Travels in Nippal

Greetings from Kathmandu, where the internet is only twice the price it was in India (as compared to Pokhara, where it was like 5 times the price) and thus I feel justified in using it. Have a ridiculous amount to catch up on, I see, so will get to work as quickly as possible!

After writing my last blog post I caught my train to Varanasi, Hindu holy city extraordinare. Despite my fervent and fond thoughts of Indian trains all the time I was stuck on night buses in Himachal, the Indian rail network decided to put on a display of equality, and show me that sometimes all Indian modes of transport can be equally as miserable. The train was supposed to take 22 hours. It took 28. Now please, take a moment and imagine a 28 hour train. 28 HOURS. 28 hours in which you are stuck on a top bunk, unable to sit up because the roof is too low, fifty different Bollywood tunes from fifty different mobile phones resonating around you, and in unhappy co-incidence, 28 hours in which you re-develop the Mumbai death-bug of permanent nausea. One imagines that boredom is just boredom, its just a case of waiting out the hours. But its not that. You feel as if you are about to go out of your mind, that you cannot possibly bear it for another second, you want to scream, but you feel so weak and miserable that you can do nothing but roll over on your bunk, and wait, and wait. Shudder.

Luckily, from that moment on things could only improve. Now, Varanasi is a city of 1.2 million people, centred on the Ganges, and visited by hundreds of thousands of tourists, both foreign and domestic, every year. Consequently it is everything the guide books warn you against - packed, noisy, smelly, crammed to the brim with persistent fraudsters and hustlers attempting to get money out of you. I was fully expecting to hate every minute, and to stay there just as long as it took to pay my respects to the major sights.

I LOVED Varanasi. And, significantly, partially due to the reason why everyone else hates it. Everyone who speaks to you in Varanasi wants to sell something to you or con you. Therefore, it allows you to ignore EVERYBODY legitimately! No more 50 million conversations about my marital status and parent's occupations! No more getting rid of over-friendly Indian men! It was wonderful, and exactly what I needed. It wasn't only that though. The city is incredible. I was staying in a hotel right by the ghats, and you could go and sit there and watch what seemed like all of humanity - washing their clothes, washing themselves, burning their dead, hawking their wares, playing cricket, praying to their gods, eating, sleeping, walking. It was amazing. In particular, watching a human body blister and blacken and bubble and shrivel on a funeral pyre 'aint something I shall forget in a while - mesmerising. Likewise watching a group of guys washing themselves not 20m downstream from where the ashes were being poured into the river, although this was something I lingered less to watch! Cliched as it sounds, the place really had an energy to it. My hotel was surprisingly good and offered free dawn and sunset boat rides, which I readily partook of, though OF COURSE on the dawn one I slipped off the ghat and fell INTO the Ganges, because comedic mishaps are what Westie does best. That river is most definitely not clean. Studies have shown that it has something like 100,000 fecal bacteria per whatever-it-is when the safe amount for swimming is something like 500, so I made a strong mental note to put my hands nowhere near my face and to scrub throughly as soon as I reached my hotel. Given that I fell in pretty much AT the burning ghat as well, I'm now either holy or I've got cholera. One of the two.

