Still in London. It seems that despite all my best intentions to get in, get out, and get back on the road, I am going to be in London for a bit longer than I planned. The apes, the tigers, the Great Wall, and Grand Canyon will have to wait a bit longer.
So despite the whinging and whining of my backpack and boots (quiet in there!) I thought I better make myself comfortable in my city.
Comfortable comes in the form of finding my constantly moving littlest hobo of a brain something to do. So I looked at what I had to hand, I looked at the city I have always been in all kinds of love with, and I decided the best plan would be to combine the two.
From the ashes of the campfires of my past travels a woolly phoenix of sneaky stitchery has arisen.
Folks, meet Deadly Knitshade, stalking the city with her sticks and string her mission is quite simply to get through the day without wrapping something random in her striped stitching. She fails. You can follow her on Whodunnknit if you dare.
Natural History Museum: The whale is displeased...
Covent Garden: Got the blues
Derby Cathedral: Holy knitted lamppost cosy, Batman
Deadly Knitshade has also gathered a small army. The Knit the City Yarn Corps seem to be causing all kinds of yarn-flavoured chaos too. This time on a slightly bigger scale. You can casually stalk them at Knit the City.
A Covent Garden barrier gets yarnstormed
Cor blimey, guv. Me dog and bone's all knitted.
So while I charge up my backpack and boots for another round of finding myself while losing myself in the great wild beyond, at least I have something to occupy my time. And I’ll continue to ferret out brilliant bits of London here on Purl Interrupted.
Idle hands are the devil’s workshop apparently. I wonder where he plugs in the power tools…?
Who can resist the smell of frying bacon wafting up the stairs and into your sleep on a sunday morning?
Well, probably not me. I have to say, however, that I ever since meeting Pickles the tiny porker back in January I’ve felt a little guilty for snacking on the flesh of her sweet and sour bretheren. Eating something you once knit a jumper for takes a guilt mastery that I have become shamefully skilled at. Nowadays I munch bacon butties without a thought for my porcine pal.
Pickles the tiny porker
Until something comes along to wobble my carnivorous pedestal once more. Pickles really went to town on sticking to the pig stereotype and sadly outgrew the jumper in the week it took me to make it. That was despite it being adjustable to allowed for the pigging out that was quite likely to occur.
Lucky for all concerned there is no shortage of pretty pigs in London and the folks at Wildside quickly drafted in a slimmer model to fill the sleeves of the pudgy Pickles.
So here, for all of you who have waited patiently for a glimpse of the swine in my stitching, is the slim and sassy sow they call Pandora.
I am stood on a plinth in the middle of London’s Trafalgar Square. To my right two martial artists in full body armour click their escrima sticks together and chuckle behind their face masks. To my left a member of the UK’s only all-girl boy band, North Star, shares 90s celebrity gossip (by ‘eck that Shannen Dohertry is incorrigible) and Michael Jackson song lyrics from a well-preserved copy of Smash Hits. In front of me a heaving gaggle of press snapped away with their cameras, throwing out occupations to turn faces towards lenses. “Knitting girl! Knitting girl!” one of them shouts, clicking away. I turn my face towards his lens and crack a smile of faint disbelief.
Yesterday morning I was art. It was all the fault of Mr Antony Gormley, whose cast-iron sculptures scared the bejesus out of half of London in 2007 by peering down from South Bank rooftops like rusty angels of death.
Gormley won the honour of having the next art installation to perch atop Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth. His One & Other project will be a living sculpture, in which 2400 ordinary folks will have an hour each on the plinth over 100 days.
A knitted plinth
It began rather damp and nervously. I arrived at the ungodly (for a freelancer) hour of 8.30am, with my trusty photographer Tom ‘Mr Tea’ Lee. It was a bring your own plinth occassion and I had brought my own plinth. A footstool that had been in my family for over 20 years, covered lovingly in knitting from the Stitch and Bitch London ladies (thanks Tina, Marion and Linda).
A nervous beephoned me
The Fourth Plinth area was severely lacking in eccentric individuals when I got there. A niggling worry began at the back of my tiny mind. What if I were the only person unhinged enough to respond to an email that asks you to bring your own plinth to Trafalgar Square and stand on it in front of the cameras in the name of British Art. For the time being it was just me, my woolly plinth, my beephones, and me chewing on my lower lip.
But then Where’s Wally arrived and my fears were soothed. He’d even made his own hair out of bits of cardboard.
Where's Wally? Oh...
Highlights of my morning:
Bridget, a storyteller swathed in black, who spent the morning in her stockinged feet waving her knitting and her tales across the snapping slew of press below her. The ball of yarn she brought along was dug up from her attic the night before and was over 60 years old. She sidled up to me when she saw my scarforama and whispered “Don’t worry. I’ll try not to steal your knitting thunder” with a conspiratorial smile before getting back to her tale telling. Someone to aspire to.
Knitting and storytelling generations
Lucy, an actor and member of the all-girl boyband Northstar. Her plinth was in the form of a pile of well-preserved issues of Smash Hits, which she flicked idly through as the cameras did their soul stealing.
