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It is our last night in Nepal. While we’ll be sad to leave the country, neither Scott nor I will miss the Thamel District of Kathmandu. Anyone who’s been here in the past few years will understand I think – it’s just an overcrowded tourist enclave where every other person is trying to sell you a trek, hash, a rafting trip, or tiger balm, and the cover bands play the same songs over and over (right now, Sweet Child of Mine is pouring through the opened doorway of this internet café). Due to the fact that Kathmandu is the jumping off point for most trips, we’ve spent a collective week’s worth of nights here.

But, of course, with the bad comes to the good – the cheap Thamel bakeries that we visit on average twice a day, the Mustang Guesthouse that always has a clean room for us and has become a home away from home, the reliably delicious food at OR2K (thanks for the recommendation, Jen), and… hmmm… I’m hard-pressed to think of another good. I guess all the tourist trappings that I find irritable would be missed if they weren’t here.

Apart from Kathmandu, Scott and I have had an interesting time in our 30 days in Nepal. From the warm forests and grasslands of Chitwan National Park to the cold temperatures and astounding Himalayan views of the Khumbu Valley, from the haze of Pokhara and Phewa Lake to the clarity and crispness of the air in the Langtang Valley, Scott and I have tried our hardest to take in every moment. But we’ve barely skimmed the surface of what this country has to offer. I’d like to say we’ll both be back some day, and we might, but Scott will, for sure, return.

Sometime in the future I’ll get around to transcribing the journal entries I wrote while trekking in the Khumbu and Langtang and I’ll post them along with some photos.

In the meantime, I’ll continue, when I can, to post entries on our travels. Tomorrow morning we fly to Bangkok via Delhi. From there, our plan is to head north for a bit, take a boat down the Mekong into Laos, then Cambodia, and, if there’s time, into Vietnam. We’ll see what we can squeeze into five weeks. I’m thrilled to be returning to Southeast Asia, the locale of my first backpacking trip over ten years ago and several return trips between 2003 and 2005 (and home of some of the most delicious food in the world).

But I’m also nervous to see how it’s changed. Really nervous.

Gone Trekkin'

Tomorrow our trekking adventure in Nepal begins. At 7:30 am (if there is no cancellation), we'll fly from Kathmandu to Lukla and from there we'll be on foot in the Everest area for 2-3 weeks.

Our bags are packed with sleeping bags, hiking clothes, food, and not much else. We do have some paper and we'll both be writing about our days, but I'll likely not be posting any blogs until we are back in Kathmandu later this month. 

For Scott, somethings he's been wanting to do for a long time will finally be happening. For me, I'll just be happy to keep up and hopefully the altitude won't affect me too much. Okay, fine, I'm a little excited, too.

Holi Wars

When we left India, I was a bit disappointed that we were missing Holi (pronounced 'holly') by less than a week. As we'd learned from watching the movie Outsourced, Holi is a Hindu holiday that's celebrated by throwing brightly colored powder at other people. As seen in the movie, nobody is safe from Holi. As long as you're out of your house, you're a fair target. 

To our surprise, Holi is also celebrated in Nepal (which makes sense since Hinduism is the country's predominate religion, but we recently just learned that as well). For our second day in Kathmandu, Scott and I set out with goals to be accomplished – buy our TIMS (Trekker's Information Management System) cards, book a flight to Lukla where our trekking will be out of, buy food for the trail as well as other last minute supplies. Well, today, being Holi, turned out to be a crazy day to be doing a lot of running around Kathmandu, which is exactly what Scott and I were doing.

As soon as we walked out of our guesthouse in the tourist district of Thamel, we saw streetside vendors selling brightly colored powder and waterguns. In order to get the TIMS cards, we had to wander through many small alleyways and streets between Thamel and Naxal district and found ourselves in the crossfire of several Holi wars between groups of kids, teenagers, neighbors. People of all ages adourned in face paint or covered in a smattering of red, purple, yellow, green, and blue powder were drenched from makeshift waterballoons – small, clear plastic bags filled with plain water or colored water – or from buckets of water being dumped from rooftops or thrown at ground level. 

Besides just being caught in the crossfire, Scott and I were also direct targets. We'd pass kids gingerly cradling water-filled bags and as soon as our backs were to them – bam! – we were nailed, water dripping down our buttcracks. Some smaller children were even so polite as to request, "Can I hit? Can I hit?" before pegging us. Innocent people peddling along on bicycles were getting hit hard by water bags thrown by people on the street. Sometimes we had two or three different armed groups coming at us from different angles. At that point, all we could do was run fast. 

