TracyFood

Foto Friday: black beans can wait. 22 February 2008 8:27 pm

Posted by Tracy in : eating, meat, nepal, pictures, travel , trackback

On Monday I promised to write something about black beans in addition to fun with tofu, but then I got to wrangling my Nepal pictures and couldn’t bear to wait until next Foto Friday to post about them. So. Without further ado, another Nepal flashback.

The date: October 21, 2007. Our point of origin: Kharikola. The destination: Puiyun or Surke, where we weren’t sure we’d be able to find a place to stay, so Saila, the sherpa sometimes known as Britney, was sent sprinting ahead of our group in search of lodgings. The trek: um, kinda uphill. Yow.

Early in the morning, on one particularly steep uphill, I spotted something that made me smile:

Yep, that’s a bok choi right there in the center of the picture, somehow growing in a rock wall, between a water source I wasn’t allowed to drink from and my backpack, which I’d put down to take off an unneeded layer of clothing. (Our lead sherpa Nawang actually passed me as I was taking this picture, and asked if I was all right on the climb. Boy, was I glad to have picture-taking as an excuse to take a breather!) Later in the day, I felt justified at all my huffing and puffing:

As I noted in the Flickr caption on that picture, 2895 meters is about 9,498 feet, which is to say I was looking forward to starting my altitude sickness prevention meds. (I generally start getting my butt kicked at around 8,000 feet.) Even my dad, who’d never felt a hint of trouble from altitude in all his years of downhill skiing adventures, would eventually come to say that he’d prefer his next adventure to be bariatric. I come from a long, proud line of lowlanders, okay? But I digress. Our kitchen crew seemed to know that we needed extra fuel that day, and provided it with great style and flair at lunch:

Mustard greens saag, French toast, mystery sausage, flatbread filled with curried potatoes, tuna, and cauliflower tarkari? No wonder I did not have room for dal bhaat!

At this lunch stop, we were passed by a group of Tibetan refugees headed south. They were moving fast, carrying nothing — they had probably crossed the Tibetan border into Nepal two or three days before (by comparison, it would take us another three days to reach Namche, not even halfway to the border). According to our guides, in Nepal everybody looks the other way about Tibetan refugees, and there’s a large Tibetan exile community in Kathmandu where it’s easy for people to blend in and be safe. Of course, they also told us that at one point the Chinese government actually confiscated all the shoes from all the villages within a certain distance of the Nepali border, just to make it harder to flee. Whoa.

After that sobering bit of reality, we got back to walking, and soon the magic was back:

My cousin Mike took an even better picture of it from the other side. Cousin, that picture is so Nepal it hurts. Thank you.

Um, where was I? As we got closer to our destination, we started seeing more traffic on the trail, like this traveling butcher shop:

Apparently some areas are too Buddhist to slaughter animals in, but not so Buddhist that they won’t allow meat to be brought in from being slaughtered elsewhere. Wow.

I’m pretty sure Mom was more comfortable with meat in baskets than on the hoof:

Which brings me to my very favorite picture of a Nepali traffic jam:

Click through to Flickr for the full annotated play-by-play, but the long story short is: everybody yields to the water buffalo. Call it my public service announcement for the day. I’m sorry this post was so late — have a great weekend!