Last Day in Nepal

Since today is our last day in Nepal we are trying to fit in as much as possible.

We wake up early, eat breakfast and hail a taxi for the Pashupatinath temple. Regular check out time is noon, however Kiran has manged to extend that to 2:00pm so we have a few more hours to wander about.

The cost of the taxi is 400 rupees (we were told that we could probably barter this down to about 300 but we are so damn tired of haggling over prices that we accept that rate without comment).

The temple that we are going to is a Hindu temple that is considered to be one of the holiest Hindu temples in Nepal. It is situated on the Bagmati river which is also considered sacred.

There is a tourist fee of 500 rupees per person to enter the area and when we get there, we can see that there are already a few bus loads of tourists who have already arrived. I'm stressing the fact that this is a tourist destination because this temple is also well known for the public cremation ceremonies which were well under way when we arrived.

The place is incredible. You just don't know where to look when you arrive. It has a mixture of religious ceremony and almost carnival attmosphere. There are rows of vendor stalls hawking the regular tourist stuff and multiple guide "want-to-be's" wondering around asking the tourists for 100 rupees in exchange for guide service. You also have some amazing, old temples and stupas complete with holy men, dressed for drama and willing to take your cash for photos. There are beggars—both very young and very old, young children jumping into the river along side monkeys who are also jumping into the river. The river itself is DISGUSTING...polluted with trash, clothing, flowers, plastic wrappings and prayer scarves from the dead bodies, burnt wood, and we're guessing, human remains. Some people are wading through this mess, scavenging something but we couldn't tell what. There were also people washing their faces and shampooing their hair in the filthy water. Cows were also scattered about, strolling through the water. Add to this scene, groups of mourning (wailing) families, about 10 burning bodies on piers overlooking the river and you have a vague picture of what the scene was like. The smell was pretty bad as well.

We spend about 2 hours wandering around, trying to make sense of what we were experiencing. It seems very strange to us to be able to photograph the cremations and funeral groups in very personal moments when, as Westerners, this is something that is not typically done. These funerals are very public.

We decide to head back to the hotel for some last minute shopping and to rearrange our luggage contents to make sure we have distributred the weight evenly. We always seem to need one more suitcase whenever we are heading home from these long trips.

Now the wait starts for the trip home.

Finally some 5 star Luxury at the Yak and Yeti in Kathmandu

Our flight back to Kathmandu from Chitwan is scheduled for around 12:30 pm but I think we're getting a drive there around 10:00 am which means more airport waiting.

We wake up around 8:00 am and start packing up to get ready to leave. For some reason the A/C was acting funky all night, powering on for about 30 seconds then powering down for about 3 minutes. This went on for a while until we decided to shut the damn thing off entirely. Not an easy decision in 40 plus Celsius weather but the noise was too much. Needless to say our room was a sweatbox when we woke. Thankfully the A/C was back to working again the am so we cooled off quickly.

After a quick breakfast (including our regular branch of fresh picked lychees) we decide to head out for a final walk about. We take the opportunity to get some last minute photos and we visit a graveyard that we've seen while driving by bit haven't had the chance to stop at.

Of course we also take the time (for the millionth time) to marvel at the amount of wild pot growing at the sides of the roads and in the fields. Crazy!

We get back to the lodge and the security guard at the front gate checks his watch and says something to us about the time. Turns out our driver is waiting for us...the time for leaving has been changed once again and we have to leave to leave now. We pay up the bill (for beers, water and pop) and find out that they don't take credit cards—cash only. Luckily we have just enough rupees to pay. We are hoping that the ATMs are open in Kathmandu when we get there.

The deadline for the constitution was last night and the staff had been watching the news cast well into the night, however they were reluctant to talk about the situation this morning. All we could find out was "no strike" so hopefully all is OK in Kathmandu (we've had no Internet access in Chitwan).

The wait in the airport and the flight back are uneventful. We had hoped for lower temperatures once we arrived in Kathmandu but it didn't feel any different.

Kiran meets us as expected, and whisks us off to the Yak and Yet hotel (our only 5 start accommodation during this whole trip). Along the way he mentions that he has been very busy at the airport in the last few days. The final trekkers and climbers from mount Everest are now arriving back in Kathmandu however they have been held up in Lukla over the last 3 days. The weather has been preventing flights in or out of Lukla so the travellers are starting to build up in Lukla. Thankfully we got when we did with no delays.

We arrive at Yak and Yeti and are thrilled with the luxury—huge, king size bed, huge room, A/C, lots of pillows, great restaurant, elevators, a POOL!!!, TV and mini bar. We quickly unpack, get lunch then hit the pool. This is the life ( and we agree that next vacation will be 5 star all the way :-)

At dinner, we notice "diet coke" on the menu and miraculously they have diet Pepsi in stalk. A 250 ml can costs 250 rupees, that's around $3 Canadian. We discuss the crazy high price then decide to splurge and order 3 cans to bring to our room. Interestingly some of the items in the mini bar are cheaper than purchasing them directly from the restaurant...yeah mini bar!

