Chitwan National Park

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From the 8th to the 10th November, we were in Chitwan National Park. I thought I'd give this bit it's own entry because my other one is getting pretty large now!

We got a bus from Kathmandu to Chitwan. The journey out of Kathmandu was like nothing I've ever seen before. The level of poverty of the city was quite shocking. The houses are small and usually build from brick with corrugated roofs. People here seem to have a hard life, where a large amount of physical effort and strain yields enough food or money to live on.

As we left the city, we ascended into the mountains quite quickly, and behind the housing was beautiful countryside. Once outside of the city, it seemed that most people live in hamlets beside the road, consisting of anything from one to fifty houses, where wood usually replaces brick as the most common building material. We stopped once for some food.

The food here is worth it's own page. Everywhere we eat, it is really amazing. Sometimes we stop at roadsides where people are cooking samosas outside their houses. A meal here is around 40 Nepalese Rupees, or about 35p. At Chitwan, we ate at the hostel. The food there was usually curry-based, and really nice. For breakfast, we often have an omelette. In Pokhara, all of the restaurants and cafes separate their menus into Nepalese, India, Mexican, Eurpoean, and Italian.

Once we got to Chitwan we were well and truly in the countryside. In the town next to where we were staying, in the more rural area, families seem to live in a house made of either wood, brick, or wattle and daub. The roofs are usually corrugated, brick, or thatched. We were told that for five days every January, the people are allowed to take resources from the forest in the national park in order to fortify and develop their home. Each family seems to have enough land in order to grow the food needed to live on. They also have some amount of livestock, often a combination of one or two buffalo, two to five goats, and a handful of chickens or ducks.

We stayed in a really nice hostel complex. We have a guide that spent the three days with us called Luxman. He was a really great guy, I liked him a lot. We were super busy doing things with Luxman every day we were there, including birdwatching, one of the less exciting activities, and which only served to remind James that he had not yet had his morning omelette, something which he mused loudly about as were we crouching in the undergrowth in the hope of seeing the lesser spotted something-or-other.

Some of the more exciting things we did included an elephant ride through the national park (at one point my life flashed before my eyes as our elephant went nuts and proceeded to spin quickly on his back legs, apparently uncontrollably as his owner sat on his head screaming at him and hitting him with an iron bar, none of which seemed to calm the situation - I have an 'amusing' photo taken of James loving it and me noticeably in fear of my life); a canoe trip along the river; rhino tracking through the jungle; elephant washing in the river; watching the sunset at the edge of the park (where we were treated to a graphic insight into the breeding habits of semi-domesticated dogs); a visit to the elephant stables where we saw the first elephant twins ever born in Nepal who were three days old; and the compulsory cultural display (this one consisting of a lot of stick banging, a man dressed as a peacock, and some questionable courting techniques between a man and a man dressed as a woman).

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Comments

[Chris Davies]

ooh ooh can i see that photo of you on the oliphaunt?