We left the sleepy, mahjong town of Lujing, outside Chengdu city in China early in the morning.

We had a plane to catch.

We could not find another way of getting to India overland from China due to border disputes, politics and bureaucracy, so we spent a little time among the clouds,

got forcibly fumigated by the air hostesses before landing, and arrived in Kathmandu three hours later. After going through immigration and customs, changing currencies and setting up a Nepali sim card, we hired a Tootle.

A friendly Nepali man took us to the lodge where we were to stay on our first night.

We walked some of the intense streets of Kathmandu,

and some of the gentle ones,

witnessed people gathered at the butchers,

and at the stupas and pagodas.

We came across personal struggles,

transportive skills,

and bigger challenges affecting people day to day,

Kathmandu is the first city we’ve visited on this journey, since we left Darwin, where drugs and alcohol are causing misery in peoples’ lives. Woody was grabbed by a man in the street. The man was inebriated, by substance and grief. He tried to cuddle Woody, forcibly, which set we parents off. We are all learning how our vulnerabilities as travellers conjure up fear, and reactivity, especially when just arriving in a new country. In reading J Krishnamurti again,

he reminds us how fear is often a precursor to violence, to a lack of freedom.

We parents were upset by the inebriated man. He required our compassion, our witnessing of his grief, our openness. Woody required protection and surety. Krishnamurti makes much sense to us, especially his thoughts about religion, however inside books, sense can be very clear-eyed, while on the streets such papery clarity can soon dissipate.

On another occasion on the edges of the tourist district of Thamel in Kathmandu,

Meg was pushed aggressively by a street vendor because we’d stopped in front of his stall to talk with another man who wanted to know about our travel plans. The push had the desired effect as we quickly left that unhappy place, after Meg offered back her views about his behaviour. We must have been an unwitting block for his livelihood.

The man who wanted to know of our plans, like many older street businessmen in this tourist district, wanted to yarn with us so as he could better weave our needs as travellers to his financial needs. Initially we were irritated and put off by this in Kathmandu, but later after speaking with Nepalis and understanding how business works here, we realised this perceived pushiness comes from an indigenous trait of connection through gossip and story sharing mixed with colonisation’s imported scarcity anxiety and lust for material riches. Nepal is currently in conversion from an indigenous culture into an imperialist one, guided by the west, China and India. This is the process from human-ecology interactive violence (eating, farming, hunting, gathering) to what Deborah Bird Rose calls, ‘man-made mass death’.

It’s easy for us to refuse what’s on offer in Kathmandu, in most cases. We are on a shoestring budget. But we also enjoy speaking with people and sharing story, even if we know there is financial intention behind the interest. It is part of the local/foreigner dance, here.

On our first night in this city, we went looking for and bought a khukuri from Ramesh, a former Gurkha soldier.

Gurkhas are a Nepali fighting unit who have a reputation for fearless military prowess. The word itself derives from Go-Raksha – protector of cows. This again reveals the conversion – cowherds become militia, famously employed by the British empire to their dirty work. No, we didn’t buy the big knife or khukuri, Patrick was given that by Ramesh to bring drama to our shared photo. Rather, we bought the little one that now travels on Patrick’s belt. It cost AU$30.

Happily, we’re back in the business of sliced mangoes for breakfast. Yes, this local green variety is ripe!

Wearing a knife again brings things up for us. We’re not going to pretend it is only for mangoes. While we are big fans of Krishnamurti’s ‘freedom from fear’ invitation, and for wisdom like this,

we also think there is a right time and place for what we call appropriate, conscious, or ecological violence, such as hunting, subsistence farming and slaughtering, and self defence. We say this without fear in Nepal. It is wild and unruly here, but quite safe in most places.

The work that Krishnamurti perennially invites us to partake in is understanding our inner violence – impatience, irritation, superiority, lack of curiosity, absence of compassion, preciousness, and so forth – and he offers meditation (post-thought peace), breath work (being in a state of wholeness with the world), and a daily mental practice of recognising early when we enter states of fear or anger, which when not faced, can lead to wounding. More common is psychological wounding than knife or physical wounding. This goes a little way to understanding the high suicide rates of men in Australia. While there is much necessary media about physical violence to women, few want to see more subtle and more common forms of psychological violence in our communities, especially perpetrated against men. The societal acceptance of Clementine Ford’s extremist misandry, especially in the so-called liberal media, is testament to this.

