It was New Year's Eve and another day on the bike with my self appointed guide, Bim. I am quite sure that no formal arrangement for this was agreed upon. It didn't actually seem like a business arrangement.
Our first destination was the Post Office. I had been writing reams of letters and they had to be posted. The notes say "to P.O. wi Bim (communists)". They might not have been Communists they could have been Maoists.
I have a vague memory of an assembly at school when someone came to speak to us about inequality. I really can't remember properly but it could have been a man of the cloth. It doesn't matter. He had been to a country where the average wealth of the population was really quite impressive. That country was Nepal when King Birendra was on the throne and the problem was that he and his family had nearly all the wealth and the general population had practically nothing. It is a memory that stayed with me.
These pictures show political protesters gathering (it seems) at Pokhara's airport. On the other hand they might not have been protesters, they could have been supporters of someone who could have been about to arrive by air from Kathmandu.
"Come gather 'round people". Yes, the times they were "a-changin'."
Birendra was still on the throne at the time of my visit and there had not been very much improvement in the conditions for the general populace. There were rebellious stirrings. Perhaps the lady addressing this small assembly was the person who got off the plane, perhaps not. If it was, no-one seems to be paying attention. Looking closely she could have been some kind of effigy. We'll never know.
These may have been the beginnings on of what turned into an insurgency and (I have to admit here that I haven't kept up closely with what has gone on in Nepal since I left there) a civil war and I think it has ended with a complete change of governmental system. The insurgents became terrorists in due course and now are legitimate participants in the government of the country.
I can't be sure but I think the statue is of King Prithivi Narayan Shah, the first King of Nepal. It is the pose with one finger raised that makes me think so. 11 years later his descendant, King Birendra, came to a very sticky end in a massacre in the Royal Palace shot by his son Prince Dipendra in a bizarre wipe-out of most of the Royal family.
Regarding the pictures above, I hadn't really been sure there was an airport. The pictures are my memories and the word is half visible, written on a gatepost in one the pictures. I just checked the net and at present 4 airlines operate in and out of Pokhara - they all (bar one) sound great: Cosmic Airlines, Nepal Airlines (the only boring sounding one), Yeti Airlines and Buddha Air.
Before we left Pokhara I bought a lunghi which was bright red with the yellow hammer and sickle motif. I've still got it.
Next stop Devi Falls. You know, it is quite handy to still have the Lonely Planet Guide. I wish I knew where the Indian one is. The reason I say so is because the LP Guide says Devis falls are 2km south of the Airport. So that is definitely the Airport above.
If there is a time to Devi's Falls, the end of December is not it. I have read that the falls swell considerably after the monsoon but are little more than a trickle in January. December 31 couldn't be much closer to January and here is a trickle disappearing into a hole. However, that is the point of this place. The outflow of Phewa Tal called the Pardi Khola suddenly drops into a hole and disappears to emerge again 200 metres away and joins another tributary to the Seti Gandaki river. This wasn't really worth the trip except this it is a pretty good picture of the hole.
So after gazing into a hole in the ground we had a quick cup of tea before the ride back. In the pictures above you can see Bim posing where some months earlier there would have been a torrent flowing. He has taken his flip flops off which reminds me that he did the 40km ride yesterday in them.
The tea was lovely and the lady who made it was nice enough to agree to have her photograph taken. It's a shame I didn't do a better job. This could have been a tea stall in the Tibetan village settlement near Devi's Falls but then again it might not have been. The problem with having a guide who doesn't speak any English is that you cannot be quite sure where you are being taken.
So we cycled back. It was New Year's Eve. It didn't feel much like it but it was. It meant more to some of the visitors to the Lakeside. I had been away for nearly 4 months and somehow it didn't mean very much to me. It never did before and it never really has since. It is the mere effluxion of time. One set of 12 calendar months comes to a natural end and at midnight another begins. So what? I have to admit that for some unknown reason I am feeling a bit down as I write this so it might all sound a bit negative.
The last three and a half months of my journey had been populated by mostly cool travelers. Here, sadly, there were rather too many uncool visitors and some poor advertisements of the British variety. I recall there was one in particular. He was a lad from northern England and I'm sure he meant no harm but somehow whatever he had to say (and though he had a lot to say I can't remember what he may have said) seemed to grate with me. He might have been bumptious and embarrassing. I am digging deep into the recesses of memory now but it could have been that there were only two of us from Britain: me and him; and everything he said made me cringe and I felt embarrassed to be associated with him by reason of our both being from the UK.
The occupants of the Butterfly Lodge seemed intent on making some kind of big deal about the turn of the year. They got some wood from somewhere and made a fire. This was (to my mind) a stupidly crass thing to do. Firewood is scarce and I tend to remember that it was also expensive. Here were a bunch of decadent westerners burning it for fun.
I stuck it out for as long as I could. The "Norman Whitebread" character, who said what he liked and liked what he said, mentioned that the next day he was off into the mountains trekking with Bruno! Just the two of them in a tent! I thought about telling him. I then adopted the Dr Hunter S Thompson philosophy. I decided not to tell him, he'd find out himself soon enough. I still have terrible pangs of guilt that this lad might have been out there in a "Deliverance" style situation with the bouffant Bruno whispering sweet nothings into his ear. Argh!
I was on the move again myself the next day. I made my excuses and tried to banish the gruesome images of what Bruno had in mind for my fellow countryman before I went to sleep.
