On Monasteries

Sometimes a sense or a feeling only happens for only a moment, but lingers, and when such happens it's best suited to poetry, better suited to a free flow of words than the implied causality of narrative. Such is the case with Pharping; but I am not a poet.

It's in Pharping, about 20 kilometers south of Kathmandu by road, that, for a moment, the desire to join a monastery, to detach from the world, comes together: a leaf fallen on a clear, languorous mountain stream, stuck by surface tension to something with no form at all, only mass and movement. I am looking along the railing of a gompa, a monastery, up on the hill, nestled against and at the joints concreted to the exposed stone of the hillside, to see a kettle boiling tea above a small stone stove filled with firewood, and an old monk beating the dust from his welcome mat. A faint breeze blows off the hill, but we are in the lee.

The peace is like the peace of the mountains, the feeling of splendid self-sufficiency without the feeling of loneliness, of isolation. It's gone after a moment, though, and just after a very light rain begins to fall, barely enough to tickle the hair on my arms.

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Travelers come to Nepal, often, to find something, because they are looking for what is more or less a religious experience. They are looking to get something out of Nepal; they have come because they think that here, finally, they can find peace—or can learn to find it. Some come to be among practicing Buddhists, in Buddhist places like Pharping or Boudha, though avowed Buddhists are only about 10% of Nepal; others come for a different kind of spiritual experience, something akin to being one with the mountains.

That one would go anywhere in search of a specific experience is somewhat odd to me, but yet also familiar: many of us Westerners come with metrics on which we gage our experience, an y-axis list of goals. For all our exoticization, Buddhism as proffered to Westerners is very much in line with this: we take classes at Kopan Monastery,we participate in vipassana, because the experience is the goal; or else the goal is to be the person we imagine we will be when vipassana is over, and the ten days' silence itself is a means.

This is not the only local religious tradition of introspection, however: India has sanyasa, in which successful men whose children are raised leave home (wives included) and become itinerant beggars—that they don't know what they're looking for is, in the end, the point. And while sanyasa is certainly more explicitly religious than vipassana, it's also in many ways more human: less about renouncing the world than it is about interacting with it and in it.

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Pharping is a far quieter town than Kathmandu, more peaceful but still familiar, still built with stone and mud huts, with brick buildings in the Newar style, with protrusions of elaborately carved wood sills and screens for windows and posts and lintels for doors. It's familiar and yet not, like a visit from Thamel in Kathmandu to Lakeside in Pokhara.

Like Boudha, you see monks and nuns in robes walking upright through the town in beautiful crimson and gold robes, men and women who carry themselves with the posture of calm of the devoted, who wait a fractional moment and temper their voices before speaking. And though most are Nepali, some are not: they are French, South African, American. I don't mean to suggest that it's the Tibetan Buddhist influence that gives Pharping its feelings of calm, of quiet; but as an outsider, as a foreigner, it feels like that's the case.

Save a few—those whose paths led them to Pharping (or Boudha) by chance—these monks have come for the destination, rather than the journey; it is not the moving that interests them, but the long rests in between movements.

*

Nepal is a religious country, and because to Westerners its rituals and forms of religiosity are usual and exotic it's an easy place to exoticize, an easy place to presume spiritual depth in someone you can't communicate with and whose daily life is far different from your own. That much of Nepal can appear to a Westerner, to use a Deepak Chopra line about India¹, like an early archaeological dig where all the layers are inadvertently mixed up, it's also easy to romanticize Nepalis, especially rural Nepalis, as more virtuous, as more connected to the land and the earth in some vague, spiritual sense, to identify them with your own ancestors, also romanticized.