Before we left the city we scoured the streets of Kathmandu for somewhere to buy a cricket bat for Woody, and after much searching we eventually succeeded, here.

We found Kathmandu boys are mostly into football (soccer), though cricket is more of a thing here than in any other country we’ve visited since leaving Australia. We didn’t see Nepali girls playing either sports until Pokhara. Woody has been longing for a game, and we didn’t have an opportunity until we reached Bhaktapur, about an hour east of the city by car, through thick traffic.

We arrived and were instructed to pay AU$60 to enter historic Durbar Square, where we were to stay. It was too much dosh for we neopeasants, so we declined, cancelled our booking at a cheap hotel inside the square, and booked into this little sweat box with stellar views, just outside it.

A kind Nepali fella back at the gates told as that after 7.30pm the guards go home and people can freely walk into Durbar Square.

It was beautiful inside,

and fragile. In 2015 an earthquake ruptured many of the buildings.

We enjoyed this place for its dedication to the sacred, pissing street dogs, absence of motor vehicles and night time quietude and cool, though we also felt a sadness here – an old Nepal walled off from the rest of the country, which has been superseded by global imperialism and national political corruption.

We are seeing in the culture how technological ascent and the global machine conglomerate disturbs everything immensely, everyday. In Krishnamurti (1973) we read this:

“…we see that education, science, organised religion, propaganda, politics, have failed. They have not brought about peace, though technologically man has advanced incredibly.”

Five decades later we are observing that technological advances have led to the psychological derangement of people, making life faster, more furious, more interrupted, more anxious, polluted and permanently unsettled. It is perpetually draining to behold the continuous propaganda and promises of US-style empire capitalism, while living the actual realities of it.

The following day, to oxygenate our rather sedated bodies in play, Woody and Patrick started a game of cricket on the brick pavement that framed a water feature and temple outside our hotel.

They soon noticed a young boy watching and they invited him to play. He was shy and declined, at first. But after a while he started helping to retrieve the ball from the water. Woody got carried away with the bat on one occasion, which found him stripping down to his undies and swimming out to retrieve the ball. Sushil, the young Bhaktapur boy, who joined our game while school kids and teachers looked on from above in their classrooms, soon lost his shyness, and we all took turns to bowl and bat, often fielding the ball out of the pond. Sushil is a natural sportsman and he loves both batting and bowling.

Once the shade disappeared from the pitch, we all got mightily hot and so we invited Sushil to join us for a drink. Patrick and Woody found out, with limited language, his family business is peddling fruit, or should we say, pedalling fruit?

We offered him a banana lassi but he wanted a Coke,

that slow release poison in a bottle, killing the microbiomes of Nepali everywhere courtesy of the psychological warfare conducted by US empire admen and women.

We observed again in Bhaktapur that Mother Country has a way of slowly eating up that which is not required,

and like all hubristic civilisations over the last 5000 years, the US empire will be eaten up too.

The following day, when we came back into the traffic jams of Kathmandu city, we glimpsed a goatherd and his animals travelling by foot.

What are we doing in this city? We want to behold subsistence-resilience, not traffic! We stayed one more night in this little cosy, mozzie-filled room,

laughed at the phenomena of us only tripping in the streets in China’s cities, which are flat, expensive and new, yet never in the countries that keep our street senses switched on,

once again marvelled at the mind-fuck that is the electrical experience in southeast and subcontinent Asia,

and headed out to find a Nepali restaurant mostly catering to locals.

We all loved the food at the Himalayan Yak, especially Woody,

and the family who ran this modest restaurant were a big part of the love we consumed in their fare. We also liked and noted the lack of advertising outside the restaurant, just a lovely gold and red drape that suggested some form of business.

The next morning we left Kathmandu, we walked to the bus stop in the rain.

We had just received a message from our friend, Trace, who asked us to look out for cyclists carrying all manner of things in Nepal. Trace is an inspiring children’s book writer and illustrator, and she told us she is considering doing a children’s book on the subject, after years of noting and documenting the beauty of such low-tech transportation and the everyday miracles of what can be sometimes carried on a bike.

