Woke up this morning and had a sudden attack of laziness lasting into the afternoon. I honestly think that I ever went travelling by myself, I'd never get anything done with nobody to wake me up and get me moving in any particular direction. Eventually they did, and we took a tight (All our taxi rides have been tight with four people in the back seat) taxi ride to the Hindu temple of Pashupatinath.

Pashupatinath Temple is built with the river going through it, with an outer temple that anybody can walk around and an inner temple for Hindus only. Our mother was let in, and she said it was beautiful inside.

The outer temple had a series of long steps going down to the river, with platforms on one side of the river, with fires burning on some of them. These were cremation pyres, although nothing was visibly burning except wood and ash. A guy came up to me and Ryan as we were sitting there and struck up a conversation, which in Kathmandu inevitably turns into a sales pitch, and this one ended with offering to take us around the temple and tell us about it. We accepted, and after telling us some things, most of which we already knew, he took us to the sadhu's homes.

The sadhu babas are men who have renounced all that life can offer them by way of pleasure, except cannabis, which they smoke once each day in devotion to their lord Shiva. They're both respected and pitied by Indians. Most of them have knee-length dreadlocked hair, having never cut it, and have painted faces which really make them look, well, terrifying.

However like everyone else they're not perfect and as soon as we walked into the courtyard, several sprung to life offering to do yoga and pose for pictures for some money. One took the initiative, spread out his mat, sat down and put his foot behind his head. He held out a hand as if to say "Alright? See this?". His expression was really strange- I can't describe it, besides something like expectant, bored and put-upon. Not one you would think to see on the face of a holy man. Our guide tried to explain it by telling us "Well, even yogababas and sadhu babas need money to live, eh?", although how they'd survived before this wasn't touched on.

Across the courtyard from the sadhus was an energetic soccer game being carried on by the kids living in the apartments next to them- maybe the family of caretakers of the temple. Across from that were some teenagers staring out at it all from behind barred windows and locked doors. Our guide, I should mention at this point his name was Progress, no I don't know why, told us these were priests-in-training. "They must be kept apart from the world, or they will be playing, running, they will not be priests". Apparently they could go out any time they wanted by another door, although you'd doubt it to see their faces. But if you were shocked every time you saw something shocking, you wouldn't survive India for long.

Zaman's annoyed because I keep saying "in India!" although we're in Nepal. There's not a lot of difference besides dress, people, temperature, mountains, and more tourists, so you can see how I get confused.

When we made our way back to the river steps, there was a body wrapped completely in orange, the colour of God, on the opposite side, waiting to be burned. As we set our prayer lamps alight in the river, I felt strangely unsettled, but I was soon reassured by the the sight of a boy downstream going through the floating offering-plates for coins.

-Bashu