Day three in the Chitwan Jungle

We start the day off with a safari which lasts for one and a half hours.  The first animal we see is a rhino, real close up. I guess being on the elephant allows us to get pretty close. We see deers, birds and several peacocks. I'm in awe at how the male peacock can have such a spectacular tail in the dense jungle without damaging the feathers.

After lunch, its a 2 and half hour jeep safari. We see sloth bears, wild boar, bison, spotted deer, peacocks, crocodiles more rhinos. A mother and son that were with us on this tour are avid bird watchers so the guide tended to stop for every bird siting which made the trip a big longer that it should have been, but what heck. They were like a dictionary of bird names (common and Latin names).

Back at the lodge we are faced with another meal that we are not sure we want. We have found that eating at the restaurant has become painful at best. We have resorted to being very specific about what meals we want because they tend to give us way too much food which ends up going to waste. I don't think they are used to cooking for westerners—they typically have tourists from China, Japan and India.

When I ordered 2 scrambled eggs for breakfast I received a bowl that contained two boiled eggs that had been smashed up, mayo and spices added and then the whole thing heated up. It was definitely NOT scrambled eggs and I ended up not eating breakfast that day. Another day I ordered vegetable chow main and ended up with a plate full of crispy chow main noodles with a handful of cooked noodles and a bit of curry sauce poured on top. Not all meals are bad, but its become a crap shoot as to whether or not we get an edible meal. I've resorted to making sure we have a bunch of lychees on hand to eat just in case the meal is bad. In defense of their cooking skills, I'm sure that if we ordered Nepalese meals the fare would be just fine. We're just at a point in the trip where we are getting tired of curries, dal bhat and momos so we're starting to crave western food again.

When we eat, its not uncommon to have the maître d', the waiter and the cook staring at us. Many times either Rick or I have glanced up form a meal only to find all three staring at us. We've never been such center of attention before and we're not sure what to make of it. It's kinda creeping us out. And this seems to happen every time we eat.

During the middle of the night there is a very violent thunderstorm. One our windows broke in the wind and woke us up. We start to secure the rest of the windows only to notice that water is pouring in through our front door. We put down towels to help stop the flow. The wind is so bad it looks like it is bending many of the fruit trees almost to the ground and the lightening seems to be constant...no breaks in between the flashes. The storm continues for almost two hours.

Day two in the Jungle

This day starts early at 5:30 am. We get coffee then hop into the jeep with a family of 4 who are visiting the lodge. This morning is bird watching. Now Rick and I aren't much into bird watching but its an outing so we go along. We see a lot of eagles, king fishers and a rhino in the distance.

At a few points during the drive we have to cross security check points and I noticed that the driver handed big branches of lychee fruits to the security guards. We had noticed that there are quite a few fruit trees on the lodge property—lychees, mango and pomelos. The mangos and pomelos are still green but the lychee fruit are just starting to ripen and we asked about them, we were told to help ourselves to any of the the fruit that we wanted to. I guess the fruit are popular with security guards too.

We get back to have breakfast then we're drive back to the sunset point to see the elephants getting their daily baths. We're invited to get on the elephants (if we want) and to get into the water a scrub their backs. I woman is walking around with a bunch of bananas in her hand. She's selling the entire bunch for 100 rupees, a bit costly, but I buy them from her to feed the elephants. That starts a run on banana selling and the woman gets a couple of kids involved in running banana bunches for her to keep her in stock.

I'm sure that the elephants could smell the bananas cause the closest ones started walking towards us. They take them one by one in their trunk and move them to their mouths.

After lunch we head to a Tharu Cultural museum which contains many old tools and clothing. It also explains that the Tharu are the oldest culture to exist in Chitwan today. Through generations of living in the jungle, they have developed a natural immunity to malaria. Due to some issues (not sure what) the government removed them from their land and then re-assigned them a place to live. This caused many Tharu to change their way of living form fishing to farming and many became impoverished or did not survive.

Off to Chitwan National Park

The flight to Chitwan takes only 20 minutes. They really rush you through these domestic flights. No waiting on the tarmac..sit down, buckle up, take off, get your butterscotch candy and glass of water then get ready to land, and get off the plane. Real quick.

The manager of the Chitwan Jungle Lodge greets us at the Bharatpur airport and a beaten up land rover is waiting to transport us. The heat is incredible—it's over 40 degrees Celsius.

The drive to the lodge takes about 20 minutes through a couple of small towns and even more villages with mud huts. We learn quickly that a vehicle in Chitwan is an open invitation for people to hitch rides and the truck stops a few times to pick up and drop of locals who are travelling along the road.

The lodge is relatively small and we seem to be the only clients. We are served a lunch plate with a variety of foods on the plate and then start settling in to our room.

There's hot water for showers (yeah), A/C (double yeah) and actual flush toilets so we ignore the fact that there's a couple of geckos wandering around in our room.

We decide to wander around the property which takes about 15-20 minutes so we extend our walk to the road outside and the mud hut villages that surround the lodge. It didn't take long before we noticed that the road is lined with wild marijuana growing. Some of the plants were taller than I was.

