Reflective

Yes, I’m still alive, and with an ever growing backlog of pictures to share, a new camera and only one free day a week in which to either be out exploring or indoors post editing photographs… well, I think you can see where I am going with this. I have always loved writing this blog but it seems for now that being out in the world is more alluring than describing the adventures I have out there. Perhaps I just need to develop a punchier style; I don’t want to keep all the amazing things I’ve seen all to myself, that’s for sure. Today I went to Tottenham Marshes in search of dragonflies and butterflies but all you get (for now) is this lousy skyscape… ha!  I’d better get busy, there’s things to show and tell…

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Dawn flight, Pokhara to Jomosom

It was still dark when we left the hotel, the air filled with a tropical bedlam of pre dawn bird calls. I’m not what you’d call a good flyer; when I flew for the first time (at the grand old age of thirty!) I felt as excited and awestruck as if I was being shot into the moon. That was then – now, I feel as if the odds against survival are just getting shorter every time and the thrill is tempered with dread. So walking out onto the runway to board our tiny twin propeller aircraft I was doing pretty well at staying calm. This route is cancelled at the slightest hint of bad weather, because if  bad weather hits during the flight the pilot will have to coax the plane over some of the highest mountains in the world in some of the worst conditions imaginable – there is no margin for error. Flights in or out of Jomosom have to be completed by 11.00 -11.30 am, because after that the weather changes for the worst and the fearsome gales that spring up between the peaks would dash a plane to smithereens. If a flight is cancelled, you KNOW you wouldn’t have wanted to be on it.

We were the last to board, with me in a seat near the tail and R sitting by the door. Look at the picture at the top of this post. That’s my view of sunrise through the open door as the plane stood on the runway. See that rope going diagonally, bottom left to top right?  That’s the rope they use to open and close the door. No, really. The stewardess whose seat was in front of mine gave me a reassuring smile, passed a tray of bonbons around the cabin (which I in my nervousness tipped up all over the place) ensured we were all strapped in, and yanked the door shut seconds before the tiny plane roared up the runway.

The plane banked and set it’s course over forested foothills studded by tiny villages and steep terraced croplands. Some villages had visible switchback roads leading to them, but the further in you got the thicker the forests became, and you began to see less and less dwellings in more remote and unlikely places, without even a trail for access. The plane seemed to almost graze the tops of the trees and then it felt as if I could, if my window were unglazed, reach out and brush my fingers through their leaves as the hills became mountains, their sides growing up around us.

And then suddenly, no more lush forests, no more tiny villages. The plane was climbing steadily, but if I looked out of the window I could no longer see the foot of the mountains… and their peaks were so high that I could barely see the tops. At last the plane climbed free, and this is what we saw.

I think I may have been making whimpering noises; I’m not sure, but the stewardess gave me a big reassuring grin and pointed out the astonishing peak pictured below – Machapuchare, or the Fishtail. Sacred, unclimbed and brilliant white it is a mountain as a child would draw it, it’s graceful twin summit hidden by a tiny cap cloud. I despair of the photo – it gives no sense of grandeur or scale. It’s a snapshot taken by an over excited woman through a grubby aircraft window, there’s barely any relation between it and what I actually saw.

Once past the highest peaks we began to descend immediately, following the Kali Gandaki river valley and through the deepest gorge on earth.

The river valley is subject to screaming gales which spring up from eleven am and continue all day – so all flights in and out have to be completed before this astonishingly dramatic change. That’s on a good day – inclement weather means no flights at all. A good thing too. If something goes wrong during the flight there’s no-where to go but into the river or the side of a mountain.

One of the most spectacular twenty five minutes I’ve ever experienced finished with our zippy little plane touching down on the short Jomosom airstrip while the other plane which works the route loaded up with passengers. These planes have an incredibly fast turnaround due to having to be safe back on the apron at Pokhora airport before the weather closes in for the day. As the plane taxied, I was able to see that the sky was pretty much taken up by mountains on all sides and that the landing strip was only a few hundred yards long.

Our plane taxied right up to the airport door and I marvelled that not many departures and arrivals can boast this kind of view. The mountain is called Nilgiri, and dominates the Jomosom skyline. Notice the other plane’s propellers? We’ve only just taxied off the airstrip and it’s already getting ready to go. No time to waste in these conditions!

So here I am, in the middle of Himalayas. You can barely see the sky for mountains.

If you want to read more about this journey click on Nepali Adventure to see all the posts!