Showing boy-band chick my stitchin'
Fiona and her flute player, a pair of London lady morris dancers. Fiona wore bells on her knees and was so bouncingly full of energy that the tinkling of her knee caps accompanied every camera click.
Those crazy morris gals
Tom, an artist who arrived fully clothed and perfectly average-joe looking then seemed to shed his outfit out of nowhere and teetered atop the various plinths they herded us on and off in only a pair of purple pants and his socks. His nakedness was apparently a homage to Caravaggio’s David and Goliath, though I have checked and I don’t see a pair of purple pants anywhere in the painting. Maybe they’re under the toga.
Purple-panted Carravaggio tribute
Will, a journalist from The Times who clearly is aptly named for he seemed to have more will than most. He marched into the middle of the photoshoot armed with his notepad and his elegantly classical plinth, and had to be shouted out of the photos by Gormley’s press people. “Oi! Times! Get out of the shot!” one of them roared at him. Antony Gormley seemed quite amused by the whole thing, and apparently told him “I would just like you to be a bit higher,” he said. “More like an idealised object. You ought to go and stand on the roof of your house. That will be better practice.”
Putting himself on a pedestal
Suspicious minds
A few more highlight from the day in photo form:
Knitting girl! Knitting girl!
Plinthies
Awaiting the ballerina
Being papped to death
Storyteller, poet, actor
Go London Laura
I finally met the lovely Laura and her wee bairn from GoLondon in the real world. Fabulous chick with lots of London knowledge.
Talking to the press (and really not as sassy as I look)
London Tonight ask me what I'm going to do on the plinth. Errrm...
Antony Gormley himself was infinitely tall for my five foot four self. I blinked up at him in the hazy smiley awe that us mortal folks get when faced with someone who is doing great things and still manages to find time to compliment a knitter on her hastily stitched scarf (up till 3am with needles on warp speed the night before).
Me, Mr Gormely, my beephones, my plinth, and a sneaky Times newshound on a plinth
Artist admiring my art
The actual privilidge of an hour on the plinth is a lottery. Us potential plinthees (over 10,000 applicants so far) won’t know if we get our 60 minutes in the spotlight (or the rain) until June. If I get my plinth time I intend to start a scarf at minute 0 and have it hit the concrete floor of Trafalgar Square (the height of the UK average house) before minute 60.
Putting my knitting on a pedestal
Gormley says “It’s about people coming together to do something extraordinary and unpredictable.” which, in the humble opinion of this beephone-wearing knitter, is what life is there for. That and cake.
Guerilla knitting. Street art that sings the same yarn-flavoured tune I do. Always had vague fluffy plans of releasing my knits into the city I am in all kinds of love with. Always admired those who have done it before me.
Never really dreamed I would be standing nervously in the shadow of St Paul’s cathedral, pockets full of stocking stitch and fat tapestry needles, on the lookout for ‘the filth’ patrolling the historic building front, while the American queen of knitting graffiti deftly wrapped a lonely zebra-crossing beacon in knitting I had frantically created with my sticks and string the night before.
Magda Sayek sat across the table from me in a lunchtime-loud London pub an hour earlier. At her feet was a handbag of Mary-Poppins proportions, stuffed full of pre-knit graffiti bits. Tubes and strips of every colour sprung from it like knitted vipers whenever it was unzipped.
Bag of woolly vipers
Magda, who began Knitta Please much like Stitch and Bitch London, with a few knitters, a bit of wine, and delusions of knitting grandeur four years ago, was on a flying visit to the UK to be on a chat show. Yarn has wrapped itself around her life, as well as the street signs and lampposts of her city.
Madga " I can never resist a lonely cycle lock."
Knitting; so utterly inoffensive. I have used it to calm distrustful strangers on trains in spice-scented lands, and to reach across language barriers to produce ‘my grandmother does that too’ smiles. Knitting is sort of the solid (yet spongy) ground I can always stand on when things are at their shakiest. But here the purly beast at my side grows another, altogether more tangled, head.
Guerilla knitting spins the idea of grandmas, moth balls, and too-long sleeves in an unexpected direction that leaves passers by dipped in thoughts of art, graffiti, sweet little old ladies, and daring deeds.
S&B Londoner's get their guerilla knit on
I asked Magda if paint graffiti artists ever felt she was stepping on their toes with her woolly street art. Magda shook her head and said emphatically “No way! I tell them ‘My yarn is as bad ass as your spray can.’”
Looking at what we did to London’s South Bank this chilly February morning it was clear Magda was preaching to the knitting choir.
When the adrenaline subsides and you stand back in the shadows to watch passers-by crack smiles and point excited fingers you can’t help feeling you just made the world a little more interesting through making it a woollier place.
My knitting, St Paul's, possibly disrupted traffic
Guerilla knitting. I can feel you tugging at my sleeve with your woolly fingers of knitted sneakiness. Not sure how long I can resist another outing. And, quite frankly, I am not sure that I want to resist.
