The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [128]
Gratefully, we scuttled back to the safety of the bus. I sidled in next to Cesar in the door frame, and he passed me my camera without taking his eyes off the corner. “Cesar,” I whispered, as a young Brit in blue shorts and a grey Liverpool sweatshirt strode out for his photo, “This is fucking nuts.” Cesar said nothing. He watched the kid, who was jumping up and down at the cliff edge. The bouncing made me nauseous with worry, so I turned to Cesar again.
“What were their names?” I asked, “The names of the women?”
“Try and get me mid-air!” shouted the Brit to his friend with the camera. Cesar watched stone-faced, not responding. I realized I had crossed a line, and immediately regretted the question. Shamefully, I turned away, back to watch the Brit, who had inched over and was now sitting on the ledge, dangling his feet off the thousand-foot drop. “Look!” he cackled, “Doesn’t it look like I’m about to fall?” He swung his legs.
“Sorry Sabine,” Cesar’s voice moved through the air thick and smooth, like a spoon cutting into cold whipping cream, “I can’t remember their names.”
“Look at me!” leered the kid, “I’m gonna fall!” He put the back of his hand to his forehead dramatically, “I’m gonna die!”
Sabine Bergmann grew up in Northern California and studied Earth Systems at Stanford University. In Bolivia, when she wasn’t busy risking her life, she worked for a local farmer’s aid organization. Currently she serves as a Peace Corps Environmental Volunteer in the Dominican Republic.
TIM WARD
Shiva and Sadhus at Pashupati Temple
The author peers into lives very different from his own.
HUNDREDS OF GRAY-BEARDED SADHUS, BABAS, GURUS, yogis, and other varieties of holy men come from all over India and Nepal to Pashupati Temple on the outskirts of Kathmandu each February. They come to celebrate Sivaratri, the day of Shiva’s birth. How do they demonstrate their devotion to Hinduism’s wildest divinty? By smoking copious amounts of ganja. Though hashish is illegal in Nepal, charitable organizations set up distribution centers on the outskirts of the temple, and dole it out free to the holy men on this holy day.
I explained Sivaratri to my friends in North America like this: “It’s like Christmas—the birth of God—but with hundreds of Santa Clauses going to the Vatican and getting stoned.”
The festival lasted for a week, building up to the day of Sivaratri itself, when it seemed everyone in Kathmandu came to Pashupati to worship. The temple got so packed, more than one thousand police were on duty for crowd control before dawn.
I woke up at six in the morning, something I don’t do at home in Washington, D.C. on a regular basis. Already the queue to the temple was backed up to the front door of my hotel—Dwarika’s—a good kilometer and a half from the entrance to the main temple. It would take these devotees six hours to make it inside to deliver their offerings and receive their blessings. But everyone stood patiently. They seemed excited, cheerful even, in the early morning darkness.
Fortunately, I had made friends with a young Nepali named Aristu who had a festival grounds pass. He had been helping his mother who was working at one of the guru tents inside Pashupati all week. The pass allowed us to sidestep the queue and walk straight to the entrance to the temple grounds. We were not really jumping the queue, since I was not lining up to enter the holy of holies—only Hindus are allowed inside the inner courtyard. Aristu flashed a pass at armed guards, and we slipped inside.
I had met Aristu a few days earlier on the forested, shrine-studded hilltop that rises next to Pashupati. He was a biochemistry student, nineteen years old—the same age as my own son, back in America. He told me that his whole family had become quite religious recently. They all venerated his mother’s guru and practiced yoga. He himself, as a student of science, believed “only 50-50.