And this, I think, is the essence of the tension of living, and traveling, in Nepal. While it's easy for a place to provide a totally external experience—it's easy for Paris to provide a view of the Arc de Triomphe, or San Francisco of the Golden Gate bridge—it's hard for even the Vatican to provide a communion with the divine. Tourist-driven adventuring, here, is safe: it is guided treks, bungee jumping, a mountain flight above the Himals to see Everest. The exhilaration, or the relief, or the sense of confidence or pride that comes from real adventure, here, often, is a consumer product; it is, or seems to me, canned.

I don't wish to harp on this point too much, so I will leave things at this: unburdened travel is not vipassana but sanyasa; it is not a guided meditation into the divine but instead a journey of mud and hunger that fulfills a purpose you cannot define, even to yourself. And that purpose could, very easily, be vain.

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¹ Being able to quote anything by Deepak Chopra is of course a tad bit embarrassing, but also, because of his passion for Ayurveda and his semi-medical, semi-religious writings, rather fitting.

Pharping, Nepal

Baluwatar, Kathmandu

Siphal, Kathmandu

I'm not going to claim that it's the best photograph I've taken, but it might be the most accurate.

On the way to Pashupati I was wandering around the pothole-infected roads of Siphal, and saw down an alleyway a large temple in an empty square, with a lone red motorcycle and a boy sitting by it. As I took pictures, the boy cautiously approached me, usually from behind, to see the picture on the screen. When I looked toward him he would turn away, shyly.

Eventually I figured out that he wanted me to take his picture, but was too shy to ask. And just as I was about to push the shudder, he looked down at his feet.

I waited a moment, for him to look back up, then took the picture just the same.

Hanging out, Pashupati, Kathmandu

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The ghats of Pashupati

The first time I visited Pashupati, I abstained from taking pictures of the cremations.

Pashupatinath--the nath suffix¹ refers to a holy place, here the main temple with its enormous golden image of Nandi, Shiva's bull; likewise the stupas at Swayambo and Boudha become Swayambunath and Boudhanath, respectively--is the most holy Hindu site in Nepal, on the banks of the Bagmati River, which far into India feeds into the Ganges. The temple is so holy, in fact, that non-Hindus are forbidden to enter, as are leather goods (shoes, belts, watch straps), cameras, tape recorders, and binoculars.

Accordingly, Pashupati is a popular place to be cremated; there are, apparently, cremations here every day of the year, even through Monsoon. Indeed, when the royals were massacred in June 2001, they were all cremated here, including Crown Prince Dipendra, in a ceremony that also included Brahmins defiling themselves in something like 84 ritually prescribed ways and then riding elephants out of the valley to help shepherd the souls of the departed. For this the Brahmins gave up their caste forever, but were very well compensated, at least in worldly terms.

Among tourists who go to Pashupati—and most tourists in Kathmandu make it to Pashupati, though the less elegant Swayambo seems to be more popular—an interesting phenomenon occurs: those that don't photograph the cremations feel superior to those, unnamed, that do. It's the imposition of a camera, perhaps, the feeling that somehow by taking pictures we are commodifying someone's grief. It 's also our feeling, collectively, that privacy is somehow necessary for grief; and that as upright and ethical citizens, we ought to respectfully allow grief to come out in whatever way, in whatever terms, the grieving find necessary.

Foreigner and Nepali alike come to watch cremations at Pashupati: Nepalis mostly from the terraces on the eastern bank, high above the ghats just next to the main temple, foreigners from a rampart just south of the bridge across the Bagmati, clustered in huge tour groups or far enough interspersed around the Ram Temple to feel separate and individual, adolescent-like. A number of these tourists do come prepared: professional-level SLR cameras and bulky telephoto lenses, khaki fisherman's vests with pockets blooming up everywhere, fertile with filters, lenses, accoutrements and paraphernalia. At certain moments it can give the walk the feeling of the photographers' well at an important baseball game, a bustle of relatively polite, mostly professional paparazzi activity.

