I am up in Katunje in the
Himalaya Mountains of Nepal. It is a tiny mountain village that I have written
about previously.
Many times.
The noise of little children
arriving at the school downstairs awakened me early. There was a lot of giggles
and laughing. It was 5.30am and the sun had yet to rise. I rubbed sleep from my
eyes and stretched as I stood and I reached around for the light string and pulled it and I found my
pile of clothes. We didn’t have any lights here two years ago - or hot water - and
now the school and Visitor Centre is fully energized and green.
It is Carbon Negative.
We use the wind and the sun.
My visit to Katunje is a
short one and the primary purpose is to service the solar panels and the hot
water service and to install a solar fridge. The photovoltaic cells have copped
a battering during the monsoon season. Photovoltaic is just a fancy name for solar.
The solar fridge wasn’t much of an installation actually - we just took it off
the truck, hauled it up the steep and narrow track to the school and I plugged
it into the battery unit. Nursing it three hundred kilometers and hauling it to
the Visitors Centre was the hardest bit.
It is humming already and my bottles
of water are chilling.
So am I - humming and
chilling.
It is very nice to be back in
the Himalaya.
My friend Babu drove me to
Katunje from Kathmandu and he will drive me back again. He is a Driver by
profession and he has driven me around before. I trust his knowledge of the
winding and sometimes precarious track that is the last and most difficult leg
from Dhading up into the village and I enjoy his company. One of Babu’s
daughters lives in Katunje so he likes driving up there with me.
Katunje. Say it Kar-tuon-jay.
There are only two types of
tracks up high mountain passes – those that zig and zag and are cut into the
faces of steep inclines – or the winding type that wrap their way up in long
spiraling circles.
They are both slow and dizzying
journeys.
Babu has six children and thirteen
grandchildren and he has been a Driver for more than fifty years. He is a gentle
and kind man of the Ghurka people. Babu is very softly spoken and he has a
sun-hardened face with chocolate brown eyes that are shrouded in wrinkles - but
they also twinkle and shine in mischief. His whole face is wrinkling and
twinkling and he has an excellent name. I like both writing it and saying it.
Babu.
Say it Barboo.
It is one of those names that
would resonate very well if you yelled into an echoing valley.
Baaaaaarbbooooooooo.
Babu has lots of stories and on
our long drives I cajole them out of him and I tell him a few of my own. We
converse easily and with great humour and respect and insight.
I always sit up the front in
the car with Babu. He has told me on several occasions that most people prefer
to sit in the back and I told him that I am no back seat passenger. I told him
that I sometimes get a bit car sick winding up the mountains – which is true - however
I sit up the front mainly so I can chat to him more easily and without him having
to turn around to look at me and us ending up driving off a cliff and plunging to
our deaths.
I wouldn’t want that.
Nor would my mum.
On a previous road trip to
Katunje – a journey that can take more than ten hours from Kathmandu if the
roads are bad – and they often are – I asked Babu who was the most famous
person he had ever driven. With some protracted probing he humbly mentioned
that he had driven some foreign dignitaries in his time and he named some Bollywood
actors that I had never heard of. He also told me that he used to
regularly drive one of the Nepali Princes. Not the one that shot most of his
family to death at a birthday lunch twelve years ago - but one who was fatally
shot by him.
They were cousins.
Then Babu quietly slipped in
the fact that he had once driven a British musician named John Lennon and his
Japanese girlfriend around for a week a long time ago.
After recovering a little
from the shock I asked Babu whether I had heard him correctly and he replied
that he could not tell what I had heard for my ears were my own. I thought that
was very wise. Babu often says wise and insightful shit like that.
Then he repeated that
he had once driven a British musician named John Lennon and his Japanese
girlfriend around for a week a long time ago. I asked him if he was serious and
he told me that he was.
We were in standstill traffic
in downtown Kathmandu at the time and he leaned into the glove box of the car and
he rummaged through it. It was full to the brim. He eventually pulled out a stained
and yellowing envelope inside of which was a tattered black and white photograph.
It was of him with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. The photo was taken in front of his
car and the backdrop was the vista of the Himalaya – seen from the Nagarkot
lookout. John and Yoko had their arms
around Babu in a genuine and affectionate sort of a way and all three were
smiling in the shot.
