Canyon-Swing

(The internet is too slow for me to post any photos. Sorry.)

On Friday, I was asked by one of the other volunteers if I wanted to do a "canyon-swing" (I didn't know what a canyon-swing was. It's sorta like bungy-jumping, but when the rope catches you swing outwards instead of springing back up.) and I said I would go, even though I didn't think about it that much. I was told it was one of the highest canyon-swings in the world, which was a little intimidating. Turns out, it's the highest. On Saturday morning, five of us took a 3 hour bus ride towards the Tibetan border.

The canyon-swing consisted of jumping off a bridge and free-falling 160 meters in 7 seconds. We were in the first group out on the bridge waiting for our turn to jump but we still had to wait over an hour watching other people jump and scream and look terrified, which only made me more nervous. When it was my turn, I stepped out on the platform, the guy behind me counted down, and I stepped off. By then I had fully realized how momentously stupid this was and my brain had shifted to auto-pilot, and it wasn't till I was actually falling that I came back to reality. And I just kept falling (7 seconds is a really long time…). It was pretty amazing.

Here are some videos I found on youtube of the jump. I haven't watched them cause the internet is really slow, but I think they show the whole thing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Lw8mMErVN0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy1JwSRaI0M


Yesterday, I had a language class with Gelu and then he took me to Boudhanath, the largest Buddhist stupa in Nepal. Gelu, a Sherpa from Solukhumbu, runs a trekking organization but works at VSN whenever he’s not traveling. He just got back from a three-week trek with a couple from the Netherlands that are also working at VSN. We got to walk through two monasteries around the stupa and I got to ask him a lot of questions about Buddhism in Nepal. He cleared up a lot of questions I’d had about the blend of Hindu and Buddhist iconography I’d seen around temples and religious sites.

Gelu then took me to a Hindu temple nearby which we weren’t allowed to enter. There was a big sign outside the main entrance that said “Entrance for Hindus Only.” Gelu told me a really long story about how the temple came to built on this particular site which I didn’t fully understand, but went something like this: Around the 5th/6th century, a farmer nearby had a cow. And everyday, that cow would start squirting milk all over the ground at the same location. So, the farmer figured this had to mean something and started digging and eventually found a buried statue of Shiva, the Hindu god. The end.

Beside the temple area was a river and along the stone embankment were sites for open-air cremation. Gelu described how cremation was mandated by the Hindu faith and how it was the responsibility of the son of the deceased person to light the fire. Nearby where we were standing, alongside one burning funeral pyre, a young man who had come to cremate one of his parents was having his head shaved (apparently that’s part of the cremation ceremony). A little farther down the river, a body wrapped in orange-red sheets was lying on a stretcher and friends, family and neighbors were seated and waiting for the cremation to commence. Gelu described how the Hindus believed the ashes of the deceased would flow down the river all the way to India and eventually the soul would be released into heaven. There’s another place along the river, right under a channel that leads up to the temple, where the dead are often place before cremation. Every morning, milk is poured into the channel and runs from the temple to the site on the river where it washed over the body, whose mouth is open to receive the milk.

I’m still in Kathmandu even though I was supposed to leave today. Apparently the flight was booked. But, supposedly, I’m leaving tomorrow for Solukhumbu. I don’t know if I actually have a ticket yet, but the VSN guys are supposed to take care of it.