Cold and very grumpy trains refuse to leave their grit-platformed stations. Colder and grumpier commuters stand around Underground entrances muttering, but secretly happy to ‘work from home’. Little old ladies grudgingly turn up the thermostat and peer in horror at pavements that promise hip replacements. Double decker buses slide gracefully into turns. The Grenadier guards on Whitehall are thankful for their furry hats. Every inch of the city is suddenly blanketed in loveliness.
London is under snow, and on the cloudy breaths of every city dweller the same sentence puffs into the chilly air, “It’s snowing!”.
I awoke on the trusty SS Codswallop (my floating almost-home) to a bit of a waterside winter wonderland.
Snow on the starboard, or is that the port...?
Thamesside snowness
And within moments they had arrived. Just when we thought it was safe to eat carrots and burn coal. They’re everywhere. Some have hats, some have scarves, some have natty moustaches made from twigs.
The Snow People are invading London, and I have been stalking them along the Thames…
Smugfaced Russian furhat snowman
Rarely glimpsed Siamese snow twins
Morose one-eyed snowman
Lazy fingerpoke-faced snowman
Fresh-herb-fragrant easy tiger Jamie Oliver snowman
Plump and pastry-full Cornish pasty snowman
Self-righteous anti-war political snowman (excellent eyebrows)
Debris from horrific unprovoked snowman attack. Small child flees in horror.
Worryingly hot six-pack snowman
Coming-to-get-you zombie snowmen
Busty Saint Snowwoman: glamour model by day, icedancer by night
Demon bench-dwelling snowthing resting his snowbones
Reclining noface snowmen
Two snowspies in covert microfilm exchange
The nervous snow bunny at evening silflay
Scarily ginormous Hagrid of a sailing snowman. We're gonna need a bigger boat...
I finally stumbled, slid and crunched my way back to the trusty SS Codswallop to warm my frozen camera-clicking digits. To my horror one of them had made his home on the vessel’s roof.
Our sprig-eared roof invader
Come the morning he was looking a little peaky…
He fears the sunshine
Today, I am sad to say, there was no sign of the little blighter at all. Or any of his kind. They arrive so quickly and mysteriously. They stand (or sit) immovable in their chosen nests. And then they are gone, leaving only slushy puddles, gently rotting root vegetables, pairs of limply broken twigs, and soggy woollen garments behind them…
Her name was Pickles. She was a week-old piglet. A piglet with a problem. Pickles needed to be woolly. A tall order for a small pig.
Pickles poses
And that was where I came in. The lovely people at Wildside contacted me through S&B London for a little bit of pig-warming help. Wildside are a London-based family-run image licensing company who fill their home with tiny beasts (so the animals feel at home in the photo studio). Their aim to is bring the cute to the camera, and their images are used for cards, calendars, keyrings… You get the idea.
What they wanted from me was a hat, scarf, and woolly jumper combo suitable for a tiny porcine lady. How could I refuse?
Arriving at their Willesden Green home (with my trusty assistant, Dr Stitchlove, many of whose pictures I have stolen here), Pickles and I met for the first time. I was a hulking giant with a tape measure and the giggles, she was less than a foot long. The tiny patter of hooves on hardwood floor isn’t a sound anyone can hear without going a bit gooey.
Pickles was a squirmy wee thing. She was content to snuffle around shoes, and sip at her bowl of milk with a wary eye on the rest of us. She chose her favourite colour yarn, and was vaguely impressed by the sample hat I had thrown together on the tube on the way over.
This one, I think
Tiny tube hat
Bring tape measure to piglet though and you’re asking for trouble. Pickles found it most unladylike to be measured. You can take a pig to a tape measure, but you can’t make it sit still to be measured (as the old saying goes, I’m sure).
Pig measuring
Not much between the ears
Pickles is a Large White pig. The skinny pink runt of her litter, she isn’t really large or even white at all. The thing with pigs is that they like to pig out. So Pickles’ measurements were going to have to be 50% bigger for the finished jumper, scarf, and hat.
Pretty in Pork: the beginnings
It was agreed I’d make:
A jumper that could be adjusted depending on how much Pickles pigged out
Corset jumper
A stripy scarf long enough to keep her cosy.
Tiny striped cosiness
Tasselly
A bobble hat to fit between her tiny ears.
Bobblish
Since dog jumper patterns were sadly just not up to scratch for a tiny porker, I ended up creating my very own pattern. Here it is in all it’s glory, the Pretty in Pork corset jumper (thanks to my mum for crocheting the loops on the jumper back), the Pretty in Pork teeny tiny bobble hat, and the Pretty in Pork eversolong striped scarf.
The Pretty in Pork set
Wildside promise to pass on some pictures once they’re all done. I didn’t manage to go back for a fitting sadly. But I am hoping Pickles is as pretty in pink as she was meant to be.
I’m just glad I’m not the one who has to get the jumper onto the sassy swine.
Pickles and her fashion designer
Only in London could I fill my post-travelling pre-next-travelling time with knitting for a pig. Will I ever eat a bacon sandwich again? Well, all that knitting did make me hungry…
Kathmandu. I have always wanted to come to Kathmandu, though I didn’t really know anything about it. The name alone convinced me it was somewhere I needed to see. What did this Cat Man look like? What was it that he did? Was he married to Dogwomandon’t? Hmm?