When the noise of the
children awakened me this morning I got straight up. I was swaddled and tangled
in yak blankets and I had slept like the dead. I always do in the mountains. I pulled
on some jeans and a tee shirt and I slipped my thongs on my feet then I eased
my way carefully down the steep external stairs.
I could smell the masala tea
before my feet touched the ground and it’s alluring odour pulled me towards the
little kitchen. Teacher was there boiling a huge pot of water for noodles and
some creamy masala tea was steeping in a big clay pot.
Teacher squealed when she saw
me and we hugged. I may have had a little squeal myself. Teacher is tiny and
gentle and lovely and it has been many months since I last saw her and the
children of Katunje.
Before too long the kitchen
was crowded with more than a dozen excited mountain children and there were
many Namaste’s and much hugging and laughing. We moved outside before too long
and I sat down on the little stone perimeter wall that snakes it’s way around
the tiny grounds of the school and Teacher bought me out a steaming cup of
masala tea. She barked her way through the crowd of children that surrounded me
with stern commands in Nepali.
I chatted with the children
and Teacher and Babu as the sun came up over the mountains and for a while it’s
rays washed everything in a dazzling orange. The sight momentarily spellbound
me – as it always does – while the children chatted on as if it was nothing. For
a moment it was like one of those movie dream sequences when all the chatter
becomes background noise and I was washed in the visual splendor of the then and now.
Background music of the Vienna Boy’s choir singing “Hallelujah” would have been
a quite appropriate soundtrack. I looked
at the crowd of laughing children and teacher and Babu and I realized that this
was everyday for them.
Fancy that.
Babu told me that a Sherpa
named Tenzing Dorjee took the photograph of him with John Lennon and Yoko with
Yoko Ono’s camera and she sent it to him care of the Kathmandu Guest House.
Babu told me that he didn’t receive it until early in 1981 and on the back of
the photo was faint black writing that said “To
Babu with love and Thanks – Yoko & John - March 1981”. An obsessed and
criminally insane man named Mark Chapman shot Lennon outside of the Dakota
apartment complex in New York on the 8th December 1980 - so Yoko Ono
must have sent it to him after John had been killed.
Despite her own grief and
loss she was very considerate to Babu and I thought that was very kind of her.
Bless you Yoko.
I was surfing on a break
called Winkipop at a beach named Bells in Australia when news of the assassination of
John Lennon broke. I remember being told about it by one of my mates when I
came out of the water. I couldn’t believe it.
I was shocked.
It was one of those “Where
were you when?” moments in history. I remember where I was and what I was doing. It is a memory captured and imprinted.
It is indelible.
It is indelible.
A ‘break’ in the surfing
context in which I have used it is a spot where deep water hits shallow water
or a reef and a wave is formed. A Melbourne Plumber and surfer called Bill
Keenan gave the Winkipop break its name in the 1940’s.
He made the word up.
I have stood in exactly the
same place where the photograph of Babu and John and Yoko was taken. Three
times I have watched the sunrise from that vantage point - as the massive
southern part of the Himalaya range comes into view at the break of dawn. On a
clear day you can see for hundred of kilometers down the Himalaya range that stretch from Dhaulagiri in the west all the way to Everest - and then beyond to
Kanchenjuna in the East.
It is a view of the highest place on the earth.
It is stunning.
Babu told me that John Lennon
and Yoko had spent much of their time in Nepal in a village called Sankhu – which is to
the north of Kathmandu. He told me that he drove them to specifically visit a tiny statue in a Hindu temple that is on a hillside
just out of the Sankhu. Babu told me that the statue is of the Tantric goddess
named Bajra Yogini. When I asked Babu if there was anything significant about
the statue or goddess he informed me that Bajra Yogini is a sex goddess who is
worshipped by both Hindus and Buddhists - and that she has no eyes.
He said that there was a
festival once a year where priests put in a pair of silver eyes in the statue –
and he took John and Yoko specifically to see that.
John Lennon wrote and
recorded a song he called ‘Nobody Told Me’ that included the line ‘a little yellow idol to the north of
Kathmandu’. The song was written and recorded in 1980.