We only published one bike of this husband and wife gleaning duo, in our previous Laos-China post. So, for Trace, and anyone else who is into appropriate technology, here are the wonderful cycling twosome we spoke with in Chengdu. The husband is carrying cardboard recycling; the wife is carrying plastic.

Our bus left Kathmandu at 7am, and there was talk on the bus about the potential of landslides because of the heavy rain overnight. We travelled with great alertness,

witnessing at one point a local bus on the other side of the road marooned in road-edge mud, seriously close to tipping over.

We followed the powerful Trishuli River for some time, and when the driver pulled over for punters to buy food and use the public toilets, we soaked up the energy of the river.

On and off over this several hour bus passage, the rain belted down,

and we saw locals or government employees out in it, trying to elevate the force of the water causing the land to slide.

There were innumerable examples of the concrete walls, attempting to arrest the pressure, failing.

At Dumre we got off the bus and hopped in a taxi for a ten minute drive up to the high country of Bandipur. Oh, how our senses relaxed as we moved towards this misty,

sane,

magical,

place.

We booked into this room for AU$20 per night,

looked out onto the town from the hotel,

went for a walk,

beheld sweetness and beauty everywhere,

and felt our nervous systems calm. In the main street of the town, no motors were permitted, and we witnessed first hand what a pre-industrial village would have felt like, and the greater peace that would have resulted. We asked if this man would be happy for us to photograph him and his craft.

Instead of delivery trucks, people carried things along the street with traditional baskets.

What we witnessed here is an easy work ethic, a green gym epistemology – a time for yarning and gossip, and a time to carry and labour.

No one seemed overly consumed by their work here, although the man sewing (above) did seem to be the exception. Every time we passed his doors he was working, and we felt a sadness in him that perhaps his continual labouring helps ease. We saw in Bandipur a beautiful village, only accessible from the rest of the country by motor transport since 1998, and that despite being part-supported by tourism, is still in tact socially, spiritually and ecologically.

Quite by chance we arrived in the low tourist season. Now is the coolest and quietest time of year. We booked one night, as we do with any new place, but immediately knew we were going to stay awhile. We just didn’t want to leave, and the goats were a big part of this.

Back home in Djaara Country, our flerd ran out of food while we’ve been away, and as a result kept getting out, causing generous neighbours and friends a lot of stress. Back in Thailand we made the painful decision to give our animals away. Being in Bandipur we witnessed peasant-sized small goats browsing on common land, as ours did, and the huge breeding-programme goats at the National Goat Research Centre, where we were welcomed in and shown the bucks, young and old,

and the does.

We tried hitchhiking back up the hill, the three kilometre hike from the research centre,

but there was little traffic. As as we walked we talked about saving our pennies when we get home to invest in some bigger animals.

Goats here in Nepal are a big part of daily life, and so too is play. Each day in the afternoon we went to Thulihill, the village park, to play cricket with anyone who wanted to join in. We fashioned stumps out of fallen sticks.

Playing both cricket and football here has helped dismantle the local/tourist, us/them barrier. When we come across others in Nepal we like to acknowledge them in the customary, local way, Nameste, which so elegantly translates as ‘the light in me sees the light in you.’ The more we stayed, played games and met people in Bandipur, the deeper our relations grew with the people of the village. Having worked in hospitality in our own tourist town of Daylesford for a number of years, we have a sensitivity to being ‘the locals’ too, and how tourists are often in extraction rather than connection mode.

We love the casual drying of corn between rain showers in the streets,

the Sishnu (nettle) and Bandipur (fermented vegetable) soups, served with local Tumba (millet) wine, which is clear in colour and tastes more like a spirit,

and we love Nepali money, which celebrates six indigenous Nepalese animals. The largest note, 1000 npr, is worth just over AU$10.

In the evenings we played cricket until the light faded,

and the local boys said to us, you need to get home because the tiger might be out. We were thrilled more than fearful, however, we took their advice and didn’t dawdle in the dark, more forested parts of the village.

