Travel Update 2: Pokhara & Yoga

Happy New Year everyone! This update is coming to you from Buenos Aires; tomorrow morning Kris and I fly south to Ushuaia near the southern tip of South America for New Year’s Day to begin hiking and trekking and slowly making our way north through Patagonia.

Since the last update, I spent some time in Pokhara visiting the city, went parasailing, took a singing bowl and sound medicine course, completed my 200 hour yoga teacher certification, and made the journey from Nepal to South America to meet up with Kris for the next few months of travel.

Pokhara

While I was in Pokhara, I stayed (mostly) at the Kiwi Backpacker’s Hostel, which is nestled a ways back from the busy road and serves as a hub for mostly english-speaking travellers coming from or starting on local treks. There’s a small yoga studio upstairs, plenty of rooftop space to sit and look out over the city, and an enormous lady’s slipper vine (thunbergia mysorensis) in the courtyard which climbs the full three stories of the hostel — up pillars, along cables, and around railings — in a solid mass of green with dangling red flower pods.

It was a good place to rest and recuperate from trekking and plan the next few weeks: there were always new people to meet at breakfast, and the yoga studio was quiet enough to work on my own practice and not be disturbed. My original plan was to go on a second trek, but instead I found lots to do in the city for the two weeks I was there.

Almost every building has at least one big thousand-litre water tank on the roof, plus a solar hot water system. The few Pokharians I talked to about politics seemed to have little faith in the government or the city’s infrastructure, so I would guess that it’s fairly common for the power to go out or water pipes to fail and that people rely on having a large store of their own water in case something happens. It looked like enormous effort had been spent by individuals to build their own systems of reliability and resilience, given a lack of trust in public works, and it made me stop and think gratefully that in Canada we have talented engineers and honest bureaucrats that take care of so much, and how quickly incompetence and corruption could take that away.

The main road through the Lakeside district — the tourist area — is a chaotic throng of scooters, cars, and buses all blasting their horns just to let everyone know “hey, I’m here!” There are endless shops selling clothing, scarves, rugs, singing bowls, statues, trekking gear, books, incense, souvenirs of all kinds. There are bars and coffee shops and restaurants, beggars and holy ascetics (called sadhus) and tourists from all over Europe, North America, and India.

A popular attraction in Pokhara is Tal Bahari temple on a small island in the middle of Phewa Lake, which is dedicated to the Hindu goddess Bahari. There are nightly ceremonies, called aarati, to propitiate the goddess and other deities, where a trio of priests burn incense, toss flower petals, and gesture with flaming lanterns for nearly an hour. When I was watching, there were a few dozen people in the chairs provided and then several hundred watchers packed into a standing, mostly-silent crowd.

The ceremony has a few commercial sponsors, since part of the aim is to increase tourism for Pokhara, with their placcards placed on the observation structures around the square. One of them is the National Insurance Company Limited, which begs the question: are they supporting the ceremony as a pillar of the community, or is there an actuarial calculation related to keeping the gods happy?

There was so much else in Pokhara… the World Peace Pagoda and a visit to a Tibetan refugee camp both stand out, and the food was good everywhere, from all different cultures. I would definitely go back to visit the city and do more trekking in the Annapurna area; apparently in springtime all the rhododendron forests are in bloom…

Paragliding

One of the most fun single days I had while I was in Pokhara was going paragliding with a company called Sunrise Paragliding. The owner of the company was one of the original pioneers of the sport in Pokhara back in the 90’s, and they had a crew of encouragingly middle-aged pilots to take the six of us up in the air. We piled into a van at about 10:30 in the morning — very civilized timing, since there wouldn’t be any thermals to help the early birds — and drove up the ridge of hills on the north side of Phewa Lake, then piled out an walked the short distance to the launch site. After a briefing on what to do as a passenger — run straight down the hill on the word “go” and don’t stop for anything — and a short wait for good wind, it was my turn to strap myself to my pilot and sprint straight for the rocks and brush and trees at the bottom of the hill… but then we were in the air and it felt like magic to be flying with no sound, no engine, nothing but a giant kite and the thermals lifting us up. I think I was grinning like a maniac for the better part of an hour while we were in the air, and the smile didn’t fade until well after we were back in Pokhara and had eaten lunch. One of the friends I made while trekking, Anna, is a paraglider in Austria, and her description of how straightforward and simple it is to get training and equipment and a license made me excited to do more when I’m back home in Canada.

Gorkha Beer

Let’s take a minute to appreciate the Nepalese staple, Gorkha beer. The beer itself is fine, as beers go; I’d probably rate it better than the average Canadian beer. The logo, though… let’s just rip on the logo for a second. The logo looks like Gorkha Beer’s graphic designer had heard that people sometimes wear their hats at “jaunty” angles, and so was intent on imbuing the brand with as much sass, pizazz, attitude, and spunk as could be crammed into the space of a beer bottle label. I can see it now… they take a determined grip on the slider controling the angle of the hat, shove right through the realm of “jaunty,” cruise briskly past “rakish,” slow down for a moment to consider the merits of “eccentric,” then decide “the hell with it, you only live once!” and plunge forward with a lurch to settle with a wheeze and a hiccup in “deranged.” I’m pretty sure if I saw a man walking down the street with a hat clutching the side of his face like this, I would climb the nearest lamp post and dive for the safety of an upper story balcony.

Dedicated to the brave, indeed.

