Foto Friday: Hiranayavarna Mahavihar (the Golden Temple), Patan (Lalitpur), Nepal 16 November 2007 1:57 pm
Posted by Tracy in : monkeys, nepal, pictures, travel , trackbackMy photos from the Nepal trip are still pretty much entirely out of control: they are mostly uploaded to my Flickr but for now they are also mostly locked until I can give them all captions and correct their time stamps somewhat, and also I doubt that anyone has the energy to see all 1000+ of them at once anyway (I know I don’t!) But this morning I worked on a particularly nice little set, taken at the Golden Temple in Patan (full Nepali names in the title of this post), and I thought I’d share them here for Foto Friday.
For starters, here’s a link to my original post about Patan, one I actually managed to update from Kathmandu instead of sticking to the original automagic, woo! Patan/Lalitpur was actually one of the few days we didn’t stick to our original trip schedule like glue (we went on October 12 instead of October 13). Now, here’s a scan of my entry ticket for the temple:
and as always, you can click on any image to get to the relevant Flickr page for larger versions of the picture (in this case it’s particularly nice to do so because there’s a little bit of Golden Temple history from the back of the ticket, in weirdly translated but still pretty darn intelligible English!)
Here’s the entrance to the Golden Temple from the street:
That’s Peter von Mertens, who organized our trip, with Jessie, to the left of the entrance; I think the person in the doorway might be our awesome sirdar (guide and all around superhero) Nawang Sherpa. Here’s my brother Piett entering the temple behind PeterVM, and perhaps a slightly better view of the male and female lions guarding the doorway:
I should note that the Golden Temple is a Buddhist temple, which is why we were allowed to go inside at all. In Nepal, they’re very strict about keeping non-Hindus out of the Hindu temples, but Buddhist temples are usually more open to the general public. (According to my cousin Mike, currently back to adventuring in India, they’re not as strict on the subcontinent, but that’s neither here nor there.) Here’s the first little courtyard, where we paid our piddling 25 rupee entry donation and took off our shoes:
Look up!
Wow. The carving (wood and stone) and metalwork was all amazingly detailed, like so:
and so:
There’s actually a pretty extensive caption on that last picture, which gave me the idea that maybe I should be writing this post. Oh, but we haven’t even gotten to the inner courtyard of the temple, which was stunning:
and full of lovely detailed sculptures like this monkey:
and more:
And here’s one look back at the inner courtyard of the temple:
before heading back out into the streets of Patan, where old meets new in scenes like this:
and I mostly managed not to walk around with my mouth open the entire time and also the Patan museum is pretty excellent indeed.
Comments»
The pictures are so great, I sit and look at all of them. The fun of seeing Patan through your eyes gives me energy enough.