Jagat to Dharapani, May 27, 2009

Baby Donkey


Horse on a Mountain Path




Today we trekked through more villages. The last bit of the trail from Taal to Khoka was downright treacherous. We hiked over crumbling rock on a goat trail that was 2.5 feet at its widest and about 16 inches at its narrowest. (For the purpose of clearly explaining this to anyone who might take this out of context: the trail was treacherous not because the actual trail was steep or hard to walk on--the trail was actually flat with the usual rocks and stones that one would expect on an unpaved trail, but otherwise flat. What was treacherous about it was that it was very, very narrow and the "road" (as the Nepalis refer to it) was literally crumbling at its edges down into the river. The entire road had been chiseled out of a rock mountain by hand by Nepali laborers with a large chisel and a hammer--they were widening the road, so I got to witness this--so literally, we were walking over rock that was crumbling down into the river. And because the road was so narrow and it was very windy, it was scary to think that the wind might blow me away into the river). It hugged the edge of the mountain a little too close for comfort and dropped precipitously down into a raging Class V rapids river. I think I would have been less nervous if the wind hadn’t been so strong, but I could feel it blowing up against my back and making my balance a little unstable. I did my best to look straight down at my feet and avoided my peripheral vision at all costs.

As we were leaving a soda stand in the hamlet we had stopped in we nearly got run over by a stampede of donkeys that were running madly down a very steep hill. The source of their terror was their donkey driver—a young Nepali who was abusively whipping the donkeys at the back of the herd as if he had found a new sport. His face was wild with excitement as if he took pleasure in the beating. He was cackling and showing off to his friends. As he approached me, he raised his whip again. I could see terror in the donkey’s eyes and because I’m a sucker for animals I started screaming, “Stop it! You are hurting him!” but of course he didn’t stop. He raised his whip again--I was still screaming, he was still cackling, but this time he was within two feet of me and I had a knee jerk reaction—I picked up my trekking pole and wacked him hard on the ass just like he had done to the donkey. “Stop it!” I screamed. This time he stopped. His friends stopped. Their cackling stopped. All they could do was stare at me—their faces frozen in astonishment while I was still screaming like a madwoman “Stop it! You don’t have to do that! “Very bad driver,” Dorgee said. “He of a lower caste.”