details about apple trees and apple growing (pomology) in general. Oddly enough the ideological influence is heavy from the World Bank and cronies. Obviously the book is a relic of their push to have apple production in this area.

The book has lots of great information about orcharding. One of the more remarkable things was the descriptions on how to perform surgery on a tree to repair damage to the bark.

But it is also quite humorous in some ways. On the section on what to do with your orchard after it gets old, and they recommend using trees that last about 30 years, they basically throw up their hands. The text admits quite readily that using the chemical methods recommended the soil will be destroyed and will likely have microorganisms in it that prevent the re-planting of any apple trees. They give the suggestion of importing new soil (!) or fumigating the soil by injecting an extremely toxic chemical not available in India (chloropictin) or methyl bromide, (which is available but not as effective) covering the soil with a big tarp and leaving it. This destroys most microorganisms in the soil, including those that prevent new apple trees from establishing. Of course it does nothing for the pH, compaction, arsenic/mercury content, or organic content. So much for sustainability. They just don’t seem to acknowledge the idea that in in all likelyhood the Himalaya will still be here in 30 years, and people will still need to make a living. It’s a very short term book, just like capitalism and the entire ideology surrounding the World Bank.

When I got back to the orchard yesterday there were people stealing the fruit! The guy who owns the orchard, and I dare say has first dibs on the fruit, asked me to pick the fruit on Friday. Here we were Thursday, the people keeping a lookout had left in the morning and in the afternoon there were already people stealing all the fruit! The frustrating part was when I asked them to leave and got a Hindi speaking person on the phone, so the message was obviously clear, they still wouldn’t go. They just kept on picking. It was a real showdown to get them to clear off, and they took the fruit (asian pears mostly) with them. Then more came a few minutes later! The things people say are absurd. This new group had a person who spoke a bit of English. So he came up to me and insisted “We are not thieves, he is a teacher” pointing to the guy taking the fruit. What’s that supposed to mean, they’re not professional thieves? If you’re stealing fruit then that means you’re a thief, as I understand it. By the end of the day there was no more fruit and there was nothing I could do about it. Friday morning I hunted the grounds and harvested a grand total of 36 small apples. They are just tapping into the peaches now as they become ripe, we’ll see... I was hoping to be alone here for 3 weeks but it seems that’s not on.

In fact what really is sad is that they were stealing the grass as well. The area is overgrazed and infertile because it does not have a chance to get back on it’s feet by growing some plants and having them decompose. The idea that people will steal the very grass at your feet, meant for the worms, is so tragic to me. I’ve noticed people’s persistence is remarkable too. They just don’t seem to throw in the towel when they’re busted.

Previously my experiences with people stealing stuff in India have primarily been children. My harmonica, flashlight, camera, cellphone. But this time it was the whole family coming out for a gathering!

The economics section of the apples book shows predictable labour costs. 30% goes to hiring a guard to prevent people from stealing the apples. I think I’ve already mentioned that people need to hire guards to watch their wheat and irrigation pipes. There are people constantly guarding the mango orchards as well of course. This whole situation is pretty expensive for farmers to have to deal with.

Some kids, skipping school came and wanted some drinking water, which I was ok with giving them but they didn’t want to drink my boiled, warm, water. So I made them some mint tea instead. Then they started asking me to give them food. What? I should clarify that to all outward appearances these were not poor children, sporting as much clean clothes, leather shoes, jewelry and cellphones as the next person.

Some other kids came and stood outside my window demanding some potatoes. Obviously I didn’t have any. I told them to go to the market. In the city I get treated like a walking cashbox, and in the country it seems people treat you like a free marketplace. I suppose that’s better. Mind you, people ask me for money here too.

So now they’re after me potatoes, me water, me grass and me peaches :-). I don’t know if I can hold out much hope for my carrots, radishes, peas, corn and biomass crops that I’ve planted. I just hope I can keep an eye on my passport, and wallet. No wonder all the windows in India have bars on them.

For laughs, here’s the photo of the mother of the child who stole my camera. She swore she didn’t know anything about a camera... This person continues to show up every once in a while and ask for a job at the soap factory, which she was fired from for stealing.

Propane!

I have recently discovered that one needs to be an Indian Citizen to obtain a cylinder of propane gas for domestic use.

That is absurd. The only way for me to treat water in my house is to boil it. So I either have to lean heavily on the surrounding ecosystem to collect firewood, or use the only other fuel available; propane. The ecosystem is suffering enough from other human activities and firewood is very scarce. The only sensible thing to do is to act as those near national parks are legislated to do; don’t use firewood, but use a different fuel. No kerosene is available nor is any other fuel besides propane.

I understand there are lots of things that only Indian Citizens have the right to do. Many of these are sensible measures the purpose of which is to prevent re-colonization. I applaud these measures. For example, foreigners are not allowed to purchase land in Uttarkhand.

However, telling me that I cannot purchase propane and so must spend hours more every day heating drinking water and cooking food is a humiliation. Not only is it tremendously rude to treat guests of your country in this way, it is completely undignified that I should be forced to degrade the ecosystem in an unnecessary fashion just to drink clean water.

I hereby publicly declare that I have engaged in an act of civil disobedience; I have obtained on the black market a 14 kg tank of propane for the sum of Rs 2800. I am using it to cook rice, chappati, oatmeal and to boil water for drinking.