On our third day, after writing a bunch of postcards,

we jumped on the cable car from the top of Bandipur,

and descended through the clouds to Dumre to send them. The Dumre post office, which we found online, didn’t actually exist in physical reality, despite the internet stating it did – the map is not the territory, just as data modelling is not our complex immune biomes. So, instead of sending slow mail to love ones we stopped in at the Dumre markets, brought some bananas and mangoes,

the latter of which we couldn’t get in Bandipur, and headed back up the hill, praising the craft of Baya Weavers (or, Tope Chara, in Nepali),

yellow-breasted sparrows Indigenous to Nepal and other parts of Asia.

Bandipur is just over a 1000m above sea level. On our fourth day the clouds revealed to us the Himalayas. While difficult to see in this photo, this first sighting of the majesty of these mountains enchanted us. Hint: Not all the white above the tree line is cloud.

There is an undeniable power in this country, and beautiful people. Dilap, who pointed out the mountains to us when we descended the staircase at his family hotel on that morning, is one of them.

We moved hotels to his, after the black mould became too overwhelming in our room in the first.

On the journey down from Bandipur to Dumre to catch the bus, we asked Dilap how his family survived Covid without tourism: “We didn’t have much money then, but Nepali all know how to grow food. We are an agricultural country. We help our friends when they struggle, and the food we grow at home is fresh and is healthier than from the store.”

In Bandipur we witnessed widespread home-grown food production and herbal medicine plants we use at home,

We helped heal Woody’s knee injury with our own peoples’ medicine kit – soaking this typical boyhood scuff of the knee injury in eucalyptus oil and warm water to clean it,

and later applying narrow-leaf plantain salve. He limped around for a day or two,

but soon forgot about it when it was cricket time. Woody’s immune system, of course, did most of the healing particularly with good food in his belly. We ate healthy Nepali food in this lovely town, much of it grown close by, (rice, lentil dahl, buffalo curd, veg curry and a weed saag),

and we sat and yarned in the clouds.

Bandipur bore many gifts, including the community of village cricket and a dreamy peaceful respite from the intensity of travel. We left with tremendous gratitude.

We caught another bus on to Pokhara, which was slow going (can you see the goat on the van’s roof?),

mostly because of the monsoonal rains causing landslides that narrowed the road,

but also other challenges.

It took five hours to travel 80 kms. It is currently wet in this region, and the next season’s rice crops have been planted.

We saw from the bus endless examples of subsistence agriculture. We love the fenceless nature of farming here, where cows and goats graze right up to rice paddies, and where the ‘fences’ are the human herders who stay with the animals to prevent them from eating the crops.

This being with the herd, being with the land, instead of constructing fences suits a less manic, less alienated culture. For the cow- or goatherd to observe their animal’s intelligent senses in what they graze and when and where, gives the farmer knowledges about deep and diverse nutrition. These knowledges slowly accrue in the being with, and often cannot be measured. In Nepal, we’ve witnessed how animals are often stabled for part of the day with rice straw or freshly cut weed fodder, after bouts of free-ranging.

This allows people to do other things throughout the day.

When we arrived in Pokhara, and went down to the lake, we found cows free-ranging among the tourists and locals.

The Pokhara farmer whose cows they were was on always on hand.

The very first image (thanks to Jordan and Happen Films) we published in the very first blog post of this journey, was of us moving our animals across town.

We miss our flerd and find comfort in the ways people are with their animals here, and also the way they are with each other. Like in the two-cows-by-the-lake image above, we witness daily the unashamed public affection Nepali friends have for each other here.

On the way to Pokhara we passed gravel mines on the fertile flood plains. This gravel is being used to make concrete to build roads,

and modern Nepali buildings.

We stayed in one of these buildings in Pokhara.

It was an oven inside because of the concrete acting as a heat bank.

Due to the monsoonal rains there are great numbers of mozzies so we needed the fan in the room all night to both repel the mozzies and try to distribute the radiating heat from the room so we could sleep. Here is the rooftop room we spent the first two nights in in Pokhara. When thermal mass is not a good thing, and not just because of the ruined fertile flood plains…

We spent the afternoon walking the streets of Pokhara to seek out various things. We looked for a shoe repairer to fix the holes in the soles of Patrick’s shoes. A skilled man in his street workshop stopped them from leaking,

and also brushed the mud off and polished them, all for the equivalent of AU$10. Locals told us he over charged us, but it’s all relative.

