Ash and Small Bear go on an adventure!

*Eeps! The following post was supposed to publish itself weeks ago, and it didn’t! Put it in your timeline of my life at around April 13. Sorry!*

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Escaped for almost a week to the edge of the Kathmandu valley. The hills in Nepal take every wonderful thing about the cities, scrub them clean of garbage and exhaust, and color them over with green and mist and quiet.  After an hour listening to the birds and the baby goats and the distant voices, surrounded by building-tall bamboo as big around as my arms and trailing away at the tips into smooth, barbed-wire arcs, the least pagan among you would convert to the religion of April!

My friend Ilka and I wanted to see the mountains, who spent the first few days of our vacation as modestly dressed under their layers of clouds and fog as the Nepali women under their saris. So we did a rain dance on the roof of our guest house, waving scarves and singing African songs to clear the sky, and the resulting thunderstorm, (which started the next day around hour 7 of my favorite pastime in Nepal: Hiking Up a Very Large Hill) blew down trees and power lines, shook the city, flooded the streets, confused the chickens… and the next morning we woke up to orange sunrise and mountains in every direction.

The Maoists overwhelmingly took last week’s election. How can a place this beautiful be also so desperate?