On the Banks of the Bagmati

Just imagine, I spent 8 weeks in Nepal with no health problems at all, and then in my last week I got hit with a stomach infection. My bottle of Cipro medicine that was getting lonely sitting on my bathroom vanity unused suddenly had my full attention. I'm doing better now, my hope is to make a full recovery before I leave on Wednesday so that my long flight home doesn't become a really long flight home. It does mean though that I have to avoid drinking any lattes while I recover since their milk contact reacts badly with the Cipro, and since my stomach has troubles when I drink coffee or tea without milk it means I may have made my last stop on my Nepali latte tour...

The stomach problems also kept me away from work the last two days. Thus there is a lot of catching up I have to do in the next few days to get everything done before I take to the friendly skies where there are no free Internet connections. I did set aside some time today though to talk a walk down to the river to stretch my legs and get away from my laptop.

The Bagmati River forms the border between the city of Kathmandu and its primary suburb Lalitpur, which is where I am staying. There are a lot of Hindu temples on the river banks, which led me to think that the Bagmati may be considered sacred. I looked online and indeed it is considered sacred. It's where Nepali Hindus are taken when the die. The bodies are dipped in the water and then cremated in one of the temples. The ashes are then placed back in the river and sent downstream to eventually flow into the Ganges River in India.

Some of the temples along the Bagmati

Some of the temples still have damage from the earthquake

As you may be able to tell from the photos, the Bagmati is also very polluted, and not from cremated ashes. The Bagmati not only serves as the final journey for Hindu worshipers, it's also the final journey for the waste of many of those who are still living. When we were in the Himalayan villages a few weeks ago one of my Nepali colleagues remarked about how refreshing it was not to see water that was black, referring to the typical color of the Bagmati.

There are also only a few bridges that cross the river, so traffic between Kathmandu and Lalitpur is constantly congested during the day since it's all being funneled across these bridges. Consequently, at times it seems like the Bagmati is considered more of a sewage line and a traffic inconvenience than a sacred river.

It would be easy I suppose to accuse the Nepalis of turning one of their sacred spaces into a toxic dump.  However, the waste has to go somewhere (after the last 2 days I am thankful for that), and Nepal doesn't have the infrastructure or the money to construct and maintain an effective sewage disposal system. They don't have the money to fix the roads and repair all the homes destroyed by the earthquakes, let alone to install sewage lines and a waste treatment facility. Thus while the richer homes like the one I'm staying in have septic tanks, the poorer ones only have the Bagmati.

Even still, there is lots of beauty in Nepal, even along the Bagmati. One example is some of the Hindu temples along its banks. Another is the suspended pedestrian bridge that I walked to today. I don't know when it was built or why the builders chose a suspension bridge instead of a column supported one like the vehicle bridge next to it was, but I thought it was a quite beautiful bridge.

Don't be surprised that I believe bridges can be beautiful. I am a civil engineer you know... ;)