We also sought out more postcards, and a secondhand bookshop. There are several in Pokhara, with books in many languages. Patrick found Bikas-Binas (Development-Destruction): The change in life and environment of the Himalaya, a radical text from the mid 1980s featuring both Nepali and foreigner contributions, discussing through a development-critical lens what was happening to this beautiful region at that time. When Patrick opened this book it fell to this page,

In one of the book’s essays, Deadly Development, the author, Claude Alvares, reads the development of this region as a con-game:

“…for it seems now that the idea of economic development has been used by the ruling classes to induce people to accept not only enormous sacrifices, but the destruction or mutilation of older cultural patterns and physical and moral environments, and debilitating forms of dependence.”

There is a romantic, pre-development painting of a Pokhara village scene hung in the office of the hot hotel we were staying in. It depicts traditional stone, slate, clay brick and thatch buildings, which are only one or two storeys high and presumably cooler and ventilated. Villagers are engaged in ecologically-embedded labours,

That was a scene of Pokhara, according to the artist. This is a scene of Pokhara now, according to Artist as Family.

The irony of being dependent on some of the patterns of colonialism is not lost on us, though we baulk at most things on offer here.

Radical texts like Bikas-Binas don’t appear to exist anymore, or they are labelled conspiracy texts, and disappeared from view in the search engines. When you do a Google search for something today, it is always filtered according to the empire’s narrative. This is why

On our first evening in Pokhara we stopped to ask a man where we might eat where the locals go. John, a jovial Irishman, led us to such a place and joined us for dinner.

John, who is currently living in Pokhara, is a great source of local knowledge. We told him of our plans to bus from Pokhara to Sonauli on the Indian-Nepali border and go through immigration there. He told us that with our Indian e-visas – the most over-complicated and annoying piece of bureaucracy we’ve ever had to endure, and which Meg spent several hours filling in back in Kathmandu – we won’t be able to cross at Sonauli, and worse, John told us, “you’ll need to return to Kathmandu and fly to Delhi; there is no other way.”

We were gutted.

What we are witnessing on this journey is the more a country ‘develops’ the more ridiculous the rules become, and the less freedoms people hold. Development isn’t only about eliminating old cultural patterns and customs and transforming ecologies into construction sites,

it is also about controlling people, and herding them into sad little, hard spaces as workers or consumers, and both.

And this control stems from a desperate economic system based on a the fabrication of scarcity. Capitalists and Marxists alike perpetuate this system, which is always city-centric and debasing to people and life forces.

We are on this journey, having not gone overseas for twenty years for social, economic and ecological reasons, to give Blackwood a glimpse of other cultures and lifeways before health-fascism – biometrics linked to Digital IDs passports – become the norm, and people like us won’t be able to travel at all.

As those of you who have been following this journey from the beginning know, Woody’s love of cricket and our meeting ‘cultural others’ through a shared love of the game, combined with our more adult focus on subsistence-resilience are the main intentions for this travel. We know we need to be ever mindful of the restrictives, negatives and our expectations, acknowledge them and let them go through to the keeper.

The feralty of street dog life in Pokhara helps with this. The way they dance through the streets with their souls in tact gives us courage and guidance.

We walked for a while with these two,

up to the park, where cows graze on soccer fields and players kick around them and cricketers play until dark.

That magnificent steer (in the photo above) certainly had his eyes on the ball. How genius for a large park that enables festivals,

track running, football, volleyball, badminton, cricket and many other social gatherings, for the cows and buffalos to be the ecological lawn mowers of it,

eating down the grass while returning manure to feed the park, and being part of the social life of this beautiful commons.

Having cow pats scattered around the park certainly adds another level of coordination and awareness as a player, when chasing down the ball.

On our fourth and final afternoon of cricket in Pokhara, a two meter long, grey-brownish snake revealed itself, just near where this fella fielded a ball.

A few stones were thrown to encourage it away from the game. It was very respectful. We are impressed with so much in Nepal, especially the interspecies connections and reverence for life.

Last cricket season in Hepburn, we watched a Muckleford player bash to death a two metre long tiger snake with a cricket bat. It just wanted to cross the field to get to the creek. We players could have waited five minutes for the snake to pass. Almost everyone on the field cheered when it was dead and hurled across the boundary fence. There is deep trauma in a culture that thinks this is OK.

