Bhaktapur
Trip Start
Apr 04, 2008
1
16
47
Trip End
Jul 28, 2008
Bhaktapur, Nepal
Friday, May 2, 2008
We have great trouble waking up this morning. It's inexplicable, as we've had over ten hours sleep already, but we can not rouse ourselves before eight. Leah in particular has it rough. I get up, drink some water, and can move. Though we resolve to leave the room early, we are not out until just before eleven.
We walk to Bhawal Barg and get two of the last seats on an express minibus to Bhaktapur.
Bhaktapur does not allow cars in the city; it is eight kilometers east of Kathmandu. The irony is that to reach it, you must drive along the highway linking Kathmandu to Lhasa. It is congested, even in mid-day, with lorries. We pass buses with passengers sitting on the luggage roof racks. On one bus I spy a family of goats, somehow standing upright on the roof as they bump along the road. Our driver blares and overtakes.
It costs ten dollars to enter the city and there are about a dozen apparently ruthless ticket booths on the perimeter ensuring that no one sneaks in. We resolve to evade them. Just before we reach the main gate, I lead Leah down a tiny side street. It's just a few feet across, and I can easily drag my outstretched hands along both walls. I am sure that if we follow it into the square we will not need to buy a ticket and I am right.
In a shop off the narrow alley we catch sight of a woman spinning an enormous treadle with her foot. It is seven or eight feet wide, and she is using it to collect what look like a hundred spools of red thread onto a thin wooden rack. A mechanical loom? Down the length of the room are other women at more traditional looms, sliding shuttles back and forth across the warp and chatting. They suffer us to take a few photos and Leah tries very hard, and I think fails, to explain that her mother too is a weaver.
The first square we enter is Taumadhi Tole. It contains the Nyatapola Temple, the highest in Nepal, with five roofs stacked above each other. The same square contains Cafe Nyatapola, which achieves the closest thing I can imagine to architectural humor. It is an old Newari Temple, just two-storeys, but the upper floor has been gutted and transformed into a restaurant with Germans, French and Spaniards (it is an expensive place and I only see Europeans) spilling over the tiny balcony. The effect is startling. You walk into the square and see enormous stone statues, ancient temples, fruit vendors, and there, in a corner, that ancient top-heavy tower, a riot of white tableclothes and camera straps.
Alongside Nyatapola Temple, local men are chatting, sitting on top of the huge wooden wheels and beams that are assembled once a year to form the three-story Bisket Jatra chariot.
Leah still very lethargic. She lays her head down on the table and falls asleep during lunch. (This irritates me instead of arousing my sympathy.)