Singing Bowls

One morning after trekking I joined a few friends from the hostel who had found a singing bowl meditation session a short cab ride outside the city, put on by a woman named Maya and her husband Yogi. We arrived at their home, a small lot with a low wall, a small lawn, and three small yellow-plastered brick buildings. Inside the singing bowl room, we lay down on yoga mats and fell into the magic of the meditation. The bowls they play have this beautiful, complex timbre to their sound, and they ring for a long, long time after being struck, so as Maya and Yogi played the room was filled with overlapping tones that resonated and bounced off the walls. There was a strong sense of space to the sound because the bowls were spread out, so it really felt like the sounds were arriving from many different directions, some near and some far away. I found myself lulled into a deeply relaxed semi-dreaming state during the meditation, and I only realized that nearly an hour had passed when the deep tones of the big bowls became quiet and Maya and Yoga began chanting mantras and calling everyone back into awareness.

After the meditation, Yogi served coffee he had grown and roasted himself — the third building on the property, in addition to the home and the meditation hall, was a still-under-construction cafe and coffee roastery — and we got to talking among the group. Maya offered that she teaches singing bowl techniques and was running her next six-day course two days from then. I took the afternoon to think about it, and signed up with the idea that I know so many people who would appreciate receiving this experience, either as a magical healing space or as a simple, beautiful, relaxing, restful hour.

During the course we talked about the philosophy behind the singing bowls — chakras, tones, mantras, and vibrations — and practiced different ways to use the singing bowls to move energy and create a healing space. I find it’s an interesting challenge to take these esoteric concepts, like chakras, and relate them to both my direct experience of the world, and to western philosophical frameworks that make them less mystical and more accessible. The seven main chakras of the body are each associated with a location in the body, several emotions or qualities of being (like groundedness, love, creativity, or communication), a colour, and a sound; similarly, when I’ve been coached through processes to find greater understanding of my emotions the process has been about identifying the emotion using familiar external senses, like associating a colour, a texture, a location in the body, a feeling of weight or lightness, and more. So in that way, it seems to me that the chakras can be a powerful mental model for honing in on places of tension or strain in our physical, mental, and emotional bodies, as long as we leave room to understand that each person’s experience can be different from the model as presented, and prioritize our own self-understanding over trying to shoehorn ourself into this model.

So if you want a singing bowl session when I’m back in Canada, let me know! I purchased a set in Pokhara and had them shipped home; it’ll be a little bit before I’m fully ready, since one bowl arrived cracked and one wasn’t shipped at all, so that’s on the list of things to sort out when I get home…

Yoga Teacher Training

My last three weeks in Nepal were spent doing my 200-hour yoga teacher training course. Before travelling, I had thought about going from Nepal to India to do the course in Rishikesh, but then I remembered I’m always saying “I don’t like travelling, I like being places.” I’m glad I found the course I did, at a little eco-village / yoga retreat in the hills north of Pokhara. To be honest, I picked the course for the dates as much as the presentation of the course, but I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to learn hatha yoga in such a peaceful setting with three amazing teachers: Madan, Linda, and Irubin. We had seventeen students studying together, four baby goats, three birthdays, two dogs, and something like seven languages (English, Dutch, French, German, Mandarin, Nepalese, and Australian).

The biggest part of the course was the asana practice and the alignment workshops, which took up about four hours of every day and ranged from moderately intense to extremely challenging, especially in the later part of the course when my body was sore and tired. Often the asana classes would have a bit of free-form time when we were working on an especially challenging posture, when it was up to everyone to experiment with getting into the asana and working on their balance, flexibility, and strength, and the teacher would go around to assist while the students would help each other or work on related postures, which made for a very social, very group-supporting learning method. The very first day of the alignment class, Madan introduced headstands and shoulder stands, which was surprising but actually made a lot of sense to do that because we were fresh and it gave us as much time as possible to think about and practice the techniques. I didn’t get my handstand or headstand nailed during the course, but I did make it into a few arm balances that I had never understood before.

There were two dogs at the eco-village, Lilly and Tomo, and they looked like brother and sister. They seemed to largely live their own lives in parallel with the people — no one was taking them for walks or keeping them in a yard, and they would head off sometimes to visit nearby houses or just spend the day napping in the sun. Tomo had an evening ritual where he would perch himself on a wall just after sunset and bark for several hours at whatever scary things were lurking in the darkness. Mostly it seemed he was barking at his own echo, which unfortunately meant that it was barking back at him and egging him on… As part of the cosmic joke, this was exactly the time of day when we had our meditation practice, so in a way he was helping train us in equanimity.

And finally, the cutest part of the whole three weeks was the four little baby goats that had been born about a week before we arrived. They mostly stayed with their moms, but would come out to play with each other and jump on and off of everything they could reach. It was endlessly entertaining to watch them jump over one another, practice headbutting each other, and climb up on the wall again and again for the joy of springing off to land on all fours. They even didn’t mind being picked up for short stints, though that came with the risk that they would try to find out if accessible bits of clothing or hair fell into the category “food.”

Christmas in Uruguay

Immediately after the yoga course, I was travelling steadily and continuously towards South America and Kris. I had a night out in Pokhara with most of my fellow yogis, a bus to Kathmandu, a flight to Istanbul with a layover long enough to get a hotel and sleep for a full night, a second flight to São Paulo, and finally a flight to Montevideo, Uruguay. The travel was long but mercifully free of hiccups, and it was good to be reunited with Kris.

This post is long enough and late enough as it is, so I’ll leave it here and go into more detail about Uruguay later, but I’ll finish by saying the biggest thing that I noticed about being in Uruguay for Christmas was how much I missed friends and family at home, holiday gatherings, Christmas dinner, and the whole cozy connected busy feel of the season. It would be like the Grinch took away all the material aspects of Christmas (or, y’know, I deliberately went to the other side of the planet) and really the thing that shines out as the most important is the people.

I love you all, I miss you all, and I hope you’re entering the new year healthy, happy, and full of hope! ❤️