Tag Archives: nepal

Durbar Square

I’m staying in a room in Freak Street that’s little more than a plywood box. I’m not sure there’s much more than corrugated iron between me and the sub-zero December air. In the room next door, a couple of guys with some very pure-looking grass. I spend several hours stoned in the most pleasant way – none of the nausea and toxicity of British hash.

Breakfast standing in the freezing fog in Durbar Square. Not many folk about, and the guy cooking some kind of Asian-style eggy bread on a low charcoal burner is friendly. I breathe in the mist, the cold, and the gorgeous unfamiliarity. I’m just happy.

In a second-hand bookshop, I pick up a copy of Scott Peck’s “The Road Less Travelled.” Happy hours are spent over coffee and in odd corners, just reading, unhurried, un-harassed. Nepal is such a blessed relief after the fractious, pestered journeying through India.

Mike, the guy who’s motorcycled from England, reappears. I last saw him in Jaipur, when three of us rented bikes and saw the Bollywood filming in the fountain gardens.

We celebrate Christmas with water buffalo steak, and begin planning an end-of-season Annapurna trek.

Pot of tea

It dribbles at the spout, and that so offends me! Surely a carefully sharp edge could cut the flow crisply.

Steam drifts up from the cup, fine china not sucking away the heat prematurely, amber, golden, delicate tea looking beautiful, with one or two leaves swelling succulently in the bottom of the cup.

The china clinks and chinks with a satisfyingly stereotypically elegant set of associations. Miss Elizabeth Bennett.

The taste of butter and tannin. In the Himalaya, there truly is butter in the tea, but here it’s more of a long, almost chewable feeling on the tongue, yet with not a yak in sight.

The smell of tea leaves in a tin. The special teas I used to love, like Rose Pekoe – prising off the lid with the handle of a teaspoon, shaking the big black leaves against the ornate tin, and breathing in treacly dark, smokey smells.

The sense of repose and relaxation that a well set up tea scenario can offer – images of relaxed seating out on lavender-scented terraces, or cosy around wood stove on a crisp winter afternoon, fingerless knits clasped around an honest, steaming mug.

Sinking deeply into an armchair by the fire, legs folded under me.