Ropain: The rice planting festival 2015

Pic courtesy - https://www.facebook.com/jaysan.photography

Carrying on with the tradition of celebrating ROPAIN as in yesteryears, socialtours organized a group of expatriates and tourist to travel to the southern ridge of the Kathmandu Valley to indulge in one of Nepal’s most colorful and exuberant festivals. After the earthquake of April 25th this was one of the major events to take place.

On 27th June, 2015, the journey towards the paddy fields began at 8 am and we reached the Bajrabarahi temple after an hour of driving through earthquake damaged village houses and well manicured terraced fields. A brief stop at the temple and the team was on its way to the fields. After a quick change of clothes the planting began in earnest. Fifteen minutes of rice planting then gave way to over three hours of fun and frolic in the mud. Mud wrestling, tug of war and mud racing then over took rice planting.

In between local rice beer, rice wine, Newar style sautéed buffalo meat and spicy potato was served. This served as an energizer for the mayhem in the mud to continue for another two hours. After another hour in the fields mingling with the local farming community and giving continuity to on the spot invented games, it was time to relish a typical village Newar lunch. After shower and change of clothes under the open sky an eight course Newar lunch was laid out. Food was as varied as from beaten rice, chicken, bamboo shoot to your regular potato curry. 3 pm and we were pulling our tired bodies into the bus for the ride back home.

This year the crowd was smaller than in previous years due to the earthquake, but let me assure the fun wasn’t. It was an occasion that everyone relished and spoke highly of. It was also a measure of how far we had come after the earthquake in terms of getting our lives back to normal. socialtours has come back stronger and better after April 25th and we promise you a bigger and more eventful ROPAIN 2016.

All photos sourced from https://www.facebook.com/jaysan.photography

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Getting in touch with mother nature – A mud bath for the start of rice planting season in Nepal

Going Ropain

When rice cultivation begins every monsoon in Nepal, farmlands become playgrounds. This was definitely the case last weekend at Bajrabarahi, in the southern outskirts of Kathmandu Valley, where locals, tourists and school children alike played wild with mud at Ropain – The Rice Planting Festival organised to educate about monsoon rice plantation in Nepal.

June 29th is the 15th day of the Nepali month Ashad and the first official day of the rice planting season. The day is one of celebration for the farmers of Nepal. Rice is the most important cereal crop in the country. Many people in Nepal devote their lives to cultivating rice to survive and during the planting season the fields are busy from dawn till dusk. Extra hands are always welcome. 

On Saturday June 30th, two buses full of excited rice-planters-to-be, were driven out of the bustling Kathmandu to the lush green rice fields of the beautiful local village, Bajrabarahi, to be greeted with welcoming locals. With colourfully dressed local women hands full of rice stalks and men digging up mud the paddy was already in full swing. After a short demonstration how to plant the stalks no more than two at a time, placing them deep enough into the mud to make them stick upright the group was ready to get down and dirty with hands-on planting, digging barefoot into the soggy soft earth. The soil easily reaching knee-high, it is quite easy to lose your balance and stumble in the mud before anyone got a chance to push you in anyway! 

A bunch of novices at work it seemed, amidst the locals, but everyone seemed to enjoy learning the new skill. Hope the locals didn't need to replant too many of the patches planted by the novices... 

A wooden plough pulled by oxen and driven by human is still used in farming in Nepal. It is all handwork!For the locals in the village it might have even been strange to comprehend how anyone could not have planted rice before. For the Nepalis in the group it brought back memories from childhood. For the tourists it opened up a whole new experience – maybe some had played with mud before, but not many, if any, had done it on a paddy field in a small local village of Nepal.

And when work turned into play, there was no telling who was who, covered in mud from head to toe. After a typical Newari snack and a drink or two of the local rice beer filled up with new energy, some real mud wrestling also took place.

All in all, what a healthy, therapeutic, fun experience – a free mud bath treatment for everyone! Makes anyone regain some youthful enthusiasm.

On the next day, Sunday July 1st, it was the turn for about 80 children and some 20 accompanying adults from John Dewey School in Kathmandu to have the time of their life playing in the mud in Bajrabahani. Together with Powerful Hands, socialtours organised this educational Ropain programme to educate the school children about rice planting. See for more photos here. 

Going Newari

The Ropain Festival was not just to plant rice and play in the mud, but also to immerse oneself in another tradition – that of the cuisine of the original Kathmandu Valley inhabitants, the Newars. The meal, eaten by hand consisted of several different dishes each with a symbolic significance. Different dishes are placed in a circle around the beaten rice, staple rice flakes, to represent and honour different sets of deities depending on the festival.