It was cold in Kathmandu. Nepal’s capital city sits at 1400 metres above sea level, and at this time of year the people who live here are all hats and scarves. Shops sell cosy down jackets and thick woolly socks. The nights, in unheated budget hotel rooms, have you waking up with frozen nosetip above the blankets. Brrrrr.
Kathmandu ended up a bit of a blur to me. But here are some of my Kathmandu happenings:
Stopping in the middle of the busy city to watch a passing parade, and seeing The Kumari Devi, a living goddess in Hinduism and Buddhism. The goddess is a pre-pubescent girl who has been chosen by a ritual of tests checking her time and day of birth, colour of eyes, shape of teeth, sound of voice and other things. On the day of her first period the girl is no longer a goddess and they move onto finding the next one. It is apparently unlucky to marry an ex-goddess.
The girl I saw couldn’t have been more than four years old. She was blinking quietly at the crowd and noise around her, her lips pressed together in a tired line, her eyes taking in all the colour and chaos like she’d seen it all before. She was dressed in a red velvet gold patterned suit, and had a third eye painted on her forehead. She was being carried by a richly dressed woman who held a gold umbrella over them both as they walked amongst the other people in the parade. (I didn’t get a photo of her. It felt a bit wrong to take one.)
Tail end of the parade
I know that this is part of their culture. And in Nepal, as in India, religion is so overwhelmingly important that it flows over everything, appearing in the most unexpected places. Yet I couldn’t help but be sad for the tiny deity. Knowing her life was not her own. She was so small in amongst the crowd.
Durbar Square, a jumble of palaces, temples, courtyards, and people. Taxis rev their engines in the centre of it waiting for fares, kids play hackey sack, people sell everything from prayer wheels to curved knives to gold embroidered silk purses to cheap plastic pairs of painted chopsticks, and others carry loads on their backs that are bigger than they are.
Shot-ruining taxis
Man or forklift?
Pigeons galore (why are there always pigeons in squares?) flap for the skies in grubby grey waves, and the smell of spicy snacks drifts from carts being pushed to and fro.
The ever-present pigeon
Extra raw chilli and onion on my dried peas, please
Along one wall is the Royal Palace, now behind barbed wire and guarded by soldiers, while on the steps in front of and around the other ornate buildings sit people relaxing in the sun, texting on their mobile phones, chatting away their afternoons, buying, selling, watching people watching other people.
Hanging with the lions
Bikes and cycle rickshaws sail through with their bells ringing people out of their paths. People come and go from garishly painted altars cratered with candle wax, while stone gods and wooden dragons gaze down on it all from their rooftop perches.
Wish I had a hat like his
We passed down a whole street of butcher shops. Skinned and naked carcasses of lambs and chickens lie raw on streetside counters, watching you pass with sightless eyeballs.
I spied my first ever Space Invader mosaic outside of London. They’re all over the place, but this is the first one I have seen with my own two peepers on foreign soil.
They came from outer space
Wandering through the back streets we came across a Bhuddist stupa, its prayer flags flapping in the afternoon sun.
Lurking stupa
Holy Tibetan prayer flags, Batman
We spent some time speaking to a travel agency about travelling on to Tibet. Halfway through the conversation he said to us “Where are you from?”. We told him we were from England, and he narrowed his eyes at me in disbelief. So I explained that I was half Mauritian, which made much more sense to him.
“You have the black eyes. The eyes of Arabia.” He said, moving his fingers around his own eyes to make a shape in a rather dramatic manner, “These eyes are considered very beautiful.” He went on. I stammered an unintelligible response. Searching the room for his white stick and dog. There was a short uncomfortable silence.
“Your eyes are blue.” He said to M. Then “I am sorry. I don’t know if this is an impolite thing to say.” We assured him it wasn’t at all. Bless him.
What I should have said was, in the words of Mark Twain, “I have been complimented many times and they always embarrass me; I always feel that they have not said enough.” in some kind of film noir manner. Before dropping a cigarette on the floor, crushing it out with my high-heeled shoe, donning my fur stole, and walking out in a sassy manner.
The streets of Kathmandu are as full of life as India was. Not here the calm and easy pace we have seen in Nepal so far. There are so many people, and they are doing so much. Life, love, religion, eduction, celebration, and the stop-start familiar wanderings of camera-toting tourists mixed into it all. It is lovely to be here in the heart of another strange city. I feel I could go on travelling forever.
Kathmandu - watch you don't step in any
But sadly for me it wasn’t to be.
We were worn down from trekking and jungle safari. Three months of cold showers, pillows apparently made from clay, grubby mattresses that made you mysteriously itch, clothes that came back from the laundry dirtier than they went in, five-hour bus seats that bruised you to your very soul, brushing your teeth with bottled water in fear that you would forget and use the tap, and food you had to more than occasionally pick hair out of.
It turned out that three months away from home and weeks before Christmas were too much for a homesick M.