The only thing about Varanasi was exhaustion. I was REALLY tired by now, and those who know me well (mother, I'm looking at you) will know I don't do so good when I get that tired. It's like thinking through a blanket of cotton wool, and you see everything in kind of hyper-vision, like its not really real. Mumbai death bug was also happily taking its toll, so my head was swimming and I was feeling sick a lot of the time. So, I enjoyed Varanasi a lot, but even now when I look back at it, it still feels kind of dreamlike. I spent most of my time there just wandering along the ghats, sitting in rooftop cafes overlooking the river, and getting myself lost in the Old City (an absolute maze, and actually quite scary when it's dark). On the third day I went to Sarnath, where the Buddha gave his first sermon, and filled with stupas and monasteries. I probably didn't take in as much as I should have, because I really felt bad that day, but I had an amusing rickshaw ride back, given that I refused to pay more than 50 rupees, and they usually charge foreigners about 200. My rickshaw driver kept saying, in a tone of shock "but this is INDIAN price, madame, INDIAN price!" as if I completely supported a system whereby tourists pay quadruple the price for everything that Indians do. At several tourist attractions I've been too, I've had to pay 200 rupees for entry (about 2.20) whilst Indians pay 5 rupees (5 or 6p) At the Taj Mahal the difference is obscene. Anyway, I think he admired my balls (50 rupees being a fair price after all), for he said he'd take me for it, though we exchanged a lot of banter all the way back to Varanasi. Anyway, being in the state of illness and exhaustion I was in, I decided to completely give up on New Year. Whereas Christmas is Christmas is Christmas, New Year is only special cause you decide to stay up with your friends and get drunk. Given that I didn't know anyone there, and I didn't think alcohol was such a good idea when i hadn't eaten anything for a while, I decided to skip it, and spend the day travelling to the Nepal border (10 hours by local bus, mmmm).

Nepal (pronounced Nipp-al if you are from the Continent, which immaturely amuses me) completely rejuvenated me, however. I had been looking forward to it a lot as a land of mountains, adventure sports and lots of cool medieval cities, and the first people I met confirmed my good opinions. The guy who organised the bus to Pokhara for me from the border gave me chai and taught me some Nepali, another guy selling bags of oranges at one of the stops, upon hearing that I had no Nepali rupees, voluntarily gave me a bag for free. For some unknown reason, there is no ATM on the Nepali side of the border, and you can't import Nepali rupees into the country, so I had to go until 7pm without food, when I got to Pokhara and could draw out some money. For some time I couldn't work out why this bus felt different to Indian ones, then I realised that 1) the horn was not being sounded every 6 seconds (I actually, in a moment of annoyance at one point, timed the intervals between horn-soundings on one particularly wearisome Indian bus ride, and 6 seconds was indeed the average) 2) the roads were so much better. It is with such simple things as these that counties now can gain my entire affection, although admittedly a 10 hour journey is a 10 hour journey, and I was glad to get to its end.

Now Nepal is a tiny country in comparison to its two monolithic neighbours, China and India, and 30% of its populace lives below the poverty line. It's also had many political problems in the last few years, with severe unrest between the Commies and the Congress party, and the overthrow of monarchical power (the king is still around, but he's a complete figurehead). Nevertheless, this is certainly not obvious from the country's two main cities, Pokhara and Kathmandu. The first is sandwiched between the shores of Phewa Tal, (tal means lake in Nepali) and the Annapurna Mountain range, which is a major destination for trekkers. Lakeside, the traveller enclave, is full of adventure sports operators, amazing restaurants selling every type of cuisine known to man, bar/nightclubs, craft and book shops, and guesthouses. I stayed in a wonderful little guesthouse a bit back from the main strip with windows (windows!) and clean sheets, which was a nice change for me. Arriving on New Year's Day, it was actually the last night of a festival in Pokhara, and Lakeside was decked out in bunting and lights, and filled with strolling tourists and locals. It was really cool, and looked like Goa could have been before the real crowds arrived. (However, I found out a couple of days ago that, unbeknownst to me, a Western girl had been raped and murdered by a gang of four Nepali guys, and another Western guy murdered during this very same festival in Lakeside, so it wasn't as idyllic as I thought it was...)

My first day in Pokhara I hired a bike (which, let me say here, was the biggest pile of crap I have ever ridden) to explore the city/town is probably a better word. Notwithstanding a small collision with a moving tractor - he was driving on the wrong side of the road, my narrowing gap had an unexpected pothole that sent me flying into the side of him - that banged up my shoulder a bit, I rode through the old town in hunt of several museums I knew to be about the place. I soon discovered, however, that in Pokhara you do not find things, you come across them accidentally and with a great deal of luck, and I only managed to find one of the four respectable institutions. It was by far the one I most wanted to visit however - the Gurkha museum. The Gurkha's are the British army regiments of ridiculous hardcoreness that are made up of Nepali recruits, and the museum commemorated their formation, history and achievements. Obviously I spent the whole way round trying not to cry with patriotic pride, because I am that sort of sentimental (read: glory-hunting) idiot. I also biked a bit around the lake, and found a wonderful restaurant with terrace and wine (wine!), which pretty much made my day. I don't know where this sudden liking for wine comes from, given my complete aversion to it before, maybe I finished uni and my body was like "right, you're a grown-up now, better start liking grown-up things". In any case, I enjoyed it.

