We began with a visit to the new monastery in Namgung. It was more leanly furnished than the better-funded Shey Gompa, but still nice. The images around the walls were tsonkas (tapestries) rather than being painted directly on the walls.Kinna helped us have a good conversation with the monk who opened the place for us. His father had been the lama at that monastery for many years. When he died, they found a new reincarnation, who is now 18 and studying in India. The man is therefore taking care of the monastery and local rituals until the reincarnation of his father can return. His son is a lama currently living in Taiwan, and he is taking care of his three-year-old grandson, who was there shyly playing with us.
Following the monk's directions, we took a shortcut straight up a side canyon. The steep, exposed climb was almost too much for Marcia, but evidently not for the monk's three-year-old grandson, whose footprints we could see. A woman came by carrying a basket, also unfazed by the steep trail.
The half-day hike took longer than it should have because I kept stopping to take pictures of the canyon that continued to open beneath us. Locals went about their work more or less as they have done for hundreds of years. We could hear a woman singing a complex song while she worked way below us. A goatherd chatted with us at a stopping place and got some eye medicine from our guide. The goatherd told us proudly that he had been in Eric Valli's movie Himalaya (a.k.a. Caravan). Although Valli received some criticism for romanticizing the story and not pumping more of his profits back into aid for the region, the locals seem uniformly proud of the part they and their country played in the making of the movie.
When we arrived at our destination Saldang, we were happy that our guide arranged for us to sleep in the house of the village amchi (traditional Tibetan doctor) Labrang Tundup. To be honest, we were both starting to get a bit tired of living in a tent, and with two more weeks of it to go, we were happy to have a couple nights indoors.This is the nicest house in town, given to Tundup's father a generation ago because the town needed an amchi. It is two stories high, three if you include the roof. Each of the stories is connected by a ladder made out of half of a tree trunk with steps carved out. It seems odd to use a whole tree in a place where it probably needed to be hauled over the mountain, but this ladder also looks like it will last a century. The house includes a small gompa, which Tundup uses for his incantations. We chose to sleep on a couple of hard beds that were offered to us, probably displacing the ten-year-old granddaughter Pema. Buddhist figures and Bollywood movie star posters hung above our heads.
It is interesting to stay with a village elder like Tundup. He shared his well-worn autographed copy of Eric Valli's 1994 book Caravans of the Himalaya, made a few years before the movie. Valli spent a few months as a National Geographic photographer living in this same house with Tundup, and he chronicled the daily life of the doctor. Tibetan medicine includes exorcisms and other rites to free troubled bodies of the evil spirits making them ill - sometimes an amchi can trick the spirits into invading an effigy or piece of clothing instead of the person, and then he cures the ill by disposing of the effigy. Tundup also showed us the instrument he uses for precisely touching hot rods to fire points on the body to treat high-altitude heart problems and other ailments.Another advantage of staying in a home is that we were able to clean up. Since we could use the house's pit toilet, our staff set up our toilet tent as a private washing place. It felt great to get ten days of grease out of our hair.
I walked around the village, which is built in terraces. Saldang is the largest settlement we have seen since Dunai, with at least a couple hundred people living in twenty or thirty houses. People seemed heavily involved in threshing barley and other fall harvest activities. The population will drop in the next few weeks as people take their yak caravans to lower elevations, but Saldang is clearly a year-round settlement.
One unfortunate note is that here, as elsewhere, the Italian group had preceded us handing out red balloons to children. Although this initially creates joy, the balloons quickly break and end up cluttering the ditches. And the children immediately expect that every foreigner has pockets filled with red balloons, and they come begging for more. If you ever come to Nepal or another backward country, please do not train children to beg in this way.