The feathered ghost of Christmas future
So, instead of booking our train into the Tibetan mountains, I found myself sadly coming home. Home to my cats, my yarn stash, my family, my friends, and the rainy grey skies of my lovely London, where my eyes are not considered quite as beautiful, and where my wandering heart will long for the uncomfortable eight-hour bus rides and nights plagued by giant blood-hungry mosquitoes.
Hanging up your backpack, for someone whose heart eternally longs for the road, is like leaving a best friend. Yes, we had our bad times, but they were far outweighed by how heart-stoppingly amazing the great times were. I will miss my best friend.
But I hope that London, my soulmate of a city, will give me enough yarns to help me spin me some travel tales closer to home. And I’ll always be planning the next trip, and the one after that.
“If the rhino runs, we must run in a zig zag or climb a tree.”
We shuffled our feet nervously in the leaves on the jungle floor.
“If we see a bear then do not run. You run, bear run faster. Do not climb. You climb, bear climb. If bear come we stand in a group and we make noise. Stick,” our guide waves his thick face-high walking stick, “is for bear.”
“If we see tiger we are quiet and meet him eye to eye. Do not run.”
A misty jungle morning
It was far too early in the morning and we were stood in the middle of Chitwan National Park, having floated almost serenely across the misty jungle river in a long boat. ‘We’ refers to four of us, me, M, and Simon and Kate (an infectiously happy couple from North Wales), and our two jungle guides.
Our main guide was Chitra. The man who would keep us from being killed by wild beasts during our safari. He was a small and confident chap with an easy moustached smile, and an obvious delight in seeking out the wildlife that roamed the park he took pale and nervous tourists into daily.
Giant M, tiny Chitra
The evening before he had taken us around the park border and village. He’d pointed out walls made from elephant grass that were decorated in tiny paint-smear handprints.
Mum's gonna kill you!
He took us to the elephant stables, where the huge animals managed to look humongous and harmless in one go.
Elephants: a bit rubbish at hide and seek
He walked us along the banks of the river, where village women dunked their laundry in the brown water and laughed in the face of the marsh mugger crocodiles that shared their washbasin. He nodded a cheerful hello to the armed uniformed guards that stood at the park gates, and he left us to enjoy sunset over the lazily flowing jungle water.
The canoe we’d stepped carefully into, to take us into the park, was just wide enough to sit in and rocked from side to side in a stomach-clenching way. Still once you got over fear of being rolled into the murky who-knows-what-infested waters it was an amazing place to be.
The river was alive with jungle birdlife, in a way that would make Bill Oddie spontaneously combust with feathered overload. Most impressive was the flashing blue and orange of the kingfisher (who was also available in black and white). He hung over the water, wings in a frantic flutter, then dropped in the murky depths for a fish dinner.
The park's birdchart - Bill Oddie would be proud
The river also swarmed with sand martins. Tiny forked-tail darts who swooped and swung at flies, and shot torpedo-style into their burrowlike nests in the dry earth walls of the riverbank.
My favourites were the ruddy shelducks. Squatting in webbed-foot pairs puffing out their feathers in the morning chill. Ruddy shelducks mate for life, and if one utters its last quack, we were told as we floated by, then the other will follow within days. Ducks, it’s only fair to eat them in pairs (pass the pancakes and plum sauce, will you?).
Back to the beasts.
Landing mid-jungle my longing to see the chunky wildlife of my dreams dropped away a bit. It’s one thing to observe them from the relative safety of a jeep, but another entirely to be standing in front of them on your own not-so-fleet feet. Poised to run in a zig zag, shinny up a tree, scream your head off, or stare out a wild animal. In Kipling’s Jungle Book Mowgli could stare out even Shere Kahn, but, though I have given some filthy looks in my time, I wasn’t sure my eyeballs were up to Mowgli’s standard.
All that stood between us and the wild were two men. Two men in flip flops.
Flip flopped protector
And so we walked. Past leaves hanging heavy with red cotton bugs (not to be confused with cotton buds and used to clean your ears).
Don't put them in your ears
Past foliage damply housing leeches all too eager to drop onto your bare skin and tuck in. And past crumbling piles of rhino dung, big enough to build a small (smelly) armchair out of.
I am sad to say that our hours of walking were beast free. We saw rhino footprints, heavy and two-toed in the dust. We saw deep gouged holes where sloth bears had dug down to the sweet roots of trees. We occasionally saw deer poo.
Beastlessness
In the middle of the walk we climbed up a wooden viewing platform. Grassland stretched out on one side in a dry yellow carpet, on the other trees stuck out of a thick mat of jungle leaves. The jungle perfume rose with the sun, warm, earthy, and green.
Jungely
Chitra told us that three years ago we would have seen ten to twelve rhinos from up there. Today, due to the troubles the country had been through with its change in government when there was no one there to warn off the poachers, there were hardly any rhinos to be seen. A very sad tale.
Sadly not being eaten by tigers
On our way back to park a few curious monkeys dropped in to peer at us from between the leaves. In the distance a monkey war was kicking off to the screams and chatterings of its soldiers.