For whatever reason, avowed amateurs like myself—those of us with with compact point-and-shoots in a pants pocket—are spared. It is a case, perhaps, of signals given and signals mis- and understood. That I should have an SLR signals that my photography is serious somehow, that I have committed something material—and likely something of myself—to its pursuit.² That in actuality I shoot with a camera the size of a back of cigarettes, a camera that is battered from tumbles onto rocky trails and, most notably, a short ways down a mountain in Montana—this signals something else, and somehow exempts me from disapprobation.

This, obviously, is not altogether fair, nor is it altogether accurate. Our collective assumption, and I am not immune, is that these semi- and wanna-be pro photographers have a single notion in mind: That of getting the shot. That is, that they are getting their pleasure, and in a sense their power, from the grief of others, succubus-like; that they have little regard for their own imposition; that they are trying, with the capture of a "good" photo, to increase their own reputation--increase their own status--within their local or extended communities. Or so we other Westerners understand them, and judge them.

But there is another use of photography, more benign and less self-conscious, and altogether more common: That of photography as an incitement to dialogue. Physically the actions are much the same—capturing a scene or a landscape with a light-sensitive sensor or light-sensitive film—but the intents diverge. It is the photography not of look at my pictures but the photography of look what I saw.

We are familiar with the idea of photography outside narrative: the posed family portrait, everyone wearing white and khaki with a neutral backdrop that gives no bit of location away, save in its own sort of negative information; the band's hi-res; the actor's glossy; the MySpace self-portrait with camera held at arms'-length. These are meant to convey something at once general and specific about the subject: a cheerful disposition, the right, artistic attitude, a certain "look," certain visual signals of class and of personal interests.

But the idea of non-narrative photography is a construction, for each photograph takes place within a narrative: the creepy photographer's run-down studio in a strip mall in El Cerrito, his long, wavy gray hair matted to each sheet and office chair; a publicist whose idea of cool involves leather jackets and dreamy looks just past the mercenary photographer's right ear; a seemingly endless day of black-and-white smiles and half-smile and no smiles, only to have not a single shot be the right one; a bored Friday night during private school's ski week, and the realization that an entire evening could be spent finding just the right angle to hide a pimple and highlight the elegance of high cheekbones smoothed by the last remnants of baby fat. The thing about such staged photos is that the stories are expressly, intentionally hidden; the idea is not as much look what I saw as it is look what I want you to see.

Photographs of strangers or of strange places, like the photos we take at Pashupati, are different. In the pessimistic assessment they serve as creators of status, of power: look at how I see. There is a certain element of pedagogy in this, and a certain arrogance, or confidence, of pedagogy, the certainty that you have something worth teaching. Like soccer, or negotiation, or writing, you improve both by doing and my watching how others do, but there are far more soccer matches or negotiations or books than one could ever peruse.

In certain situations, with certain signifiers, we find this sort of creation of culture almost inconceivably gauche: at funerals, at highway accidents, at times in churches, at public bathing sites and bathrooms. We assume, because of the trappings of wealth, because of a certain manner of dress and a camera that costs what the typical Nepali makes in 10 years, that this is exploitation of grief, of poverty.

And sometimes, often perhaps, it is. There are more generous ways of seeing, however, and other intents. Put into an album, stiff pages protected by plastic film and leafed through casually by our friends, our photographs allow us to say, Let me tell you about this person; we can say, The photo may read like this, but let me tell you about the beauty and horror of this place, Let me tell you how people live here. We use our photographs to tell stories, but also to open the doors to the stories we want to tell.

For example: I want to tell you that burning bodies pop loudly, violently, much louder than the pop and crackle of sweet sap boiling between bark and heartwood, but it has taken me an entire essay to come out and say it.

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¹ Pronounced nat+h, or in approximate English phoenetics, NAHT-h, but with the tongue on the teeth, like in Italian. Nepalis, at least those in and around Kathmandu, also tend to pronounced the letter u, when mid-word, similarly to its pronounciation in Japanese, which is to say almost not at all, as in the Japanese word hibakusha, meaning the atomic bomb survivors. The best, still-rough equivalent I can give in text is to the e in Oregon, which kind of sounds like a hiccup in the middle of organ.

