Advertisement
Sari street
negotiating the holy cows and rickshaws through the narrow streets of old Katmandu Wow! I can now say I've been to Katmandu... How many times did I hear that name when I was a teenager! The mythical, magical hippy Mecca. How I yearned to go there!
Guess I should have been somewhat mollified on arrival to have middle-aged vendors calling out to me from every street corner and shop door with a 'Hey, friend! You're back! I remember you! What've you been up to these last 25 years!'
Did they have to mention the quarter of a century?
Getting to Katmandu, after months of travelling through outer Mongolia, China and Tibet, is a little like sighting land after months at sea. They got pots of Earl Grey tea with COW'S milk, served with china cups and saucers if you please; they got whole wheat brown bread, TOASTED; they got spaghetti, pizza, croissants, apple pie... delicious Indian food! And did I grow blinkers, or was there really no noodle soup?
Took me a while to rouse myself and go visit some of the sights... but I have to admit to being a bit lazy about seeing very many of those in Nepal. Felt a touch templed out, you know. So,
Holy man at Monkey Temple
This chap leapt on me as I was coming down the loooong flight of stairs from Monkey Temple keeping an eye on where I was putting my feet. Taking advantage of my fully bared brow, he daubed my third eye with coloured powder and flower petals. And then hotly demanded payment for his blessing. Seeing that he wasn't going to let me get away, I got him to pose for this picture to feel a little less maneuvered.
Leaving him afterwards to descend the final flight of stairs, I could feel his eyes boring into my back and felt sure he was giving me the evil eye. Coming off the last step, my foot turned inwards, and I twisted my ankle...
when I did hoist myself up and out of the city, it was to do an eight day 'white water' rafting trip down the Sun Koshi river... 272 kilometers of crystal clear water flowing from the Himalaya down into the plains of northern India; not a city or town in sight, just the occasional hamlet set way up on the hill well away from the river banks; long stretches of jungle interspersed with stretches of cultivation, mainly in the form of rice terraces. At night, we camped on pristine beaches, far from the madding crowds (but not often from the kids who always seemed to find their way to us, materializing out of nowhere to gawk and stare).
Thankfully, I chose to do this trip just before the winter, so water levels were down. The grade 5 rapids on the prospectus dwindle during this season to grade 3s... though in the first few days, I couldn't really see how a grade 3 could possibly get any bigger!
On the second day we flipped, front straight over the back, much to the glee of our three crew members. For a while, that wiped the blasé smirks we had begun
At the Indian Consulate in Katmandu...
one of those lovely quirky notices one finds all around Asia... least you thought a country's consulate would be a place to try should you have queries about their visa requirements... to sport clear off our boat races. That's where Martina and I finally got a move on with the paddling according to Sham, our Nepalese lord of the waterways who steered our raft. Huh. I'd like to see the two hulking guys he moved forward into front position after that do better than we did hitting that three-meter-high 'you're-not-going-nowhere-til-you've-rubbed-noses-with-the-riverbed' river wave the way we did... especially when still trailing the effects of a Chinese/Tibetan stomach bug as I was!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.084s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 5; qc: 43; dbt: 0.032s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
