One Afternoon Two Temples.

Well it would be very wrong to come to Nepal and stay in Kathmandu without making a visit to a temple or two. I managed to find a very nice taxi driver who took me to the temple called Pashupatinath. I had a guide show me around and tell me all about the place. It is a temple built about 300 years ago on the banks of the Bagmati river which runs through Nepal and into India. It is a very important river to the Hindus as it is where their ashes should be scattered when they pass away. Hence Hindus come from all over Nepal when they are old and sick to stay in the hostels attached to the temple. If they die here the theory goes that their soul goes straight to heaven.

The pashupatinath temple. The group gathered in the foreground

on the steps are unfortunatly attending a funeral.

The temple is therefore a very strange place. There are lots of tourists around but also lots of Hindus who have journeyed to prey there. There are also funerals that take place right in the middle of all the crowds (up to 65 a day), no privacy for the families. It was very sureal to see funerals taking place, with the funeral pyres burning in amongst the tourists and the monkeys that are running around. When the fires go out the ashes are swept straight into the river. You can imagine how dirty the river is. As cows are sacred to the Hindu religion people make offerings of cows to the temple. However no one looks after them. They just roam around the temple, with lots of them wading through the river and ash. Yuk!!

I then went on to my second temple of the day called the Bordnath. This temple is a Buddist temple. It was much cleaner and surounded by shops and park benches to sit on. I had no guide here but the gist is that you have to walk around the Stupa in a clockwise direction. It is thought that it was built in the 14 century and some believe that it coontains a peice of bone that once belonged to the Buddha. I sat down for a while and lost count of the number of times some of the monks walked around the Stupa. I decided to leave when a mini monsoon started and tried to drown me.

A monk making a clockwise circuit around the Bordnath Stupa

There are more pictures from Nepal, have a look.

xxx