At meals, festivals and gatherings, Newars sit on long mats in rows. Typically, the sitting arrangement is hierarchical with the eldest sitting at the top and the youngest at the end. The dessert, a simple delicacy of yoghurt (dahi) mixed with the beaten rice (chewra) and some sugar is believed to give good luck consumed on the rice planting day. Simple but delicious!

Going home with a memory that will last

Although it was not raining at all, there was already enough water and mud to get totally immersed, in both muddy and engaged way. A day like this is only a little peak in the real lives of the locals and one can only imagine how the work goes on on their paddy fields day in day out for the weeks to come. The event may have been more about learning rice planting for some, more about playing in the mud for others, but it surely was fun for everyone, and couldn’t really get more local or bring the mother nature any closer – For people in the Western world, rice on their plate comes from far away – now having planted your own rice, just imagine if by harvesting time (end November - mid December) the very rice you planted ends up on your plate!

We at socialtours would like to thank you all who participated in this event to remember for a long time to come. We were told by the locals of the village that apparently our “work in the mud” was indeed very useful, stomping the field ready for the them to go on planting.. While some of us are still washing off the mud, here are some priceless photos to remember the day by. The adage of “a picture is worth a thousand words” seems more than applicable here. Let the photos tell the story further: http://www.demotix.com/photo/1310940/play-mud-bajrabarahi-rice-planting-festival-kathmandu

Last but not least, a big thank you goes for the locals of the village who let us into their lives – even if it was just for a day.

I know where your rice comes from....

Danielle Shapiro (www.danielle-shapiro.com)

How do I know? Because I planted it! Well, some of it. And just that part that you might get from Nepal, which, in all likelihood, is not very much. But let’s not get stuck on the particulars. The point here is that Ilaria, Isabella and I spent a lovely, messy, fascinating day this past Wednesday wading through muddy rice paddies planting with locals in a village called Chapagaun about 10 km outside of Kathmandu. The farmers we met are ethnic Newari, Kathmandu’s native population.

The Rotaract Club of Mt. Everest and a social event management company called Life Entertainment planned our venture. We were there because Ila is friendly with a wonderful guy named Raj Gyawali who owns Social Tours (www.socialtours.com), a travel agency based in Kathmandu. He worked with the other organizations to get the word out about the rice planting trip. He and his daughter Tara joined us too.

Turns out, that June 29, is the 15th day of the Nepali month and the first official day of the rice-planting season. However, because the rains have been so good this year – and we have seen a few good downpours during my visit – farmers actually started planting earlier. Nonetheless, the day is one of celebration.

We started our journey with a short trip to a Buddhist stupa dedicated to Shiva near Chapagaun and then made our way to the rice paddies. When we arrived, the fields were already full of brightly-dressed women (and a few girls) bent over at the waist, water up to mid-calf and hands full of long, thin, green stalks of rice. Men also waded through digging up mud and, it seemed, thus prepping the earth for the planting.

Dressed as we were to get filthy, we shed our shoes and cautiously descended into the paddy. Isabella was a bit scared and wanted to be held the entire time, but Ila and I got to experience that weirdly unsettling yet simultaneously pleasant squish of the mud between our toes and under our feet. Our walking was unsteady until later in the day when Raj gave us the all-important tip that we needed to lift our feet out of the water with each step forward.

Once we were in the fields, the local Nepali women approached with a bunch of rice seeds and showed us how to plant them. Take two at a time, at least, and place them deep into the mud, standing upright so the greens stick out. Ila went first, while Isabella and I watched. I followed. With the Nepali women planting next to me, it was clear what a novice I was. For every row of rice I managed to plant, I think they probably completed five, at least. They move quick! The result, as we saw throughout the day, are the delicately beautiful paddies full of bright green slivers bending gently in the wind.

In truth, Ila, Isabella and I spent most of the day watching, quite happily so, and I taking pictures. But the others on our trip – we were a group of about 20 – got so into the spirit of the day that they ended up utterly doused in mud, tossing each other in, wrestling and playing a game that sort of looked like tag. Isabella and Tara, Raj’s daughter who is just about Isabella’s age, loved that I started calling them “mud monsters” and ran from them each time one approached.

After the planting was done, we boarded our bus and headed to lunch. We ate a traditional celebratory meal with our hands, much to Isabella’s delight. The food started with beaten rice – pieces of rice that are flat and crunchy, and sort of look like cereal. To mix with this was an assortment of vegetable and potato curries, buff and chicken and as a dessert, fresh yogurt. With a touch of honey, that and the beaten rice was a surprising treat.

Thus muddied, fully-fed and exhausted, we made our way home. It was a wonderful sneak peak into the daily lives of Nepalis, especially now during the Monsoon. Raj told us they will spend most of the next few months in their fields. We saw how the farmers remained in the fields even when the rain pummeled down, with ponchos perched on their heads and covering their backs. Undaunted, unperturbed. Impressive indeed. A really special day.