When we get back to the lodge, we are given a quick overview of what activities are planned for the next three days. Today we go on a brief walking tour of the village. Our guide explains that the mud huts in the surrounding area belong to people in the Tharu culture. They make their huts from bamboo reeds covered with a mixture of horse dung and mud. The rood id made from dried grasses. After the structure dries, the sides may be decorated with white hand prints for good luck. Our guide tells us that we can go inside one of the houses if we want..”they don't mind”. If this was a staged visit (i.e. a house for tourist display only) then yes we would have gone in, but the people are living in these houses. It didn't seem right to us to just walk into someones house so we decline.

We end up walking through the village into a more modern town and then to a river bank that had a few bars and a lot of lounge chairs. This seems to be the place that everyone gathers to watch the sunset so we order some drinks, sit back and relax.

More Days in Kathmandu

The next couple of days are uneventful for the most part. The weather is great, we are both feeling “healthy” and we spend most of the days exploring the Thamel district, shopping, eating and snoozing. The strike is only on during the middle of each day. Shops etc are open early in the morning and then again later in the afternoon. Cars are still not allowed on the road during the strike period and we find that we can tell if the strike is on or off when we first wake up—no horns honking means the strike is still on, horns means its off. True to the media reports, the strike does only last 3 days.

Most restaurant menus include “diet coke” but no one every has it in stock so I've managed to find a new favorite drink—lemon soda. Its basically the juice of one squeezed lemon topped with club soda. Jam packed with sodium I'm sure, but who cares...its vacation time. Rick has been sticking to his Gorkha or Everest beers.

Visiting ATMs has been stressful. Several times we have used our cards in an ATM (going through the entire process) only to have the machine shut down, giving out no money.We've been sticking to strictly bank ATMs so we're confident that there's no fraud happening, however it seems as though the transaction process (or the error messaging) is a bit out of whack in some of these machines. Also we've noticed that many of the ATMs do not take bank cards, only VISA cards.

Kiran gets back to us and confirms that Lumbini is off the itinerary and we are now flying to Chitwan instead of driving. This will bring the total flights on this vacation to 10 flights!!!

We repack our bags yet again and pass over our extra, non-essential luggage to Kiran who will store it and deliver it to our new hotel in Kathmandu when we get back from Chitwan. This service is fantastic for us because we did need to bring both winter and summer clothes which meant a lot of extra baggage to carry around.

Side trip to Durbur Square in Bhaktapur

We had decided yesterday to attempt a tour outside of Kathmandu. We called up Krishna, who had given us the guided tour of the monkey temple to see if he was available. We don;t usually go fr these guided tours however the first one was included in our package from PeakFreaks and we found Krishna very informative and willing to discuss almost anything. We have found it difficult to discuss the current political situation with any of the locals so we are interested to hear what he has to say about the matter. Also, since there are no taxis available, we are hopeful that Krishna will be able to arrange for a "green plated" tourist only vehicle.

We get a call back from Krishna- the tour is on! $55 for 3 hours with guide, car and driver included. We are heading to another city just outside of Kathmandu called Bhaktapur. Our main focus will be the "Durbur Square" in this city—where most of the interesting  and very old temples can be found.

The drive is slightly nerve racking...there are police every where. At first we were were worried that the police may target us, however we we find out that they're there to prevent riots ( in the event that the people start trashing cars etc.) so we feel a bit safer. When I had originally discussed the possibility of getting transportation, Krishna had told me that there would be no problems; "it is safe". Today he is saying we "probably" will be safe (what the hell!!) We get stopped a few times by police and are told to take alternate roads due to protests that are underway. The roads are empty of cars—only people walking, rickshaws, motor cycles, bikes and kids playing football or cricket. At one point our car is swarmed and there is a man yelling with a large rock in his hand.The people are peeking into our car and when they see we are clearly tourists they move away from the car, pulling the angry rock man with them.Krishna looks a bit worried, shaking his head muttering that he doesn't know what that was all about. He says loudly that he thinks the the man with the rock was drunk. We're just glad nothing bad happened.

The suburbs of Bhaktapur (at least the part we see) are kinda weird...many large, smokestack factories that produce red bricks, intermingled with wheat farms. We see so many people thrashing wheat wherever we go...on the road side, in the middle of the street, in the fields and in the Durbar square itself.

There is a small fee to get into Durbar square ( I think about 1,000 rupees each). The temples are stunning and the history amazing. What we find sad is that there is so much work to be done to restore these temples. The wood work really needs to be preserved better and a lot of it is covered in bird poop.

I had started the day not feeling up to par (I think I have the stomach flu that Rick had a few days back). When we enter the air conditioned, Thanka painting school, it hits me full blast and I have to sit but what I really want to do is find a bed to sleep NOW.  I keep thinking about how sick Rick was before and how could he possibly have walked that distance feeling this bad. Ugh. Rick continues with the tour of the thanka school and heads up to the main studio to negotiate a price for a painting.

Unfortunately, we decide to cut the tour short because I'm not up to walking. Krishna tells us that the only other place he had wanted to show us was the potter square, where the artisans are working in clay. Because of the strike, the potters will not be working today, so we aren't missing much.

We head back to the hotel where I sleep for the next 12 hours and Rick is left to explore Kathmandu on his own (and yes he has some stories about that!!! :-)