The only thing that shocked me about Nepal was just how expensive everything is. This was especially since everyone else I had spoken to said exactly the opposite. Obviously the Nepali rupee is worth less than the Indian one, but even so I ended up paying about double the price of everything I had in India. Ok, fair enough, an evening meal might now cost a fiver rather than 2 quid, which still isn't extortionate, but a Cadbury's Twirl for 65p? Really? On the other hand, the restaurants in Pokhara (and, as I've since found, in Kathmandu) really are excellent, and there is a tremendous variety. In the four days I spent in Pokhara I ate Japanese, Tibetan, Nepali, Italian, Indian and English, all of it yummy. I also, in a strange and not entirely understood phenomenon, have suddenly gone straight back onto meat, having been veggie the entire time I was in India. Partially this was because I trusted the Lakeside restaurants more than some of those in India, but more importantly, it was because there was so much beef available. To be honest, I'm still off chicken, but beef you can't get at all in India (those sacred cows again) and I started having cravings for it. I even ate water-buffalo and goat, which are the local meats of choice in Nepal. It's going to be a little strange to go back to England, where the variety of food is so much more limited. Yeah, we have (inferior) Indian restaurants, and (inferior) Chinese restaurants, but its not like Sydney or New York where you can think "hmmm... do I fancy Japanese or Lebanese tonight?" (unless you live in London and have lots of money...) Maybe I shall just have to learn to cook, so I can do it myself. Maybe.

One of the things that really brought the difference in price between India and Nepal home to me was when I went to go book a paragliding trip the following morning. Now, Sarangkot (above Pokhara), is one of the foremost places to paraglide in the world, and I reallllly wanted to do it again having got the taste for it in Manali. Plus, here the flights lasted about 30mins, whereas the maximum you can get in Manali is less than 10 mins. Even so I was shocked when the cost for the flight was the equivalent to approx. 70 pounds, when I had paid about 18 pounds in Manali. I soon found out the reason for this however. When we had ascended said mountain and were having a safety briefing, I joked to my pilot (a very cool Canadian-Australian called Brad) that I'd had no such pre-talk before, and had been buckling my own buckles on my harness and equipment, which was certainly not the case here. He smiled and explained that Manali is one of the most dangerous places in the world to paraglide, and that people die every year doing it. Most of the pilots don't have licences, let alone insurance, and all use old and sometimes faulty equipment. He himself used his parachutes for 8 months, then sold them onto the guys at Manali, who used them for years more. He wasn't telling me because Manali was a paragliding competitor or anything (they were in different countries!) and he was backed up by several other pilots in the group too. Indeed, my pilot in Manali had barely spoken English, and when we landed in Sarangkot (gracefully, slowly, staying on our feet), I realised that coming in at a ridiculous speed and hurling yourself full length on the ground to stop yourself skidding over the edge of the concrete landing pad, was not actually the proper proceedure, and what I had done in Manali could actually have been termed a 'crash landing'. I took three points from this. 1) I should not think that 70 quid was a massive rip-off for paragliding, but that my 18 pound flights were a fortunate and unusual bonus, made more lucky by 2) the fact that I didn't die doing them, and 3) that I didn't know of my danger at the time! In any case, my 30 min flight at Sarangkot was great, I got a few glimpses of the Annapurnas, which were snow-topped, formidable and immense, both in size and splendour. I most definitely have to come back to Nepal one September and go trekking in these mountains. I even got to do the steering and controlling of the controls of the paraglide for 10 mins or so, which apparently I am "a complete natural" at. So there you are kids, if all else fails I have a career as a paragliding instructor to fall back on. (This is actually an extremely tempting proposition).

