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Published: February 19th 2008
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Gambay the Sherpa Dog!
. at my host family's home meeting Gambay for the first time! He's officially from the Himalayan Mountains! . The Adventure Begins … The first night I arrived here, Amrit and I bought enough clothes to last for a few days since my luggage didn’t arrive with me, and then we headed back to his family’s house. I got some thick Nepali and Tibetan style sweaters all for like $5 bucks each… nice. (Side note: I met my first real-live Sherpa dog ever! Gambay, a totally cool mountain dog, was officially born and raised in the Himalayas - I thought it was so cool! ) Anyway, my Nepali language instructor’s family (to include Amrit, his brother Bikrant, Bikrant’s wife Lina, their daughter Pari, and their cousin Sobita and her two children, Aryan and Sanskriti) invited me to join them on their to visit Pokhara and Chitwan for the weekend. It was quite easily the most perfect introduction to true Nepali life that I could have hoped for! They have been such gracious hosts, and I can easily say that this trip would not have been the same without them… I really, really mean that…
And we’re off … We all piled into the van and left KTM City on Friday morning loaded down with a heap of Nepali
Mahleku village town
with Sanskriti and Pari ... oh, and of course the rooster behind us :) CDs and bags of oranges, Nepali sweets and bottled water. Along the way, we stopped in Malekhu which is a little roadside town that is apparently famous for their fried fish that are kind of like French fries but made out of fish that reminded me of large feeder fish. It’s all caught in the riverbed behind the storefronts. Many of the shop owners were barefoot and the “store fronts” were decorated with skewered 4” long fish on sale in bundles for about $3 US bucks (or 180 Rupees). My food poisoning bout was still lingering, so I only tried one little fish to say I’d had it, but don’t think I’ll be stopping there again for snacks 😊
Leaving there, the Nepal countryside was absolutely spectacular but contrasted harshly with the roadside residents’ extreme poverty - suspension bridges over the crystal clear river link the rolling green hills and were amazing to finally see in person, but the tin-roofed shacks that lined the roadside the entire way were a complete reality check. Even within the first two days of Nepal, I had a feeling that the rest of my trip would kind of follow suit with the feelings
Mahleku village town
these are the little skewered fish that the guy was selling.. of seeing so much beauty being immediately challenged by so much hardship… It’s been four weeks now and I can’t even begin to say how true that is…
The beautiful town of Pokhara... We arrived about 6 hours later in Pokhara which is located west of KTM. I’ll never forget Sanskriti and Pari sitting on the van’s middle bench and dancing along to the music the ENTIRE trip EVERY single time we went anywhere… They looked like they could be in a Nepali dance video 😊 Anyway, we got to Pokhara a little late on Friday, so Saturday was packed with a boat ride in the wooden boats along the lake, walking up and down the main street lined with little shops selling Nepali hand-crafted goods, visiting the gardens, taking pictures, spinning prayer wheels…
Sunday morning we got up super early and walked up to the Sangrakot mountain top to watch the sun rise over the Himalayas - specifically the Anapurna Mountain peaks and Machapuchre. Nothing short of simply gorgeous.
Later that morning, we visited Davi’s Falls (where I randomly bumped into three sisters from Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity - kind of ironic - I won’t
mention the whole good sign thing again, but it’s not like these nuns are just walking around the streets all day long… very chance meeting 😊 . We got back in the van and continued on to a much more remote area for lunch, eating dahl baat at a roadside restaurant (Dahl baat is this country’s #1 staple meal made of lentil soup over white rice normally with some sort of steamed cabbage veggie… I think the statistic is that 80% of the country eats it at least once a day.) The experience was complete with villagers walking by with huge loads of sticks or bundles of leaves saddled on their backs and leveraged by a strap around their foreheads, & random groups of stray cows and goats along the road rambling on to nowhere in particular. (Another side note: It’s amazing how much a person can carry when it’s set up with the whole forehead/strap arrangement - I even saw a guy the other day in KTM city carrying TWO huge 6’ TALL bookshelves on his back!!)
We drove back to the hotel that afternoon to get ready for out early morning departure for Chitwan and the elephants!!
Roadside Life
roadside living in Nepal... this is an actual person's house. …
Day 7 of travel: (Whew - a lot has happened!! 😊 Sunday we left to go to Chitwan, stopping in Bandipur along the way. I can only begin to describe Bandipur as an amazing little mountain top town that is kind of a cross between a scene out of a 1960’s American mid-western classic film and a rural dwelling completely protected by a feeling of time standing still. The pics really say it all.. we left after about an hour, twisting our way back down the mountainside road completely unprotected by the lack of guardrails anywhere 😊 and headed into Chitwan!
Welcome to the Royal Chitwan Elephant Park! Only in Nepal can you be greeted upon arrival in a new little village by a herd of lumbering elephants carrying tourists in little playpen sized crates on their backs! How crazy! What’s even crazier is the fact that the locals make their way around the elephants (that are walking down the regular streets, of course) and act like it’s more of a nuisance than the fantastic event I thought it was the two days we were there.. Yeah, I know, they’re used to it, but still… I
Outside Courtyard
. The hallway leading to the outside courtyard . don’t care how long I lived there, I don’t think I’d ever be like “Oh, geez, these elephants again - how mundane … “ Anyway, the next day we headed out to meet our elephant Punam and take our tour of the jungle complete with a full-on water crossing, monkeys going crazy in the trees above us and me getting to drive/steer/ride (what do you really call it?) Punam all by myself … I don’t know if I’d have been as trusting of me as my group apparently was, but it was awesome without a doubt and not your typical Monday morning for sure 😊
So overall, the first few days in Nepal were nothing short of a full-immersion course in the beautiful countryside, eating dahl baat with my hands, and wondering how on earth the poverty of this country could ever be changed… Hopefully, the elections that are scheduled for early this year may help to makes some advances in providing more help for the poor. It will really be interesting to see…
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