Pashupatinath, then, is closest to pash-pa-tee-NAHT-h than any other way I can think of syllabicating it.

² The paradox here is that oftentimes point-and-shoots require more imposition, more posed photography, than SLRs, because it's difficult to get sharp pictures from a distance far enough to be surreptitious; but also that people are more at ease with their portraits being shot with a point-and-shoot than a fancy camera. Perhaps the lack of communicated "seriousness" signals a lack of desire to exploit of the images--that the images are to be used only personally, and therefore no reciprocal (and unoffered) consideration is in order.

Watching Funeral Pyres, Pashupati, Kathmandu

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Fruit Stand at Night, Naxal, Kathmandu

The politics of disaster

On cable television in Kathmandu, CNN is on both channel 05 and channel 20, both identical and both for the past two days showing news of only four things: the earthquake in Sichuan Province, the cyclone in Myanmar, fighting between Hezbollah and amoebicly defined "pro-government forces" in Lebanon, and Bush Junior's state visit to Israel to celebrate the 60th anniversary of its existence.

The focus has been mostly on China: because of the States' love-hate relationship with China, and this was, at least at first, a chance to further entrench China as vilely unresponsive to the needs of its poor, because of China's denser population and the ease at which CNN can report shockingly high death tolls and sensationalist stories about 900 children trapped in a school, and because Myanmar, whose rulers are far more evil and yet far less condemned on television, won't let CNN's journalists—or any journalists, or even most aid workers—in.

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Earthquakes are terribly unromantic, except possibly in the extreme macro view, where we imagine continents floating like oil scum on a bucket of water. There are no pictures of lonely survivors boating amidst the peaked roofs of their flooded houses, no charred, smoking, skeleton houses with singed and half-burnt shopping lists or guide to local birds, streets empty but for snowpack that rises to where trees trunks diverge into a bird's nest of branches. No: The earth shakes and liquifies, man-made structures fall or crack and burst, and mountains are raised a few feet higher. A slope, perhaps, slides in the aftermath.

Earthquakes involve none of the great verbs of hurricanes: rattling doors barred by two-by-fours, sluicing rain falling sideways with the force of hailstones, lashing winds that break windows and bend deep-rooted trees till they break like twigs. And where hurricanes (and tornadoes) involve a massive, physical alteration of human space—cereal crops are blown across counties into other fields, mobile homes are shot into the granite-tiled lobbies of office parks, once-empty fields are filled with wooden roof shingles, broken shudders, and crumpled outdoor furniture—earthquakes simply collapse things in place. What was there once is still present, but broken, devoid of the negative space that lets a bucket hold water or a house a family.

Indeed, how many earthquakes do we remember, and how many hurricanes? I can name five California earthquakes off the top of my head—San Francisco in the 1870s and 1906, Sylmar, Loma Prieta, Northridge—and five outside of California: Lisbon in the 1700s, New Madrid in the 1810s, the Great Alaska in 1964, Kobe, the quake near Seattle in 2001. But Hurricanes? Andrew, Dean, Hugo, Rita, and of course Katrina come to mind immediately, and then the less present, more vague storms: Charley, Mitch, the Bhola Cyclone that precipitated widespread famine in Bangladesh in the 1970s. It's hard to believe I would ever have heard of the early San Francisco earthquake or know the Sylmar quake if I weren't from California—even though it was a {7.6} on the Richter scale, most Californians my age are utterly unfamiliar with the Sylmar quake, including, as I recall, at least two of my three San Francisco housemates—and if we except these, I'm familiar with just as many hurricanes as earthquakes. And from a place without hurricanes or tornadoes.

