Nepal

Nepal

Otherwise Know as… Dammit Im cold 

Nepal was a very interesting country. So close to India, surrounded on 3 sides by India and yet so not like India. Nepal can best be described as everything I wanted out of India only better than I had expected. This is not to say it did not have a few… quirks? The pre paid usually safe and good option cab we got from the airport to the hostel was… pushed up to the front of the cab line… and I was fairly sure it was not going to make it into the city. Good thing it was mostly down hill from the airport.  Once at our hostel we realized we were in the heart of thamel the lively business and tourist district of the city. It was amazing. There was little shops selling everything from prayer flags to super heavy duty trekking snow suits. There was an abundance of clothing shops selling what have to be the coolest pants on the planet.  The unfortunate part about these clothing shops being they are clearly designing clothing for people half my size. The people here are not only on average a foot shorter then me but they are a lot thinner. It was a most annoying phenomenon for me to wander through a shop prepared to buy just about every item of clothing in it only to have them be not just a bit to small but significantly to small.  But persistence won out and I did manage to find a collection of really fun clothing. Apart from shopping ( which we did a lot of) we also embarked on a 3ish day hike in the mountains near Kathmandu valley. Day one of our adventure saw us climbing stairs for the better part of 4 hours. Yes stairs. In the mountains. It has come to my notice that in other parts of the world they treat their mountains differently than we do in Canada. Back home we have tons of space so we see the mountains as something to be looked at and occasionally hiked up or slid down. Not here. Here they see it as valuable real estate. People build things all the way up. To be fair we were not in the really crazy mountains and were nowhere near mount Everest or those mountains. But still these were high enough that back home nobody would have bothered to build on them.  Regardless we found ourselves walking up stairs. I have to say climbing stairs was way harder then just walking up a mountain would have been. It was a really nice walk however and it was neat to stop and have lunch at a little tea house along the way. It was just after this point that we acquired a dog. I am not sure how this happened but at some point we noticed that a cute little dog was following us. Well more like leading the way and wagging his tail. Little did we know that this dog picks people up along the path and follows them up the mountain every day. That night we stopped at around 2pm at our hotel for the night. It had a beautiful view and the sunrise the next morning was fantastic. But for a minute lets talk about how boring it is to sit around for 6 or 7 hours till you think it is reasonable to go to sleep. Because we knew we would be hiking neither of us was bringing extra stuff. No books, no ipod, no cards nothing. In the end we bought a deck of cards each and spent some time playing among other games Vs solitar. Yes. Solitair against eachother. This degenerated into cheating and then things got really ugly.  So after an evening spent playing cards and drinking our body weight in tea we were faced with going to bed. This may not seem like a daunting task but you never saw this room. We have pictures but it is hard to really do justice to this space. The bathroom is really not even worth going into detail about other then to mention there was a window at about shoulder height with no glass in it going into the hallway and a huge window at about chest height looking into the bedroom.  It was special to say the least. I would now like to say something about how cold it was. I know it is ridicule worthy to say we were freezing at 5C but honestly we were freezing. This probably has a lot to do with having until very recently been in a country where the average temperature was damb it’s hot.  So after putting on every item of clothing we brought and climbing into sleeping bags under some extra blankets we tried to go to sleep. It was about at this time that erin mentioned how indefensible our location was. And that the lack of windows that lock or really windows at all in the case of the bathroom ment that anybody could come in. with that thought now resolutely lodged my my head I decided to share with her that given how witchcraft works we are not safe even if we had locked doors and a moskito net. After spending the better part of the next 10 minutes laughing we went to sleep.

The following day was met with a much nicer hike. We could just about make out mount Everest peaking its face out over the shorter closer mountains. The best part of this hike was probably the absence of stairs.

Following our hiking adventure we had what I would call adventures on public transportation. Starting off from the tea house were we spent night 2 we walked down a hill to catch a public bus. Now everybody in the known universe knows that public busses are crowded and not overly comfortable. I have never before however been on a bus where it was acceptable when no other seats were available to sit with the driver on your lap. I had thought that no matter where you went there was probably some rules or general guidelines that everybody followed when it came to road safety. Oh how wrong I was.

Following our transit adventure which involved jumping on and off everything from busses to very small tripod like trucks?  we finally made it to the temples part of the adventure. First on the list was one of the largest buddest temples in the world.  It was really an impressive sight with a lot of detail around the edges and smaller temple buildings around the main structure. The part I found strange was the huge number and variety of shops and hotels right on the temple grounds. It was weird to me that just a meter of sidewalk stood between a huge temple and everyday life.  That day consisted of another 2 temples putting us at just over Erin’s max tolerance for buildings. The only thing that got us to the 3^rd temple was the promise of monkeys, and even then she waited outside because the monkeys could be found outside the walls just as easy as inside.

The next adventure involved tigers. Well it was supposed to involve tigers. Just like our last unsuccessful tiger adventure. This adventure started with drinking really really delicious masala tea made by some guy on the street while waiting for yet another public bus.  Seriously though I had about 3 cups of this stuff.

It was again on this trip that I noticed that the only thing worse than the way people drive is the way they build roads.  First of all it is important to note this was a narrow twistey mountain road with a rock face on one side and a drop into oblivion on the other. The last thing you want in this situation is a big chunk of nothing in your road way with nothing but a few branches warning you that now is the time to swerve.  Second of all, and I may be wrong but I doubt it. Mixing ashphalt at the side of the road with a shovel is not going to give you a good mix. Just saying maybe you would have less holes in your road ready to flip the unsuspecting driver into the river if you paid more attention to your pavement.

After arriving in Chitiwan national park we had lunch and set off on our jeep safari. Yes a jeep safari. Not an elephant safari. No we are not afraid of elephants, we just don’t want to ride one. It was remarkably hard to convince people to just please get us a jeep. Not everybody thinks it is a good idea to ride elephants. And if more people didn’t think it was a good thing we would have far less of them being  mistreated and chained to posts for most of their lives. But that is a rant best left for later. So off we go on our jeep crazy man who knows more then 2 species of birds. ( kingfishers and peacocks) as we drove to the park we felt like this was going to be a safari reminiscent of India. We drove up and then back down the same paved road through some trees and called it a “safari” Im not sure if I would have been impressed with this interpretation even if I had not been to Africa… but having just been in Africa we were still really unimpressed. We did see some deer and a few really large crocodiles. As well we found kingfishers ( being as previously mentioned a mythical bird that exists all over the world when somebody cant remember the actual name) peakocks, storks and the occasional bush pig. Still no tigers.  After driving back down the same road again we arrived at the lodge for dinner and then a dance show. Oh what a dance show it was.

Still a bit wary of local dance shows from the pigmey incident we went to this hall that had a real stage and seats and even a painted set background. This might be good we thought. Oh optimism.

In retrospect the best part of the whole evening was probably the announcers voice.  It was naisley and flamboyant with very painstakingly articulated words that still managed to have an accent.  The dances were for the most part really good and looked like they had been practiced and were preformed with skill and smiles. As far as the dances went the best ones are probably a tie between the fire dance and the large man-sized straw peacock dance.  No. I am not going to explain any further then that you get to make your own assumptions.

After leaving the national park we again went back to thamel for some last minute shopping and said good bye to Nepal. I for one would for sure be back… if only because eventually I am going to need new pants.