Fire and Ice

1. Ice

Buddha Air Flight 101 is an hour-long sightseeing flight northeast from Kathmandu to the highest peaks of the Himalayas, and back again. It is also possibly the world's most breathtaking airplane ride.

I didn't have high hopes for seeing much of anything this morning. A low layer of thick grey clouds started forming about 30 minutes before our flight. But once we got above 10,000 feet, jagged peaks began appearing in the distance, bursting through the cloud cover.

We headed further northeast and up even higher. "Now you see Everest on the left," the flight attendant announced. There is no charge for the flight if you fail to see Everest, so they do make a very clear point of letting you know that you're seeing it.

The pilot took us closer as one by one, each passenger was invited up to the cockpit for a better view. The clouds suddenly dissipated as it was my turn to go up front. The plane banked to the left and a massive wall of snow and ice appeared directly in front of us, with all 29,029 feet of Mt. Everest at the center.

Coming here at the start of the monsoon season, I expected to be trudging around in torrential downpours every day... and never thought I would get even a glimpse of a mountain, let alone the spectacular view I had this morning. I am so grateful for this experience. Nepal has been so much more than I ever imagined or expected.


2. Fire

"I've never seen anything like that before," was pretty much all I could manage to say to my taxi driver after spending about an hour at Pashupatinath Temple in Kathmandu.

On the banks of the Bagmati River, it is the most important Hindu site in Nepal. In addition to a meandering group of Hindu temples, a row of stone cremation ghats line one side of the river. Today they were being used in full force. On the first three platforms, bodies were burning in various stages of... Let's just say one was quite rare, one was medium and one was very, very well-done.

The smoke billowed up, but the bodies are burnt with so much fragrant wood and herbs that the smell is almost... almost not bad.

Further up the river another cremation had just begun. A woman's body wrapped in colorful fabrics was placed on thick slabs of wood. Dried bundles of sage grass were lit at each corner of the ghat. One by one, four balding middle-aged men stepped onto the platform, removed their shirts and symbolically tossed them into the river, where they were quickly swept away with the current

They circled the body three times, each of them touching the woman's feet. Then the first man (was he her husband?) was given a flaming wooden torch, which he matter-of-factly brought down onto the woman's head.

They stepped off the ghat, more wood was gathered, people came and went, four monkeys scampered up and down the temple steps. And, for the rest of us, life went on.