Images of Nepal

 Images of Nepal

A country landlocked, but soaring to the highest point on Earth.

Women toting impossible loads on their heads down dirt roads.

Men pedaling enormous tricycles through traffic with long lengths of bamboo or rebar dragging behind.

Men and women hawking homemade violins and necklaces in narrow city streets.

Potters fashioning clay bowls and firing them in a furnace open to the street.

Artists painting depictions of spiritual images in a street level shop.

Fearsome stone beasts scowling outside ancient temples and palaces.

Monsoon rains settling the city dust, and providing water to crops in the lowlands.

Green city gardens perfectly manicured by workers sitting on the lawn and pulling tiny weeds.

A vast and rambling palace, scene of the murder of the entire royal family by the king’s own son, whose marriage - to a woman not chosen by his parents - was denied by them.

A woodcarver at work fashioning small Nepali souvenirs, rhinos, crocs, and elephants.

A walk to the river down a rural road fringed by poor dwellings, chickens, smiling children, and a deep pond filled with water buffalo with the water level up nearly to their curly horns.

At the river, our first sighting of the Himalaya in the far distance, its snowy peak seeming to float above the clouds.

Women, celebrating a festival honoring ancestors, in colorful dress with pots on their heads.

Men and women working the fields by hand, the fields given to forty families to help them out of poverty.

These people treated us like royalty, providing food, and placing turbans around our heads and marigold garlands around our necks.

A man, Cumar, who taxied us Westerners around the city and countryside, providing information as we went, and whose twin goals were to send his kids off to college, and to retire by age 50.

An American couple working for years to provide safe houses for children kidnapped by human traffickers, as part of a worldwide organization fighting this crime. 

Colorful, three-story residential buildings throughout the Kathmandu Valley, with narrow, twisting streets between them, and laundry hung out to dry on their flat roofs.

Tiny shops on street level, selling everything from produce to computer items to building materials to repair services for the ever-present motor scooters, or scooties.

In the country, it’s one emerging from poverty, where it’s hard to tell which buildings are for animals and which for people.

A country whose topographical gradient rises from river valley lowlands, elevation at or less than Wisconsin’s, to the highest mountains in the world.

Crocodiles viewed from our dugout canoe, thankfully after they’ve had their breakfast.

Rhinos up close and docile, grazing on the grass.

A monkey at the monkey temple trying to steal a women’s purse.

At the elephant rearing and training station, watering baby elephants by pouring water into their trunk.

Spotted deer, the males with antlers at least half the length of their body.

Buddha statues in many places, the historical Buddha native to Nepal.

The friendly Nepali people, whose greeting is Namaste, “I bow to the divine in you.”