There are of course many more hurricanes than devastating earthquakes, which is part of it, and at least in the United States the parts of the country susceptible to hurricanes is both larger (basically the enormous coastline from Brownsville, Texas around the peninsula of Florida and north all the way to New York or perhaps even Boston) and more densely populated than those susceptible to regular earthquakes, which is currently the Pacific states and, based on the past few months, northern Nevada. It's only to be expected, then, if the dominant culture in the US gives more weight to hurricanes than to earthquakes, for there are simply more people to reinforce the cultural memory of each, other impacts set aside.

*

So the focus on China I found curious. Hu Jintao was on his way to Sichuan 3 hours after the earthquake occurred, at which time he had already mobilized the army to provide disaster relief. Even when CNN's reporters found that the army had acted dutifully and appropriately, the spin was still on horror—how there was not yet food, so the people were scratching through the remains of their houses for whatever dry scraps they could uncover; how it was beginning to sprinkle on the field or park now filled with makeshift tarpaulin shelters and the ground was turning to mud.

Perhaps because of the cyclone, and perhaps because of the Burmese junta's insistence that it has its disaster areas under control when all actual facts point otherwise, I began to think of Hurricane Katrina. The contrast in government reaction between this earthquake and Katrina is, in most respects, stark. I think of things this way: When the government of China is volumes more responsive to its neediest citizens during a disaster than your own government, something is seriously wrong.¹

My suspicion is that this lesson—this moral, if you will—will be lost. CNN's news department was clearly most interested in finding ways to condemn the Chinese government and the Chinese in general—“The phenomenal boom of the past 10 years has come at a cost, it seems,” one reporter said²—and by focusing on the horrors of living under a tarp, which many of us have done by choice, as camping, there is strong undercurrent of aspersion cast on the Chinese response. Which they have, up to this point, done well.³

The report I mentioned earlier, by the reporter among the tents, was almost unbelievably offensive. Mentioned but little were the basic material possessions, the thin woks and thick-walled pots, the farming tools, sickles and baskets, the butchering knives and water jugs that in their replacing would entrench poverty further for each poor family; and not a survivor was interviewed, on camera or off. Instead, the reporter, white and European, talked obvious nonsense, like starvation setting in; complained of the mud, really only softened dirt underneath a thin lawn; and was incredulous that there was not enough water for the survivors to take a shower.

Just for the sake of comparison, I live off a dirt road than turns to a muddy pond during heavy rain here in Hadigaon, in Kathmandu. We don't have municipal water right now—it went off yesterday, while I was in the shower, in fact—and we didn't have municipal water for the first 8 days of May. What water we did have then was either 25-liter water-cooler jugs of drinking water that we had to truck over ourselves; or well water from the back that was only accessible when there was electricity to run the pump—load-shedding occurs between 20 and 40 hours per week, mostly when you're home in the mornings and evenings—and was good for little more than flushing the toilet, too putrid and oily even to boil and wash with.

But this is not a poor neighborhood: Hadigaon is just south of Baluwatar, site of the Nepali Prime Minister's residence and the headquarters of Nepal Rastra Bank; just east of Bhat Bhateni, where Crown Prince Dipendra used to make his liaison with his lover Devyani Rana before he offed the rest of the family and himself in 2001⁴; and northeast of Naxal, where the Royal Palace and Police Headquarters are. Likewise, my landlord, who lives upstairs and whose profession I can best describe as real estate developer—he buys a lot, builds a house, sells it, starts again—claims to have just sold a house for 7 million rupees, about $105,000, which in Nepal is not so much small fortune as a large one. You have to understand: we are lucky to have the well, for most houses around are without.

What was so offensive about the CNN report was the complete lack of understanding of relative importance in the developing world, or in developing parts of the world: the reporter, I think, would be the world's worst triage nurse. The neutrality of the news is always a farce, of course; but for me at least—and I have no television at home in San Francisco—I am unaccustomed to seeing such misunderstanding of the world in the open, such bias.