 

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Sunset over Phewa lake, Pokhara

We weren’t in Godavary for long. Just a day to change some money, purchase tickets and travel permits and then we were on our way to Pokhara. We would only be staying one night on the banks of Phewa lake – and we had a dawn start to look forward to.

So this was our brief glimpse of Pokhara, a seductively tranquil lakeside resort beloved of lotus eating hippy travellers since the sixties. Many years ago an old friend of mine who travelled to Nepal, full of ideas of what she would do and see there, visited Pokhara in her first week and never left for over a month. “How could I”? she said, “everything I needed was there – sunshine, a backgammon board, a glass of cold beer and the mountains reflected in the lake – there could be no better place “. I can see how easily you could think that. But we already had our flight booked to Jomosom, and so the lake for us was just a fleeting pleasure. A good thing – we might have been there still…

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End of the rainbow, end of the road

About a fortnight ago my best beloved and I went to Whitby, where we camped on a rise above the town with our lovely friend A. It was a wonderful few days, and the changeable weather ensured spectacular skies – I have so many sky images from our visit that they will keep me in Skywatch Friday posts for months to come.  Here, we had been walking from Robin Hood’s Bay to Whitby along the Cleveland Way National Trail, when the sky blackened. A rainbow glimmered faintly among the clouds as rain began to spit, while the sun shone on the crops that line the final mile or so into town. I’ll be posting more about this walk hopefully, there’s a lot more I’d love to show you.

I’ve had a lot of adventures this summer – many have not made it into this blog because they kept me a little too busy, but also, I’ve been deliberately keeping my time online to a minimum.  Now, with autumn just around the corner I need to hunker down and concentrate on making new stock, and while that means spending a lot more time indoors near the computer, I’m just not sure that once autumn starts I’ll have the time to blog consistently.  I’m not going to give up this blog, ominous though the title of the current post must seem (I chose it just because it fitted the picture, I didn’t intend the melancholy vibe I now see it lends).  But perhaps the form will change, less writing and more images, or maybe  just a monthly bulletin. I’ll always try to keep up with the wonderful bloggers I’ve met along the way, but please forgive me if my visits to your blogs are fewer.

For more beautiful and fascinating images of the sky around the world, visit Skywatch Friday!

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Red Kite Soaring

Last weekend as I sat quietly reading a book in the garden at R’s family home, I glanced up to see a large raptor circling lazily in the hot summer sky. Buzzards are common in that part of Hampshire, but this most certainly was not a buzzard. The forked tail gave this spectacular bird away. It was a red kite.

I sat entranced as it approached, lower and lower, quartering the field below the garden. It made a couple of lazy passes over my head, enabling me to capture these images on my not so great little point ‘n’ shoot, then sailed languidly away. A better flyer than a red kite you will never see; swifts and swallows and falcons are spectacular, but a red kite seems to defy gravity. With the tiniest adjustment of those long wings they can swoop or hang as if suspended on a string, turning and gliding, a burst of acceleration followed by an eerie stillness, all lazily performed (it seems) with the minimum of effort. Watching these birds you almost believe that if you stepped off a high enough cliff with your arms raised just so…

The birds beauty and prowess are not the only reasons for feeling surprised joy when one just casually appears above you. It was at one point nearly extinct in the UK, with only five breeding pairs surviving. And yet in Tudor London these birds were common scavengers,  with a contemporary report stating that “the kites are so tame, that they often take out of the hands of little children, the bread smeared with butter given to them by their mothers“*. Although officially protected in London for their valuable scavenging services by which much putrefying material was removed from the streets, red kites were persecuted throughout the British Isles until they reached their final perilous decline. By the 1920′s, the red kite was all but wiped out.

It’s spectacular comeback means that while red kites are by no means common, you are more and more likely to get lucky and see one with every passing year, and indeed they can be locally common. They are moving outwards at last from their strongholds in Wales and The Chilterns, and this bird is one of a pair which arrived in the neighbourhood only this summer. The first time I ever saw one close up I will never forget; it exploded out of a farmers field on top of Winter Hill near Cookham, a flurry of rusty red and charcoal and so very obviously the rare bird of my dreams that I actually shouted it’s name out loud. A grinning local out walking his dog told me I that if I liked red kites, I was in for a treat. He was right; that afternoon was spent on Winter hill with a picnic, a bottle of wine and the spectacle of red kites in plenty riding the wind below us. I will never forget that first sighting.

*Source of quote:- Birds Brittanica

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