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.