By the time we got some of our errands done and returned to Thamel, tourists and locals alike were covered head to toe in colored powder. People ould say "Happy Holi" as they smeared each other with color. Some groups got so rowdy the police had to intervene to break up the Holi crowds. 

Holi in Kathmandu was a city-wide waterballoon fight where anything and everything is fair gamke. In some parts of Thamel, Scott and I saw remnants of thrown raw eggs – that we were not the receiving end of one of those was something to be thankful for.

Hello Nepal

We – Scott, myself, and the steerer – were sitting perched atop an elephant in Chitwan National Park in southern Nepal and, in my mind, I was composing a blog post about my disappointment with our National Park experiences in this part of the world. We has just finished a 7-hour walk through a miniscule fraction of grassland and forest in Chitwan and didn't have any significant sightings. Scott would argue over my definition of the word 'significant.' Sure, we saw tons of birds, including a rare Egyptian vulture and hornbills and kingfishers, crocodiles and gharials, red-spotted deer and sambars, monkeys, but we didn't see any sloth bears or tigers or rhinos. Not seeing a rhino was what disappointed me the most. We've seen them wild in Africa but were excited to see this Asian rhino, which looks as if it's wearing armour. I was thinking that this elephant safari wasn't shaping up to be any better than the walking safari when – finally – on the latter half of our supposed hour-and-a-half tour, we finally spotted a rhino! Scott saw it first. It looked like it was next to another one, and sure enough, my vision was correct – we had stumbled upon a mother and baby. They didn't seem to be bothered by an elephant walking closer and closer; they carried on eating. Scott and I were trying to capture the magnificent creatures through various camera angles when two more appeared. They had walked out of the forest into the clearer area to eat. After spending some time with these four, our elephant driver looked at his watch and steered the elephant away – our tour was coming to an end and he had to get us back. On our way out, another rhino appeared directly in our path. She even charged at us a bit – rhinos have terrible eyesight – not realizing right away that an elephant would kick her ass. Another rhino appeared by its side.

In total we saw eight rhinos in Chitwan National Park, which made every other National Park visit on this tour worth it. We never saw the elusive tiger, but I have to say, I'm alright with that. Maybe next time.

Goodbye India

This is the first blog post I’m actually writing in real time. For the past two months, I’ve always just been catching up. Now, on our last night in India, I’m caught up.

Scott and I are sitting at an internet café in Varanasi. We have some hours to kill as our night train doesn’t leave until 12:40 tonight. Another overnight transportation adventure; we’ve had many these last two months. They can be pretty dreadful, whether it’s by train or bus, as we don’t usually get any sleep, even in the “sleeper” class.

By early tomorrow morning, we should find ourselves in the Indian town of Gorakhpur. From there we’ll take public transportation to the border town of Sunauli, cross the border into Nepal, and by evening – hopefully – be in Chitwan National Park. Keep your fingers crossed for us. 

*

From Bundi, Scott and I went to Ranthambore National Park to make a third attempt at spotting a tiger. We rode around in a bumpy cantor with twenty or so other tourists and … didn’t see a tiger.

From Ranthambore, we took a train to Bharatpur. We were told we’d be able to easily catch a government bus from there to Agra. On that train ride, I remember thinking about how I might miss India, how it was a bit sad that we were spending our last days in the country. But then we arrived in Bharatpur and everything seemed strange, stranger than normal. First, we couldn’t find an auto-rickshaw from the train station to the bus stand. So we got into a bike-rickshaw and watched a barefoot man slowly, but surely, pedal us to the bus stand. Once we got to the bus stand we were told that all the buses (and autos) were on strike for the day. Meaning, no bus to Agra. We spent a frustrating hour trying to negotiate a reasonable rate to go 60 kilometers to Agra. During that hour, needless to say, all those sad sentiments about leaving India were gone. We negotiated a rate of 800 rupees (it should have only cost us 400 in a cab) and finally made it to the famed India town of Agra.

What did we do in Agra? you might wonder. What else. We saw the Taj Mahal. And played cards by the red fort.

From Agra, we took a sleepless overnight train to Varanasi, the holy city of the Ganges. We’ve wandered around the many ghats, witnessed the burning pyres of bodies, rode a boat during sunrise, sat through an evening aarti, and have gotten lost among the windy alleyways of the old city.

And now we’re ready to go. Onto Nepal.