It is believed that Lennon probably got his
reference for the ‘little yellow idol’
from poem ‘The Green Eye of the Yellow
God’ which was written by the English Poet J Milton Hayes.
Lennon liked poetry and it is
widely known that he was widely read. Or is it that he was widely read and it is
widely known?
Both stand true.
Both stand true.
The ‘J’ in J Milton Hayes stands
for John - but he is always referred to as J Milton Hayes.
I am sure that his mum called
him John though – and perhaps even Johhny.
John Milton Hayes penned the
line ‘There’s a one-eyed yellow idol to
the north of Kathmandu’ in his poem ‘The
Green Eye of the Yellow God’ – and for reasons only John Lennon knows he
replaced Milton’s words ‘one-eyed’
with ‘little’. Actually perhaps Yoko
also knows and she should at least be asked the question.
‘The Green Eye of the Yellow God’ is one of Milton’s more famous works that was written one and a half
centuries before Lennon penned his lyrics.
It is believed that both John’s
are describing the same thing - the sex goddess Bajra Yogini.
I spent the morning pottering
around the Visitor Centre and school doing some maintenance on the building and
the solar systems. After lunch of a very fiery soup accompanied by coconut
water drunk straight from the cracked nut I sat in one of the two classrooms
and did some teaching. Actually it would be unflattering to teachers to call it
teaching really as all I did was sit around and talk to the dozens of kids who
were squeezed into the room. I showed them lots of pictures and we talked about
a whole heap of things but mostly it was discussions about oceans. The mountain
village children love to talk about oceans.
Me too.
Few Nepali have ever or will
ever see the sea. It is a landlocked and mountainous country that is drenched
in poverty and drained of opportunity. The Maoist party grabbed political power
here more than three decades ago in a violent and bloody conflict that cost
tens of thousands of Nepali lives. Ten years ago the mad Prince of Nepal took
an automatic gun to a family lunch and he decimated the Monarchy.
The recent history of the
country has been bloody but there hasn’t been any violence of any significance for
more than a decade.
The Nepalese have decided to
give Peace a chance.
All Nepali children dream of
the ocean and they have a great interest too in ships and waves and all things
nautical. The village girls love mermaids and the boys seem to like pirates.
I quite like pirates and mermaids
myself.
I know of this interest in
the ocean because I have talked at length to the children about it before. It
is their conversation of choice. On this visit I made a particular effort and gathered
together and brought with me many pictures of seascapes and photos of me and my
family swimming and surfing and snorkeling and out sailing on boats.
Visual images.
I tried to explain surfing and
scuba diving and snorkeling to the Nepali children and it was not easy. The
children told me that I was young and better looking when I was a boy than I am
now and I laughed and I said that I agreed. They asked me lots of questions and
some of them were hard - like what was the difference between a sea and an
ocean and what was the noise that a wave made when it crashed to shore?
They asked me if I had ever
seen whales and dolphins and sharks when I was swimming and surfing and I told
them that I had. I told them that swimming with the whales was a particularly magical
moment for me and I explained that these huge gentle creatures also sing
beautiful and haunting songs. A few of the little village girls told me that
they thought that this was beautiful and I told them that I thought it was
beautiful too.
I told them that you don’t
get to hear whale song very often and it is one hell of a tune.
The children left to walk
back to their family’s farms late in the afternoon and here I am now sitting in
a sagging and battered armchair on the creaky verandah at the Village Centre.
I am writing this.
The sun will be going down
soon.
Babu is downstairs cooking
some noodles that we will eat for our dinner with some cauliflower and pickled
mango that one of the local farmers bought us.
We are driving back to the
city tomorrow and will be making an early start. Then I have only a couple of
days left in Kathmandu before I have to say bye bye to Babu and then fly back
to Singapore and reality.
I don’t want to leave.
MY GOD DEAR PETER YOU SO INTERESTING PERSON I'M VERY PROUD OF YOU. YOU LOVE NEPAL AND NEPALIES SO MUCH . WE ALL NEPALI RESPECT SO MUCH FOR YOUR KIND.
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