We walked back for lunch, and ‘elephant bathing’. I am not going to say much about Chitwan National Park elephant bathing, except that we didn’t do it. We didn’t because after seeing the elephant’s mahouts clout them on the head so hard their ears waved out in alarm, we thought it better not to encourage them. If you come here then maybe go down the river to see the elephants bathing without the tourists on their backs. It’s a lot more fun for the elephants.
I was a bit disheartened by lack of beasts by this point. Climbing into the jeep for our elephant safari I have to say I wasn’t expecting much. I had disappointingly not been killed by anything on four legs. Not even a nibble.
I clearly underestimated the power of a wandering jungle tusker.
Four of us crammed onto the small cushioned platform on the broad wire-haired back of our trusty steed, and with a prod of the stick we were lumbering off in search of smaller beasts.
Four people, one elephant, not much room to sit
An elephant crunching through the jungle is something of an everyday thing to most jungle beasts it seems. It wasn’t long till our mahout breathed “Rhino!” and steered our four-legged friend towards a patch of bushes.
Snoozing peacefully in their leafy nest lay a baby rhino and his somewhat more scary mother. Both creatures in their triceratops-like plates of grey armour, flies buzzing and landing on them as they snored on. Rhino Junior flicked his ears as we swayed closer, then sleepily blinked his shiny eye and rolled to his chunky feet to peer at us sideways. Seconds later and mum was up too, turning her great grey rear to us, after deciding we were clearly no threat. Clicking cameras and excited whispers from atop the elephant didn’t bother them at all.
What was that noise?
Go back to sleep. It's only an elephant.
We spied large-eared staring deer whose eartips would have twitched above my head had we been on foot, and flighty spotted deer who gave us a glance and flickered into the undergrowth. Haughty high-horned stags stayed just long enough to pose for photos.
I think he knows we're here
At the riverside we saw a large man-eating marsh mugger sunning himself on a mud bank. A streak of pale green scariness pretending to be a not-hungry-at-all log.
Marsh mugger ahoy
The elephant waded calmly into the croc-infested river, stopping to fill his trunk and squirt a refreshing drink into his mouth.
Other elephant safari-goers crossed our path from time to time, and we all beamed at each other in animal joy (except for these two who clearly could have been happier. Possible elephant sea sickness?).
Possible elephant seasickness
More rhino greeted us on the opposite bank. Chewing at grass and leaves, and ignoring us all the while. Seeing a rhino from above is a very odd thing. They look incredibly alien and yet a bit cattley at the same time. Like armoured cows.
Not armoured cows but rhincerouseseses
The elephant apparently doesn’t need a path through the jungle, and towards the end took to rushing randomly into the trees while branches and vines smacked us in the face and got caught in our hair. At one point we emerged from some particularly dense trees and I looked down to find an enormous hairy spider on my knee. I calmly flicked it off with my trusty camera phone before allowing myself a shudder of horror.
At the end of the trip we climbed down and thanked our elephant for his jungle tour.
Thanking you
So maybe I didn’t get to stare my tiger in the eyes. Maybe I didn’t get the bear hug I had been after. But waking a baby rhino from elephant back was possibly the best moment of my trip so far.
A world full of chunky beasts is so much better than one without. The only poaching I condone is that of eggs. And only if the yolk are just the right runny.
I had a good feeling about the bus that was to take up from Tatopani to Beni, where we would catch a bus back to Pokhara. The good feeling could well have been because the bus waved a knitted dashboard pretty at me that beamed “Happy Jerni to Pasanjar” in woolly letters.
We’d said our farewells to our fellow Brits, over the edge of a clifflike staircase which seemed only fitting really, made our way down to the bus area (where horses and mountain views saw us off), and wedged ourselves and our packs into seat on what we hoped was the right bus.
Tatopani says farewell
My good feeling was not going to last. But I didn’t know that. The knitting had told me my ‘jerni’ would be happy. Knitting has never lied to me before.
Knitted lies
The twitchy mid-teen bus conductor, with a gap between his teeth and unruly hair, banged his fist against the side of the bus, in the traditional make-bus-go-faster Nepali way, and off we rolled. On four wheels instead of two feet at last. Now I could relax. Yes, there I was relaxing. Enter disaster, stage right.
It wasn’t so much the constant rollercoaster of road bumps. I have learned to roll with those. It wasn’t the way our wheels were inches from the rockslidey edge of the river ravine below. I was well practiced in the art of ‘if I can’t see oncoming bus rolling into ravine and bursting into flames death then it won’t happen’. It wasn’t even the fact that the overhanging rocks on the inside of the road looked so very ready to play avalanche. No all that was just run of the mill.
The trusty Nepali bus
What was not run of the mill was the bus continually puttering to a stop every five minutes or so. The way the driving team (for there were many many woolly-hatted men expertly peering into the engine) got this well and truly sorted was to crack open the box where the engine lay (right around the gearstick, filling the bus with sweet petroleum fumes whenever they opened it), stick in a hand or two, and crank some kind of handle for an indeterminate time, all the while loudly gunning the engine.