We moved from the top floor of the hot box hotel after two nights to another multi-levelled hotel closer to the park. The trees in the garden of the Trekkers Lodge significantly help keep the building cooler, despite it too using much concrete.

It also helped we were on the first floor. Outside our window to the south was another hot-box-for-empire building going up, but much more interestingly, corn and millet were planted together where in Australia people plant lawn seed. This backyard also housed stooked rice straw for the buffalo stabled nearby, with taro and bitter gourd on the edges of the patch for human consumption.

The sweet family who ran the lodge had other family members growing this food, and collecting fodder in the park across the road for the buffalo.

The owner of the hotel told us the buffalo lives in this shed, near were we are sleeping,

and sometimes free-ranges in the park. All of this is done in small suburban, often shared areas, and it is giving us so many ideas about the scale of a farm, especially if daily human ‘green gym’ practices of foraging fodder are incorporated. Buffalo, at least on menus in Nepal, is called buff. Instead of beef, buff sits beside chicken, pork and goat dishes. While we spent three nights at this lodge we kept checking from where we could, waiting for the buff to come out of her shed to get a goodly photo. But she liked her little cow cave, and all we got is a glimpse of her lovely rump.

Coming to Nepal is like doing a RetroSuburban masterclass. Not just in the growing of food, but in the way people transport things,

wrap things,

and feed themselves in a way that doesn’t require many resources and is accessible to most. We loved eating masala omelettes and drinking mint tea for lunch. The cost was around AU$2, not just because we are in Nepal, but because such a meal can be hobbled together without a middleman, without a supermarket.

Cafe owners share, borrow or buy ingredients from one another, so no food is wasted. Often, when we’ve ordered something we’ll see the cook go across the road to another cafe get an ingredient or two. This is another example of working together – another indigenous trait that hasn’t been destroyed here.

On our first day in Pokhara we spotted these lovely boats on Lake Fewa.

On our fourth day in Nepal’s second largest city, we hired one.

and rowed across to the other side of the lake to trek up to the stupa. On the way we beheld more rural food production and preparations, such as future crop patches mulched and left to go fallow,

and in other patches, manure brought from the stables and animal sheds to return to the soil, akin to any organic food production that doesn’t require the mining of phosphate rock.

More intelligent indigenous-peasant lifeways we witnessed on our walk, and which we have seen all over Nepal, are the ecological air conditioning systems that invite rest, yarning and cooling. They are often about 3 degrees C cooler underneath them.

Here, the technics required to build this air conditioning/recuperation/social system incorporates local materials. Large mossy benches made from brick or stone are built around (often pre-existing) giant ficus trees, and they operate as temples of relief and shrines to the long history of people and ecologies being in union here. We walked on, up the many steps,

past the ‘tree elbow’ love tree,

leaving lying dogs to sleep,

passing fading proverbs adorned with wild flower,

until we reached the stupa.

We looked out across the lake to Pokhara, at a city of 600,000,

and rested and meditated on the shady side of Shanti Stupa,

which was built by Japanese buddhists belonging to the Nipponzan-Myōhōji order, and local Nepali devotees and artisans.

Our response to Pokhara at first was a repulsion for the tourism and imperialism that’s so clearly fucking over the culture here. But having meet with the locals on boats, such as Santos who grew up on the streets,

and over breakfast with Surentra who worked in Australia for five years as a chef,

and each evening playing cricket with a bunch of generous young men,

who generously included us in their afternoon games, we felt ourselves shift from sadness into relationship.

We witnessed sophisticated subsistence-resilience here, showing the way forward for the rich countries that are speedily coming down the affluence bell curve,

and we beheld the growth and learnings within ourselves.

so, after two weeks, we leave this spirited country full of possibility and with much post-hope positivity.

On our last morning in Pokhara, we woke to unseasonably clear skies, and thus to the majestic Annapurna Ranges of the Himalayas.

This rare glimpse (at this time of year) of the power and magic of this Mother Country somehow changed us. Perhaps it changed us in how we relate as humans, now knowing this grand scale of range is possible. Or is it that Annapurna is a mythological site, and we were briefly drawn into her mythos as we silently stared. We held no expectations to behold her because this is ‘off’ season and the Himalayas are usually covered by clouds, but behold her we did.