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A week trekking up to the Annapurna Sanctuary and back… it’s the bobbins!
Waking up at Base Camp after a night of heavy snow… a clear and divine morning… at 4000m, surrounded on all sides by peaks.
Annapurna and her siblings, spin all the way around to Macchu Pichurre (Fish tail), each mountain towering 7000 or 8000m high
brain slightly doolally, oxygen deprived, realm of the sacred, theres a reason hermits head to the mountains for spiritual insight
Annapurna goddess of nourishment, the nectar of plenty flowing endlessly from her lap
bask in wonder and exhaustion, content with my insignificance, rumbling along, with the humble and the glorious
The day up to the Sanctuary was epic, a climb of 1000m, trekking alone i was blessed to be adopted by 3 Kathmandu lads in the lodge the night before… BK, Nikki and Muni… ‘We go together!’… they were all around Finn, my sons, age and in truth had never much been in the mountains before… they were like ‘Respect Uncle!’… seemingly bewildered that someone so ancient as i could be up there… their own parents at home, comfortably, sensibly, ensconced in front of the telly
Up we trudged, crawling past the avalanche zone, over fast flowing ice streams, reaching Macchu Pichurre Base Camp, then dog legging left… a bleak, empty wilderness… an hour from the camp the weather closed in, white out from fog, then the snow started.
Once we got to the lodge, relief, a huge plate of dhal bhat stodge, a hot lemon ginger honey and watching out the window as stragglers made it home… a huge snow storm into the night, mostly the rumble of thunder, interspersed with the occasional distant sound of an avalanche! crikey!

back track slightly… tho the peaks are jaw dropping, much of the pleasure of trekking is in its cheerful simplicity
wake up in the morning and follow the path, up, then down, then up and up…. i meandered higher and higher, easily the slowest on the mountain ‘no hurry, no worry’
when your tired stop for chai, or mid afternoon find a comfortable lodge to hunker down for the night… 2 quid for a bed. bargain
the lower stretches were pleasantly rural, water buffalo, terraced fields of crops, cabbages and wild hemp, rickety hay stacks, locals just grokking as the world passes their front door… shire-esque! have always felt that tolkein vibe since I came to Nepal first back in 1986
After this it was 3 days of Sal and Rhoddedendron forest, interspersed with Bamboo… occasionally a posse of porters would surge past, many with music blaring out… a bit of nepali hip hop? else the syruppy-ness of a romantic duet!… each porter carrying up to 60 Kg supported from a band around their forehead. respect. a tough life… else a bamboo cutter with his basket and poles would appear from nowhere…. grey langurs, eagles and even vultures!!!

Lodge life was fun and sociable, still low season, so but few folk on the mountain… grab a handful of spare blankets and wrap up in down jacket and wooly hat… always a friendly dawg and chatty lodge keeper… each night was like being marooned in a submarine, a motley selection of people, random and frequently hilarious gabble!
who knows what nonsense you’d be talking about
of the tourists there was a healthy smattering of europeans, americans, dutch, south africans etc… as they all travelled faster than me i saw them all again as i was trudging up and they coming back down… companions! long lost friends!
by far the largest contingent of trekkers were young Nepalis from Kathmandu, more affluent, middle class english speakers… a real generational change, lovely to see them out exploring their own country
oh and of course there were the groups! ha! with guides and porters, i particularly enjoyed a gang of 20 malay chinese, their porters were carrying hair dryers up into the mountains?!… they were great tho, we leapfrogged each other for a couple of days… every time i’d stagger up, they’d all jump to their feet and clap ‘Wichard! Wichard!’… a wonderful nourishing way to be greeted
……. goodness i’m waffling on this morning… a glut of words and pictures… won’t fare well with the social media algorithm!
…… hmm what else to say?
my stick! dropped off by the bus in jhinnu, the first adventure was to cross the longest, the highest, the creakiest suspension bridge! i’m terrified of heights so a baptism of fire… sunset… as i got to the other side there were 2 sticks propped against the wall… perfect! one of bamboo and a beautiful one of ooh mbe sturdy cherry?… i snatched the latter up and off i went… i love a good stick, won’t bore you with my camino tale now, the perfect companion, this one supported me all the up and all the way back down again… a week later i left it at the exact same spot… for the next traveller… a beautiful symmetry
did make me ponder about my choice… we are so conditioned by our heritage, our history… i never even for a second even considered the bamboo?! …. i was explaining this to one of the young malay women… in response she arched her beautiful eyebrows and in despair at my folly mournfully uttered ‘ Bambuuuuuuuuu’

on the way up the mountain i stopped at a sacred place in the woods, ‘a powerful god’, there was a shiva shrine, prayer flags, teeter totter stones and a more buddhist pagoda… ‘powerful god’ is about right, for whatever the quibble about the name of the divinity, it surely comes from an ancient animist site.
sitting by the pagoda, looking into the gorge, a waterfall gabbling down the far cliff
i closed my eyes and intoned three deep ‘aummmmms’… a curious audio quality, there was the sound of the waterfall, then a deeper rumble from the river gorge, but the sound of my om somewhow resonated with the sound scape… it was like being lifted up, the whirring and fluttering of great wings…. beyond that, beyond that…. stillness
i stopped there again on the way down… just to give thanks… speak a few simple, obvious, words into the roar of the waterfall… i cried
………..
may all beings be well, may all beings be happy, may all beings be free from suffering… om mane padme hum x

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Street of Typewriters. Street of Scribes. Mysore
Typewriters! The rhythmic cheerful metallic rat a tat tat audible even above all the street sounds…
mostly the persistent smog whirr and hurtle honk of circling rickshaws
there is something curiously satisfying about redundant technology … these mechanical contraptions of yore …
a collaboration of type set metal, set on sticks… then the reams of blueBlack ink and smudge carbon paper
these typists were down a side street near Mysore palace, towered over by Raj era, slightly pompous indo saracenic (sarcastic?!) buildings, likewise relics of a bygone epoch
Not the best photo, indeed, just a snap in passing… I half remember(?) exactly the same scene from when I first came here back in the 80s
I loved the way the customer, he with the scooter helmet, mobile phone at his side, was animatedly explaining what he wanted, whilst the typist alternated between earnest attention and that faraway stare, almost rapt, as he typed away
composition as collaboration
Fascinated, the next day I returned to chat with Ramesh… balding, gentle natured, a mild beige shirt, seemingly old, but in truth probably 10 years younger than I… He proudly told me he had been working here 25 years, his only ever job.
I blurted out the obvious ‘but but computers!!!’ he explained that 15% of Indian written communication was still done in this way! people preffered it… mostly the job was translating official-esque documents from Kannadian (language of Karnataka, with its beautiful curly wurly alphabet) into English… depositions, legalese pleas… and yet, and yet, I am sure he would sometimes turn his skills to writing the occasional purple prose of a love letter… wringing emotions into ink, codifying the heart… it was ever thus for scribes
I think, in another life, I would have happily been a scribe, mbe at the court of Tipu Sultan, the late 18th century, with a beautiful coloured turban, sniffing a Rose (a frequent motif), gnawing on a florid ink besmirched feather quill, concocting love letters for a customer… like something from Orhan Pamuks ‘My Name is Red’