I spent the rest of my days in Pokhara kayaking on the lake, and visiting waterfalls, lakes and caves. One of the latter was particularly memorable due to the fact that just as I had reached the narrowest part of the uneven cavern, there was a power cut. For those of you who don't know, I am claustrophobic. *Lifts* freak me out. To be suddenly plunged into pitch blackness in a tunnel whose narrowness and stooping roof was already making me anxious to get out is pretty much my worse nightmare. Thankfully the lights came back on after a couple of minutes, but needless to say that was the end of caves for me!

On my third day in Pokhara I set off to hike around Phewa Tal - a four or five hour trek, climbing the hills to the south of Pokhara and returning across the wheat fields at the western edge of the lake. This was definitely a highlight of my trip. I'm an antisocial beast, and I like nothing better than solitary hiking, especially if there are mountains involved. Although the views weren't great (due to the season a haze lay over all of Pokhara the entirety of the time I was there, and glimpses of the Annapurnas were few and far between), it was a warm, sunny day, and the track led through several tiny farming hamlets in the hills that seemed a million miles away from Lakeside. At one cottage I stopped to ask for directions, and immediately got invited inside, and had fruit, rice-bread, rice-pudding and buffalo-milk pressed on me, whilst the whole family (great-grandparents, householder and wife, his daughter and her two 18month old twins) gathered round to ply me with more food and chat to me in broken English. At the risk of sounding incredibly cheesy, I couldn't believe their warmth and friendliness. They clearly didn't have much themselves (the farmer told me the rains had been particularly austere that year) and I could give them nothing in return but my thanks, and talk to them. The twins were particularly cute, and called me "Didi" (big sister). I hope they understood how much I appreciated their unmotivated friendliness. This seems to be a real factor in Nepal. Just the following day I went to visit Begnas Tal, a pretty nearby lake, and returning to the village bus stop at about 5.30pm, found that the last bus back to Pokhara had left 10 mins ago. Seeing my distress, another driver told me to hop on his bus, and we proceeded to chase the Pokhara bus down at top speed, the driver signalling to his compatriot to stop and let me jump from one bus to another! It's expensive here, but on the other hand I haven't been hassled by a single guy, people don't force their questions and company upon you all the time, and you don't seem to be looked upon as much as a cash cow, which is certainly the case in a lot of places in India. I would love to come back and explore some more of the rural interior of the country, and interact some more with the local people, which I can't say is usually one of my more pressing concerns.

To top the whole of Pokhara off, whilst most of the bookshops here are as expensive as English ones, unlike in India, on my last day I found a bookshop that sold classics for about 1 pound 50, and went a little mad. I am now one extremely cultured and erudite ladyee, having gorged myself on everything from Flaubert to Dickens to Sir Walter Scott in the past week. Oh yes.

On Tuesday afternoon (6th Jan) I arrived in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, after only an eight hour bus journey (such distances are all in a days work to me by now!) I had been told by the LP and other travellers to expect massive amounts of traffic, noise, crowds and stress. All I can say is, they must have regarded it from the viewpoint of someone who'd been trekking in the hills for the past month, not someone who has recently experienced the delights of Delhi and other Indian cities! I had enjoyed the energy of Varanasi, and the glamour and sophistication of Mumbai, but Kathmandu is the only city thus far I've really wanted to stay, and consequently I've been here 6 days, the longest I've stayed in any one place yet. Thamel, the traveller enclave, is full of the great restaurants, bakeries, cafes and bars that distinguished Lakeside in Pokhara, and its within easy walking distance of the city proper, with its winding alleys, bahals, shrines and chowks. The old city especially is amazing - made up of hundreds of courtyards surrounded by old houses decorated by the the most intricately carved woodwork, and there is a shrine to some god or the other on every street. Remember how I expressed my disappointment for the gaudy monstrosities that were many (not all) temples in India? Now Kathmandu has beautiful temples, ridiculously carved in wood or stone and build in the pagoda style. Indeed, many scholars think the traditional Chinese pagoda architecture spread there from Nepali origins. Unlike in India, there is pretty much no religious tension in Nepal, and Hinduism and Buddhism has amalgamated in parts into a syncretism that is reflected in its religious architecture and practice. Additionally, their pillars and roof-struts are often carved with quite extraordinary tantric scenes in which couples attempt the most mind-boggling sexual positions imaginable. The guides modestly call them 'erotic carvings' - pshf - its ancient porn! All in all, its a fascinating city to wander around in, which is mostly what I've been doing the past week.

