Whichever side of the tracks…

The conventional world view says that something different from yourself should be feared.

It happens with race… but I’ve been in places in Africa with children who have never seen a white man before and they seem to have no concept of it. It happens with religion… Christians who have never spoken to an Islamic man label the religion as “evil” because of a .0001% who are radical enough to kill people. It happens with politics… a “Conservative” labels a person “Liberal” and shuns them because they don’t agree with the other man’s view on how healthcare legislation should go.

The world is a massive place. A truly unfathomably massive place. To believe that everyone on earth should agree with me or you or the president or the imam is of the highest order of simple-mindedness.

The most important thing we can do with our fellow man is get along.

Keep this in mind as we venture into 40-something photos of a world completely different from your world.

This is what 3:45am looks like:

Now why would we get up at 3:45am? To go see the sun rise over the 3rd highest mountain on the planet, that’s why!

Well, you would be shocked at how many people are out at this hour. But this seems to be something LOTS of people do when they hear it will be good weather for a sunrise.

Or something like that… 😉

Today’s sunrise was at 4:44am.

That’s Alan, above, confirming the time.

Oh, there it is!

Our guide gave us the option of going and crowding around a few thousand people doing the same thing, or coming to a slightly different spot with the same view and be completely by ourselves.

Of course…

…he was a little apologetic about it, but when you’re on top of a mountain, the likelihood of a cloud passing by at just the right (or wrong) moment is fairly high. The other few thousand people didn’t get much of a showing, either.

How do I know? Just a feeling…

We were stuck in traffic quite a while.

So long, in fact, some of the drivers just gave up and fell asleep waiting for their passengers… That didn’t do much for the traffic jam on the side of this mountain.

Oh, while I’m introducing a few people, meet Stephen.

And a funny little graffiti nearby.

Okay, back to the story…

That little cloud actually didn’t pass for hours.

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It lessened a moment. But then… it really rolled in while we waited on a UNESCO World Heritage site to roll down the tracks.

I’ve never seen a movie filmed here. They probably should.

Or maybe they shouldn’t… I almost don’t want it to be discovered and popularized.

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Maybe a James Bond movie. It would seem so much larger than life, nobody would expect it to be real. Sort of like “Port Au Prince, Haiti” in the last James Bond movie. Not hardly. Or half the locations in the Bourne trilogy. Close, but not quite. (Sorry to burst that bubble, if you didn’t already know that.)

Golly gee, I’m getting off topic today.

I like time “waiting” for the train. Gives me time to see who passes by. Their regular day is crossing my path.

I, the outsider, observing what has been there for eons before I came. And will be there eons after I leave.

I don’t think people really complain much when a train with such history is a little late.

Keyshon, our guide, put us on the train and told us when to get off. He was going to run ahead. The train ride was approximately an hour.

Remember the absurdly steep drops of the past few days? Yes, lets ride a train down that!

I appreciated the ability to just photograph from the window, a fixed location on the move, as it were.

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A little bizarre riding a toy train through people’s back yards.

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That was a bit underexposed, but kinda turned out neat in monochrome.

Oh, and before we leave the train segment… we see Alan again. If you will remember, the photo way up top… 3:45am. Here we are sometime in the early afternoon.

Being awake for 12hrs at that point was a bit laborious for some. 🙂

There’s the outside of the train, if you were wondering.

A few years ago, a college world religions class took a field trip to some of the major religion centers in Chicago. That’s a fine introduction, but without seeing something on par with a true monastery…

…almost anything the midwest United States can throw at you just seems like a thin facade.

For these boys, this is life. Its why they are reluctant to call Buddhism any sort of “religion”… even being the first to admit the Buddha himself was Hindu.

So I spent some time there.

I might could have spent much more. I would have liked to.

Speaking of time, take a second with this photo…

🙂

But definitely spend some time with this one…

…and this one.

You’re looking at people who live what they believe.

Do you?

This, I can almost guarantee, looks nothing like the place you grew up…

…but there is absolutely nothing here to fear. The other side of the tracks, the other side of the ocean, or the other side of the world.

What is there to fear?

The mind of a man can generate such beauty and such evil. Fear and the inability to get along with someone who is “different” is at the root of so many of the world’s problems.

So here we are… coming to the eves of the roof of the world to drink tea in the place where the finest sits rooted to the steep hillsides. We’re making no grand gestures of goodwill or striving for any recognition or “peace prizes”…

…we’re just coming to have a cup of tea. We’re crossing the tracks, as it were. We are here to sit with the Indian, the Buddhist, the cricket player, the Sherpa… and each other… to ask: “Tell me about you.”

Because everybody has a story. Everyone has a voice. Over the cup of tea, we listen.

Stay tuned…
-Noah D.