The engine roared and died, died and roared. I eyed avalanchey stones the size of houses above us. Eventually the roar went on without the cranking, and thus we rolled on. Only to stop again five minutes later for the whole performance to begin again. The bus journey was due to take four or five hours. At this rate that may stretch to years.
Things were further complicated when we rolled to a stop before a delightfully dodgy looking bridge. A bus lurked on the other side of the bridge doing a no-you-go-first face at us. The engine-cranking woolly hat wearers all filed out of our bus and stood around the bridge peering at in much the same manner as they had peered at the engine. We had seen them ‘fix’ the engine. M thought it best to get out and let the bus brave the ‘fixed’ bridge on it’s own. I agreed.
Has anyone got any blu tac?
Safely over the bridge and still intact the bus races on to Beni. And stops again for more engine cranking about three minutes later. Where oh where is my ‘happy jerni’? The driver puts his foot down to coax the engine back to life. The engine roars back like a grumpy teenager. The sound bounces about the valley walls around us, just as a train of heavily burdened donkeys come clattering around the bend in the road.
Donkey panic ensues. Dust is rising in great fear-flavoured clouds, occasionally parting to allow a view of donkey rears vanishing back up the track. At the front of the train the donkey driver is holding the lead donkey quite painfully by the lips and nostrils to try to keep him still. He’s is not a happy beast, he’s all rolly eyes and jumpy hooves.
All the while the donkey driver yells at the bus driver to stop the engine, the bus driver continues to gun the engine for all he is worth as it is the only way the bus will keep going, the twitchy conductor shouts at the donkey driver, the donkey driver shouts back, no one can hear anyone. Things are not looking good.
Some retreating donkeys I made earlier
Our twitchy bus driver decides actions speak louder than words and goes after the donkey driver with a metal board from the bus doorway. The donkey driver picks up a rock the size of his head. The Nepali equivalent of ‘leave it, it ain’t worth it’ ensues. We get the hell off the bus and start walking.
I am still seeking my ‘happy jerni’.
Lucky for us the bus gods are smiling. We catch up with the bus in front which has stopped for a nice cup of chai. Stowing our stuff safely on the roof (where M perfects his bus surfing Teen Wolf pose),
Teen wolf
we climb inside to find the ‘happy jerni’ we were looking for. The bus is packed with thrice-wrapped urchins, chattering ladies, cardiganed old men, and the smell of just-peeled oranges, the evidence of which flies out the windows as the bus pulls away in a Hansel and Gretels-style trail behind us.
Happy jerni at last
At Beni we jumped into a taxi, driven by a calmly happy man who drives both calmly and happily all the way to Pokhara, via Baglung (a village that sounds like a Bond villian). All along the river are gatherings of locals, chatting in the shade, running up and down in the sunshine, balancing great silver cooking pots over smoking fires, and chowing down on all manner of local tastiness. It’s saturday and, according to our taxi man, it’s the day when everyone goes down to the river to picnic. He pats two bottles he has just brought back from a roadside hut, now filled to the top with yellowish clear liquid. “Nepali wine” he tells us, with a smile that assures us he’ll be drinking it later.
Dinner in Pokhara is a kick-ass spicy curry (I order it ‘Indian spicy’ and for once they actually believe me, must be the tan) and a glass of red wine to celebrate being back from the mountains. Everything is back to travelling normal at last. As I stutter down the stairs on the way out the waiter stops me, “Oh, you do some harm to your legs on trek.” he says knowingly. Hee hee.
So one night of recovery and we’re off again. In search of a Shere Kahn. Beasts. Yay!
Brushing your teeth with a quietly buzzing electric toothbrush while standing outside at a water tap with a view of Annapurna One, and being observed by several curious water buffalo in the field next door, is probably one of those moments where you feel like the luckiest person on earth. So there’d be stairs today, more stairs. I could take it. Look where I was.
My calf muscles, by this point, seemed rather angry at me. No amount of stretching seemed to calm their ire. I soothingly promised them much sitting down later, maybe some tiger balm, and if they were very good then a dip in Tatopani’s hot springs. They grudging relented, but not without some muttering I can tell you.
Chris and Anna argue with their calf muscles
Today was to be our last walking day. M and I, and my legs and lungs and his knee, had decided that the heights of Poon Hill and the lows of the deepest valley in the world (the Kali Gandaki gorge) were enough. Things would get colder and less oxygenny further on and, though it was sad to be ending the trek, we weren’t going to gamble. The yak steak at Jomsom would just have to wait. Thus making a yak somewhere very happy too.
So downstairs we went, our bellies full of chapatis with peanut butter spread on them (they had run out of bread for toast and they don’t appear to have any Tesco Metros in the area). Onwards to Tatopani (literally meaning Hot Water) and the steamy hot springs of my dreams.
Give me a sign! Oh...
Lovely last day stuff and things:
The path. The views. The moutain air. I just make you sick, don’t I?
