On my first full day in Pokhara, Nepal, a petite woman strolled down the sidewalk and stopped in front of my table at the open-air restaurant where I was enjoying lunch. Her muted, horizontal striped apron was cinched around an ankle-length gray dress and long, glistening black braids wound around her head. A wide smile … Read more
Chime led me down a narrow grass pathway at Tashi Palkhiel, the Tibetan refugee settlement on the outskirts of Pokhara, Nepal where he’d grown up. Midway down the lane he stopped before a diminutive man with a long gray ponytail and gleaming onyx eyes. The elder Tibetan grasped my translator’s hands between his own as … Read more
Very few things in life frighten me, but by the time I arrived in Pokhara, I was scared. My left hip and knee had never fully healed from an injury sustained in Mexico earlier in the year and as a result even an easy trek to Nagarkot and day hikes around the mountain village of … Read more
Standing on street corners amidst clamorous horns and revving engines in Kathmandu and Pokhara, young musicians play sarangis, a traditional handmade wooden Nepali folk instrument that resembles a small fiddle. Although the sarangi is today used by many, it was traditionally played only by people of Gandarva, or Gaine caste, as they are commonly known. … Read more
Crimson and saffron robed Tibetan monks shuffled into Shree Gaden Dhargay Ling Tibetan Monastery and sat cross-legged on brocade cushions stretched in a double row down the center of the hall. Adolescent monks-in-training slid giant drums down the polished parquet floor to their older counterparts. Others took up ancient-looking metal horns that telescoped out to … Read more
