All monastaries in this area are empty. This dissapoints me on many levels. Marpha was cute and freshly whitewashed. I ate a soup with a sweet old lady and her granddaughter near the house where the famous Zen monk Dr. Ekai stayed 100 years ago. Here is a quick rundown of his story (to my weak understanding - please email corrections to me as I err). Dr. Ekai was a zen monk and theology professor in Japan in the late 19th century. In studying the holy men of history his students kept pressing him for answers on how they were able to cure people with only their hands a la Jesus and Bhudda. He arrived at the conclusions that the most detailed records were kept by Bhuddism and that most of these were dystroyed during the Mughal invasion of Northern India following the rise of Islam. The best preserved records that had been transcribed from Sanskrit to Tibetan and were being kept in a very closed Tibet. To get access to this information he would have to sneak into Tibet. He left his family and went to Darjeeling, India were he studied Tibetan language for one year in the company of many migrants from the north. Immediately upon sneaking into Nepal posing as a Tibetan monk he found himself sharing a truck with two prominent Tibetan monks. They questioned him on his alias and he had to say he was actually ethnically Chinese by extraction. "Oh, OK" they said and one began to speak to him in fluent Mandarin. Thinking fast he said he was from a region of China where Mandarin was not spoken. The monks demand that he showed them he was able to write in Chinese which, owing to the shared characters between Chinese and Japanese Kanji, he was able to do. Satisfied with his alias he entertained both of them with the latest Lhasa gossip (which he had learned while in Darjeeling). In Nepal he spent the next year in the Lower Mustang area improving his knowlege of Tibetan spoken and written language, conditioning his body for his ascent over a high Himalayan pass into the forbidden kingdom by hiking in the Muktinath valley each day with a backpack full of rocks. During this time he lived in Marpha with the village headman Adam. It was from here that he hired his porter and guide and finally set off sucessfully accross the border alone, dismissing his confused porter (who thought Ekai was going up to the border for a there and back) only one day from the pass. Dr. Ekai was the founder of Reiki, a practice involveing the channeling of energy through the hands for healing. It has many adherents worldwide and is said to be quite effective. I had a particularly nasty case of Diahrhea cured by one woman using Reiki here in Kathmandu (she had just returned from a one month master's course in India). This woman was actually a pain in the ass to be around and very self-centered so one does not have to be enlightened to heal with the hands. According to Reiki practicioners this is an ability we all have but remains untapped in most. The Chaairo Tibetan refugee settlement south of Marpha was haunted looking and after crossing over to that side of the river and continuing south I had to enter Tukuche by taking off my boots and pants and crossing the Kali Gandaki river by foot (after a few quick prayers for safety). To my Chagrin nearer to Tukuche there was a small bridge and my forging adventure was superflous. I just read one of the most beautiful passages of Tolstoy's; that where Levin's brother Koznyshev aborts his mission to propose to miss Varenka. Besides the setting, and deliberate step by step tension being delicious Tolstoy reveals another of his arch-observations about human relations. There is an indescribable difference between a strong mutual chemistry between two people and an imbalanced interest supported by all the best reasoning and logic etc.. The reader instantly juxstaposes the proposal of Levin to Kitty with this one of an arch intellectual Koznyshev to the do gooder Ms. Varenka. With his intellect he perceives the moment and utters not what he has practiced to himself (a proposal to her) but rather a banality that ruptures the moment's mood and makes clear he is not to propose. Wow. Humorously just after this exalted section Tolstoy lays into each of the characters around Levin with unbridled savagery at their superficiality and artifice.