One tree loveliness
A knitting lady I accosted outside of the loos at one of our stops, who smiled shyly when I complimented her on her stitching prowess and knit dilgently on while I took a snap of her (I asked first. She thought I was a bit odd).
Stitch and sunshine
The way my stomach lurched as we peered gingerly down the steepest flight of stairs to the sweeping green of the valley floor below.
Where's the lift?
Finally getting the butterfly I had been spinning round and round to photograph to strike a pose. Wing-ed fiend.
Wing-ed fiend
A man carrying a cage of very sad chickens on his back. Not a good sight but a memorable one. You could smell their sorrow as he walked by.
Tasty but sad
A bunch-haired girl who kept demanding we buy her oranges, and told us her age was “Ten o’clock.”
Tiny ladies carrying the components of an entire house on their backs. Yes, backpack-carrying shame for us all.
House carrying
The very last awesomely precarious suspension bridge, which suddenly became buckled and rockslid at the opposite end causing most of us to suddenly do speed-up-before-it-breaks-into-tiny-bits-and-pitches-me-into-the-river walk while crossing it.
Unafraid. Utterly unafraid I tell you.
Other end. Now okay to admit I was afraid. Just a bit.
Our first dust-puffed steps onto the newly made road at Tatopani. Happy to have made it, but sad to be leaving despite my whiny aching legs.
Yay!
Ah hot springs. They’re hot. They make you springy again. What’s not to love? Tatopani’s hot springs were less impressive than your mind makes up. In Iceland we’d wallowed in rock pools of stream and steam under snow and stars. Here we found a small stone square of slightly murky water, vaguely steaming in the afternoon sun and full of Nepali men in greying y-fronts. But hey, when you’ve spent the last four days washing with a jug and a bucket of hot water in a concrete room with goats peering nosily into the window, a nice hot bath sounds like heaven whatever might be lurking in the water.
M and I padded down to the poolside and donned our wallowing gear. I ended up putting on almost more clothes than I took off. The two Nepalese ladies in the pool were both covered to the knees, and when in Rome don’t get your haunches out if the locals don’t, as the saying probably doesn’t go.
The water was toasty. Slightly filthy, but toasty. The nearer you got to the corner where the springs were fed into the pool, the toastier it got. I braved it for a good long while, I do like to lobster, but eventually even I found it too much. My shoulders began to take on the appearance of gammon. I can take a hint.
It was a fascinating splashy place to be. At the run off pipe people happily soap themselves down and wash off the mountain grime. Probably the only warm wash they get without having to go to the trouble of getting the wood to heat the fire etc etc
Young men stood about be-panted, pretending not to watch young women who pretended not to watch them back. The ladies took down their hair from the usual single plait, and it fell in shimmering dark rivers impressively almost to their knees in some cases. I had hair envy in the extreme, even though I would have no idea what to do with so much headfur.
Small boys and girls also tumbled about in the greyish water. One of the boys waved a mangled toy gun and a soggy packet of chilli paste (fake blood). Occasionally he shot at one of us. The boys duly rolling in the water in impressive English villain death throes.
It was here amongst the steam and the soggy chilli paste that we met a wise man. A walnut of a man whose eyes looked authoritatively off in two different directions. He told us his name. It was a soaring dipping Nepali name that I would never remember. He smiled as if he knew this, and added “Each part means something. My name is Large Joyous Wisdom.” I was far too impressed by it to forget that. It turned out that for 48 years he was the Head of Agriculture for the whole of Nepal. He introduced apples, peas (yuk), potatoes, and other wonders to the whole country.
He’d been to England, and all over Europe. His proudest memory was attending the 14th International Potato Conference in Holland, where he climbed their highest mountain. “Three hundred and thirty…METRES!” he told us, slapping the water in his mirth.
He also said that while he was in London he has spent every weekend exploring. He’s often ask directions, and the people of London would say “Not now! Don’t bother me. I’m too busy!”. “Here in Nepal,” he went on, “we have time.” before smiling proudly and looking around at the mountains above.
It was a fascinating place to be. The heart of surrounding communities where people gathered to get clean and pass on news. Large Joyous Wisdom seemed much happier to be amongst his mountains than anywhere else. I had to agree.
How green was my valley? Pretty damned green really.
Dinner was a celebratory steak, a glass of Chhaang (like alcoholic cat’s pee), and a few well-earned beers. Followed by a drunken gathering to look at the frankly humongous spider living in Claire and Simon’s bathroom, which was clearly just waiting till they were foolish enough to fall asleep before it crawled into their ears to lay many humoungous baby spider eggs which would hatch out and feast on their sweet sweet brains.
You can enlarge this picture by clicking on it. But why would you want to? I mean really.
Sleep was very easy to come by for a girl full of still-mooing steak, ache-legged, and Chhaang-soaked. I checked for brain-eating spiders before sleep. Just in case.
Lauren ‘Deadly Knitshade‘ O’Farrell, many things in life but most of all a writer, traveller, knitter (ridiculously proud co-founder of Stitch and Bitch London) and S&B London Stitchette, and upside-down turner of small dogs.
www.stitchandbitchlondon.co.uk