The only slight pall to Kathmandu has originated not from the city, but from my own idiocy. Having been troubled for several days by a sharp pain in my chest that seemed to be getting worse rather than better, I submitted myself on Friday to an international clinic, knowing full well it was going to cost me. It was really painful though, and I was starting to worry that I might be developing asthma, which would pretty much screw over any chance I might have of attending Sandhurst. The doctor listened to my explanation, and we started working through the various possibilities, from pneumonia to asthma. When, in response to him asking whether I was on any medication, I mentioned my malaria pills, however, I saw the light go on in his head. Doxy, the malaria pills I'm on, are apparently notorious for needing to be swallowed with at least a pint of water, and I had been taking them only with sips, and occasionally dry, if I had no drinking water available. In addition, I had been taking them in the evening. Consequently, I have corroded away my entire oesophagus. It hurts. Not only this, but I have to take various pills and medicine for the next week, and am banned from coffee, alcohol, and chocolate. NOT ONLY this (and chocolate and alcohol are two of my prime reasons for living!) but the whole thing cost me about 35 quid. So kids, a warning from Westie: when the fine print on your pills say "must be taken with water" and "should not be taken less than a hour before lying down", they 'aint just saying it idly.

Nonetheless, I am managing to enjoy myself. Yesterday, in my final extravagance (for I feel myself becoming an adventure-sport junkie) I booked a canyoning trip at the Last Resort, a kind of adventure resort just 12km from the Tibet border. Canyoning involves jumping, sliding, scrambling and abseiling down waterfalls, and it was utterly awesome! Hanging over the edge of a 45m roaring waterfall, supported only by a rope, and then propelling yourself down it, was definitely fun, and something I'd love to do again. The instructors were descending in 3 bounds like crazy madmen, and by the end the aim was to get down as fast as possible, letting out the rope as quickly as you dared. The problem with all these sports - white-water rafting, paragliding, canyoning - is that all I want to do as soon as I've finished is do it again, with bigger rapids, and higher waterfalls! As I said, junkie. On the other hand, I do have my limits. The Last Resort is also the home of the third biggest bungee jump in the world, and two of the girls I had been canyoning with were led off, in the afternoon, pale-faced, to jump off a suspension bridge swinging creakily over a 160m gorge, at the bottom of which was a ravening, rapid-filled river. I'd crossed this suspension bridge in the morning, and I can tell you that whilst I don't suffer from vertigo at all, I'd been relieved to reach the other side. Kudos to the girls, bungee is not something I have the faintest urge to do at present!
To round the day off, when we got back to Kathmandu last night, me, Jenny (a Canadian girl who'd done both canyoning and bungee), and two of our Nepali instructors, decided to go out on the town. After playing a few games of pool and sucking back a LOT of shisha at this amazing place in Thamel (the nicest shisha I've ever had) the guys took us to a Nepali nightclub, which was somewhat hilarious, full of local boys dancing Bangra (which one day I WILL learn how to do.....!) Lots of fun.

So, its what, the 11th Jan today? And I fly home on the 26th. Can't believe I only have two weeks left! This three months seemed to have stretched out forever (that whole "6 weeks in, 6 weeks to go" thing I was saying in Bhopal was utter bull, by the way, I'm out here in total for 15 weeks, not 12, something I only realised about 4 weeks ago....), yet now I only have such a limited time left, its really freaking me out! I have a lot to fit in before that date....

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Part of trip: Backpacking around India and Nepal

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