For the reporting is not only a more-than-slightly xenophobic understanding of China; not only a type of repetitive, US-centric propaganda; not only sensationalism to keep grasp on tenuous viewers; but also is itself an expressly political view, and the reporting a political act. This idea of Why isn't the Chinese government doing more?—indeed, one of the CNN anchors asked the Scottish correspondent, "How can the Chinese government do more?"—is a way of absolving us of the survivor-guilt-by-proxy that can well up when we read about and see scenes of such devastation. That it's a hardship worth mentioning for the earthquake's survivors to go without a shower for, at that point, about 32 hours is not only an assumption on the reporter's part that our shower-every-day Western lives are the best kind of normalcy, but an assumption that they are the sole right normalcy, one that it is the Chinese government's duty to provide. It is also not a “hardship” that any of us viewers have agency to rectify, or one we should have foreseen, and it's this kind of framing that allows us to unquestion the externalized, aggregated impacts of our lives.⁵ And to the extent that people are starving in Sichuan Province, they're not starving because of the earthquake; and it falls to us too—for it falls to everyone—we who secure enough to eat more or less whatever we when whenever we want, secure enough not to horde canvas bags of cornmeal and rice in our damp cellars and cluttered garages, secure enough to take for granted that we will have a future, to ask why people are starving at all, anywhere.

I spent much of the evening flipping back to CNN, hoping to watch the report again, nodding off occasionally, hearing the same uninformed clichés about searching frantically through rubble and children thirsty and hungry, until finally, past midnight—which is an eternity of a night in Nepal—I fizzed off the television and went to bed.

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¹ Or right, in a better world; but here: wrong.

² My notes from the telecast read, “phe. ↑ lt. 10 yrs. at cost, it sms—cmmn ppl...” and then an illegible squiggle though I normally have pretty ok handwriting. I may have nodded off at this point, and I actually don't remember this line. My notes are not so much chronological as wherever-they-fit, but this line is next to some ranting about the blonde, American, rather ignorant anchor's live interview with Beijing bureau chief Jaime FlorCruz, whose name she repeatedly pronounced “Hi-me.”

³The long-term issue of construction standards notwithstanding, of course. But these issues are rife in the developing world—when Kathmandu is next hit by a large earthquake, it will be an enormous catastrophe, very possibly worse than this quake in China. The idea that you build building that are safe for hazards both regular and highly irregular—like earthquakes—is very much the perspective of someone who is privileged enough to be able to pay for security from earthquakes.

⁴ Or didn't, which is equally likely. He's the official killer, in any case, though the notoriously corrupt Nepali police refused the help of Scotland Yard, which Britain offered at no charge and with no strings attached.

⁵ Including flying to Nepal to write essays on disasters in China for 20 people half-a-world away.

Hadigaon, Kathmandu

Go maybe 50 yards beyond the temple there with the tree growing from its top and you'll get to my apartment--but it's Kathmandu, so going 50 yards straight requires 150 yards of winding back and forth. But Hadigaon is my home here, not a bad neighborhood at all...

Coming Soon!

It struck me that I hadn't written anything substantive for public consumption in a while, so I thought I'd give a preview of what's to come here:

Tomorrow's a long post about the Chinese earthquake. Would have been today, but I wasn't quite finished in time.

Also on the horizon: An essay actually about Nepal, about another trip to Pashupati.

And later, I think an essay about water.

Some pictures in between, of course. And maybe an update on what I'm doing, which is, to apparently everyone's disbelief, more than nothing but less than saving the world.

Naxal, Kathmandu

Sakhu, Nepal

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The thing about bananas

The internet seems to be a little passive-aggressive in Kathmandu today, especially about uploading pictures, so instead of a few pictures of the town of Sakhu, I'm going to talk about bananas.

Yes, bananas.

