Nepal – Day 4: Boudhanath and Bhaktapur
This morning we finally had a more reasonable starting time than on previous days: we were supposed to wake up at a leisurely seven o’clock and leave at nine. I say “supposed to,” as I woke up before six; my body rightly distrusts our tour guide’s newfound lenience.
Charting an eastward
course, we drove for a good half an hour through dense traffic until reaching
Boudhanath, a massive Buddhist stupa in eastern Kathmandu. We spent an hour
there walking around and taking pictures, as well as entering temples and not
taking pictures. I was surprised to see the amount of work that has to be
expended to keep the stupa looking as beautiful as it does: for as long as we
were there, we saw men climbing the stupa and unfurling lines of prayer flags.
There was also a team of painters walking around the exterior walls and making
them even whiter than they already were.
An interesting story
about Boudhanath is that a monk once carved its shape into a turnip, which he
carried all the way to Bhutan. He then used this model to build a stupa in the
village of Chendebji; we visited it on our fourth day in Bhutan just after
driving eastward through Pele-la Pass.
As we did then, we
continued driving eastward from Boudhanath until we reached Bhaktapur. The city
is one of the three main cities in Kathmandu Valley alongside Lalitpur and
Kathmandu, as well as being an ancient capital. It is difficult to describe
Bhaktapur in words, and pictures do not do it justice. Indeed, they led me to
expect a relatively quiet historical town with a preserved and revered town
square and a modest number of sights.
That idea was entirely
wrong. The town squares of Bhaktapur are filled with both locals and tourists
(as well as local tourists), and many of them are constantly traversed by
motorcycles and other traffic. People hang around on the steps of pagodas,
touch old statues without giving it a second thought, and simply inhabit the
space that many photos portray as an open-air museum.
We began our tour on
Durbar Square, the most well-known part of Bhaktapur. It is the site of
numerous temples and statues, as well as a palace, and while we were there, we
witnessed an entire dancing procession dressed in red. Our tour guide said the
festivities were part of the preparations for Nepali New Year. When we
subsequently walked down to Taumadhi Square, we found another accoutrement of
the upcoming celebration: a massive Biska Jatra chariot, which is used to carry
the Lord Bhairava and is fought over by the upper and lower parts of town.
For much of our visit,
however, we walked through narrow alleyways soaking up the atmosphere of old
Bhaktapur. It is true that there is much less traffic on them than in
Kathmandu, but they look no less inhabited. Indeed, the scarcity of motorbikes and
cars allows old people to sit around watching passers-by, children to play with
ragged footballs, and souvenir-sellers to tag on to tour groups for much longer
than they do in Kathmandu. During this venture into the past, we stopped by a
local pub, where we saw men smoking and playing cards on the floor while
drinking chang (the local liquor) and brandy made from guavas.
One thing I should
mention for which Bhaktapur is famous are its woodworks. The windows are even
more ornate than those in Kathmandu, featuring elaborate geometric patterns and
figures of gods, humans, and animals carved in intricate detail. Perhaps the
most famous carving is the Peacock Window, which combines these two modes in a
harmonic interplay between geometry and nature. Leaving Bhaktapur in the
evening, we made our way out of Kathmandu Valley and checked in at a hotel in
the eastern town of Dhulikhel.
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