Thank You India

As I mentioned yesterday, after having an online conversation with a friend about India, I realized I have a lot of photos from those couple of days of our Nepal trek that I hadn't put online. In fact I have so many hundreds of photos from Nepal that there are MANY that have never seen the light of day. These photos are from towards the end of our trek when we got to the area of Nepal near the India border. We went over into India for one night and stayed at this beautiful cabin next to the Jogmai Tea Estate in the town of Meghma, India, which is not far from Darjeeling. I still have a box of Meghma tea in my cupboard, which is organic, and very good! So anyway here are some more photos from my trip. Enjoy! I'll be gone this weekend at my church's women's retreat in Huntsville, so that should be really nice. I'm looking forward to it!

Madan Tamang, owner of the Jogmai Tea Estate, and Brian Williams, Director of the Red Panda Network (RPN), walk in the mist on the tea plantation grounds. Madan has a passion for rhododendrons as well and is restoring many native rhododendrons to his land, and reforesting with other trees as well. Here is an interesting interview with him on TheSimpleLeaf website. RPN leads eco-treks through Nepal for other travelers also if you're interested - check them out!
Brian, Sonam (behind), Madan, and Mickey Mestel (a fellow trekker) walk along the path.
I don't think this is even taken at Madan's tea plantation but another one, but it shows the way the tea grows, and I think it's a cool photo. This is inside the gorgeous cabin where we stayed. Very upscale and very moderately priced and a world apart from the places most trekkers stay when trekking through Nepal!! This is Brian on the far left wall, Tim Gorski (Director, Cultural Film Fund), and Mickey and Madan in the background.
A close up of some of the tools used in processing the tea, when it's being dried.
Madan tells us about how he dries and processes the tea. No tea is drying right now because it wasn't the season for it to be drying.
This was the vehicle we drove to Meghma in. Most of the time we trekked but for this part into India we all piled into this tiny vehicle, WITH our gear. So that would like oh gosh I need to double check this but at least 9 or 10 people plus gear. That doesn't count the driver.
Yep we got a flat tire on the way too, and I've never mentioned that! These were obviously the infamous "retreads."
Across the street from Madan's estate is this. If I remember correctly, it is a gompa which is a Zen Buddhist temple but it's also housing a bunch of artifacts that Madan's father or grandfather got from Tibet many years ago. The building on the right is where all the artifacts or gods-n-goddesses are which I'll show in a sec.
A close up of the wall.
A close up of the stupa, the dome shape on top of the gompa (monastery).
Another close-up of the wall, with tibetan prayer flags.
Inside the building were all these statuettes. There were hundreds of them! These were on the second floor of the building. The first floor was the more traditional gompa, or monastery, where the prayers take place. The sceond floor was almost like a museum with all these statuettes and artifacts.
Some little cups lined the walls near the glassed-in statuettes.
Some candles were lit.
Madan spins a giant prayer wheel clockwise, inside the gompa. Buddhists believe that spinning the prayer wheels, which are printed with the Tibetan prayer mantra Om Mani Padme Hum, reverses any bad karma you have and help you on the path to enlightenment.

All photo Copyright (c) 2007 Wendee Holtcamp

i was a wild child...

Zen Buddhist gods and goddess statuettes in a museum on the border of India-Nepal. ! A conversation on Facebook with a friend reminded me of the one day we spent there in India, and going back through my photos I realized just how many I have never shared... I plan to include a whole bunch of pictures tomorrow from this part of my trek in a blog post tomorrow, and here's a teaser...
Copyright (c) 2007 Wendee Holtcamp

My boyfriend lives in Cypress, and that is where I went to high school (Cy-Fair High School). Cypress - just west of Houston is not a place I used to visit often and though I had some great times and great friends, a lot of "bad things" happened to me in high school also and it was a very tumultuous time at home, and in my life. So every time I would drive down FM 1960, which turns into Highway 6, toward Doug's place, I would drive right by my old house. You can see it from the road, and the first time I realized that I was driving past it I was like (to Doug), "Oh my GOD that was the house I lived in during high school! Look! I used to sneak out and go to that market and buy cigarettes! In fact that was where I smoked cigarettes for the first time!" So it was a major blast from the past. I drove by it umpteen times during December and then, one time I decided to stop by and take some pictures, and here they are.

Mind you I was a bit of a wild child in high school. My friends would spend the night because we could easily come in at our curfew, set the alarm, pretend to go to bed, and then quietly as a mouse sneak back down the stairs (we knew exactly which one squeaked), turn off the alarm, quietly open the back door, and go sit outside by the pool. We had it down pat. We'd sit outside at the pool for 5 minutes to make sure no one woke up. That way if they did, we could just say we were out there talking and smoking a cigarette (my mom knew I smoked back then). Then when no one came out (they never did), we'd climb over my fence and to the M&M market that was right behind my house - where someone would pick us up (or we'd have the friend's car parked). Boy we had that routine down pat. We'd stay out til all hours of the morning. At least I can tell my kids I know all the tricks so they better not even think they will get away with it!! My mom was a bit naive about such things... Maybe benign neglect?

Anyway...when I saw the house it was very weird, because I did not recognize it. I mean I knew exactly where it was, and which house it was, but when I saw it, I hadn't remembered it looking exactly like that. Or the yard being so small. But the first thing I thought was, of course, the time the guy dumped me on my front lawn, still too drunk to walk, after I was date raped and left me like a worthless piece of trash. I have written about that night of my life on here before, a couple times, but this was just all very weird to go back there. All the memories. My first boyfriend. My first truly "best friend." First time smoking. All the good and all the bad. That was the beginning of my journey into adulthood, my young adulthood and those were not good ways to be initiated into adulthood. My college years would prove to be much better.

This is the house I grew up in, during high school (moved there in 10th grade).
This is the view behind the house. We had a covered pool, which is what this is, and you can see it right off of Hwy 6.
M&M Food market where I used to buy my Ritz Menthol cigarettes. When I was taking pictures of the market and my house the guy who works there came out and was wondering why I was shooting pics. He didn't like it!
Do you see that little green electrical box? That is what we would step onto after climbing on the fence.

Scientific American piece

A dead Kemp's ridley sea turtle - a critically endangered species - washed ashore at Texas' Padre Island National Seashore, probably a drowning victim to net entanglement from shrimping boats offshore.
Copyright (c) 2008 Wendee Holtcamp

This piece in Scientific American I wrote came out a few weeks back and I forgot to include a link! The article is called, Fury Over Conservationists Taking Fees from Developers: A proposed megaport and a sea-turtle nesting beach collide within the group that maintains the endangered species list (IUCN). This was a crazy piece to write. It is an extremely complex and controversial issue, and I had to research and write it very quickly and cover a LOT of info in a relatively small space. Here's a link to the PDF that has the full magazine layout with a cool pic of mating sea turtles, and here's a link to the article on Scientific American's website.

It starts with these two paragraphs:
Every winter and spring, tens of thousands of endangered olive ridley sea turtles clamber onto the shores of Gahirmatha Marine Sanctuary, along India’s northeastern coast, to lay eggs in one of the world’s most spectacular phenomena—the arribada, or mass nesting, which occurs only in India, Costa Rica and Mexico. This past season, however, the arribada did not happen at Gahirmatha.

Although turtles have occasionally failed to mass-nest in previous years, conservationists fear this time the cause is dredging for a new seaport. Indian scientists and conservation groups place some blame on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), among the world’s most respected conservation organizations. The union has taken corporate money to consult on the port, effectively giving it a green stamp of approval even though it may spell the end for this nesting site....

Read more here!