I've had a thing against the bananas of San Francisco for a while: namely, that I don't really like them. That I dislike them would be too strong a term, however--it's more that bananas at home are a food you eat without tasting, a food you eat for convenience and a lack of disagreeability, a food that's not too bitter, not too sweet, not too soft or too hard, not to mealy, not to acidic, and most of all not too present. And while these bananas may indeed be a sort of gustatory zen riddle, I prefer my tastebuds to know a fuller range of experience.

Indeed, the state at which most Americans, in my experience, eat their bananas bears out this rather harsh opinion: our bananas are large and firm in their peels, bought while green and eaten just as they turn yellow. Brown spots mean that the bananas are going bad--indeed, it's always seemed that Americans freeze the bananas the second day after brown spots appear, all the better for banana bread. In the freezer, of course, the banana peels go totally brown, and the inner fruit discolors like an apple or potato left peeled too long.

The thing about these bananas is that, in comparison to their potential, they are terrible. Terrible, awful, I would even go so far as to say an abomination. I don't know if there's a Hindu god of bananas--there are so many Hindu gods that I think there must have to be--but if so, I suspect we've displeased him enough that he's cursed us to think that our bananas are somehow worth eating. Which they are, except in times of starvation, not.

Let me better explain: Here in Nepal, the only way I can make a banana taste like the bananas at home is to find one totally green, a little oversized and over-firm, with a skin much too thick, and eat it. This is something I have to work at--I did it yesterday just for kicks¹, but I had to go three different places just to find a banana awful enough that it would taste--shudder--"normal," and even then the vendor, a stocky man in a dirty white Nepal baseball cap who tried to charge me, initially, 75 rupees for 6 bananas (going rate is 20 or so) told me that I didn't want that one. Yes: he would charge me triple the normal price, but at least at first didn't want to sell me his worst piece of merchandise. Then he shrugged and said ok.

Let me also explain, as best I can, what it is that I've missed out on for the past quarter-century or so. Bananas here, most notably, are creamy and most of all rich, with a sweetness that only appears in the moment or two after you begin to taste them. The sweetness, perfectly balanced, lingers in the mid-front of your mouth, and then, as you swallow, there's the slightest sweep of fibrous bitterness at the back of your tongue--but as soon as you swallow, it's gone.

That the most distinctive taste of a banana is umami--and that that's something of a surprise--is notable mostly because I would never have described a banana that way before. If pressed, I think I would previously have described the slightly woody, back-of-the-throat sensation that stays with you for a few minutes after you've eaten an American banana. In fact, this is the taste of an unripe banana, at least here in Nepal. It's similar to that of a ripe plantain, in location if nothing else, but again we eat plantains when they are brown and ripened, and a plantain has a that overriding taste of the acids in the banana at the roof of your mouth--nor does it linger like that American banana taste.

So what to do? I guess it depends on perspective. Eat bananas when actually brown, of course--and I have a suspicion that with bananas, like with zucchini, smaller is actually more tasty. And you can't get locally grown bananas, I don't think, in San Francisco anyway, which is another good reason not to buy them.

But really, they're just not so good, so don't buy them. Actually, they're quite bad. Seriously.

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¹ Ok, not so much for kicks as for research for this, but still.

A few more, Annapurna Conservation Area, Nepal

Halchowk, Nepal

Devis Falls and Mahadev Cave, Pokhara, Nepal

The Seti River winds through Pokhara, mostly in the narrow canyon it's carved for itself, thin and deep. Devis Falls is where it undergrounds itself for a time, and Mahadev Cave is where you can go down underground and see it!

Also, in proving that American Christians have no monopoly on religious silliness with Jesus-on-a-tortilla and whatnot, Mahadev Cave has a Hindu Shrine within because--I kid you not--there is a permanent dark "shade" that looks like a cow. Alas, it's forbidden to take a picture of the Cow Shade, and a Nepali man sits in a chair to enforce the policy, so all I can provide is a picture of the sign.

Boats, Pokhara, Nepal