Nepal

Not too long ago, I posted a cursory and incomplete account of some of my travels. Though I still haven't written even an overview of the big five-month trip that came immediately after the place where that account left off, as I noted in my afterword, I did write down some impressions of a couple of the individual countries we visited on that trip. The first country we went to after Thailand (which was almost like our base of operations, as we returned to it twice more in the following months) was Nepal, which is the only country that I finished my write-up on. I had only typed half of it into the computer previously, but now I have finished the job, so it can be posted. As I recall, I actually started writing it while we were still in Nepal, though I finished it later (exactly when I don't remember). In typing up the last half, I noticed that a number of little incidents, especially from later in the trip, were left out, so I may have finished it a bit hastily. Also, I'm not sure that I would still agree with all of my impressions as I wrote them then (of course they were much fresher then, but now I also know more about not only Nepal but many other places, knowledge which might have led to different impressions if I had had it at the time). Nevertheless, I am posting the essay essentially unchanged, except for few changes to punctuation, even fewer to wording, and a handful of additional comments in brackets.

Upon arriving at Kathmandu's airport, it was immediately obvious that Nepal differs somewhat from a place like Thailand or even China. Instead of impressive rows of official-looking immigration counters, there were two counters manned by half a dozen officials running back and forth. The counters had signs hanging above them which informed us that one was for foreigners who already had a visa, the other for those without one. At the latter counter, however, we were told to go to the former to get our visas. Upon learning that we wanted 30-day visas the officials at the second counter sent us back to the first (they only had the stamp for 15 days). Now that we were at the correct counter, we had to pay for our visas in US dollars (local currency was not accepted) and we were given change from a drawer in which bills were rather casually stacked.

After leaving immigration and passing through a rather chaotic baggage claim and customs area, we went to buy tickets at the taxi counter. The guy behind the counter sold us the ticket while expounding on the virtues of one hotel to which we could have a "free taxi". We exited the airport to see dozens of touts for various hotels all waiting outside flashing cards. We pushed to the crowd to the taxi (which had no markings whatsoever identifying it as such - apparently the only way to tell in many cases is by the color of the license plate ). Many "volunteers" appeared offering to help us load our bags into the car (we ignored them, not wanting to pay for unnecessary services).

The car drove away from the airport, which was not surrounded by warehouses and such, but rather by fields. The taxi wound thru narrow streets to the tourist area of Thamel, a journey accomplished fairly quickly, making it clear that Kathmandu is much smaller than, say, Bangkok. In fact, most of Kathmandu can be seen on foot, though one must take care not to lose one's sense of direction in the narrow winding streets.

After arriving in Thamel and turning down the hotel the taxi took us to (the driver apparently having been bribed by a tout who had squeezed into the taxi with us), we walked around looking for a cheap place (the hotel we were taken to cost US$6, which is pricey for Nepal). On the way, we were constantly approached by guys offering, in conspiratorial tones, tiger balm, Gurkha knives, chess sets, and hashish (at least for this product the whispering made sense ). Having found a place to stay (US$2 for a room with common bath) we spent the next few days exploring the city.

Wandering thru the streets of Kathmandu, in particular the older sections of the city, one encounters a place which seems to have little in common with capitals of countries farther east. While in a city like Beijing or Seoul one can see monuments and palaces of the distant past, in old Kathmandu not only are there temples dating back centuries, but even most of the buildings that the people live and work in seem to be ancient. Many of them are cracked and lean into the narrow streets, seemingly on the verge of collapse. It is not difficult to imagine that the Kathmandu of medieval days differed but little in appearance from that of today.

Of course, there are still reminders that this is the 20th century rather than the 15th. When moving thru the crowds of people on a narrow market street, one frequently has to move aside for bicycles and motorcycles, and even the occasional car. Though traditional dress is still commonplace (particularly among women), Western style clothes are also in evidence. Certain ubiquitous Western products, e.g. Coca-cola, are available as readily as in most other places, and there was even a Wimpy's fast food place under construction during our visit.

It is possible to some degree to escape the more negative aspects of modern life which Kathmandu exhibits (namely traffic and touts) by going to the town of Bhaktapur a short distance away. It has the same medieval atmosphere as Kathmandu's old city, but fewer motor vehicles and not quite so many people selling tiger balm. In each of the three cities of the Kathmandu valley (the third being Patan, just across the river from Kathmandu), the heart of the town is in its Durbar Square. Durbar means palace, so not surprisingly there is a palace in each of the three Durbar Squares, harking back to the days when the three towns were separate principalities. The squares in front of the palaces are dotted with temples, shrines, and statues and it is easy to spend hours wandering around in them (if one can avoid the touts and sadhus. I'll say more about these two types momentarily).

The temples, however, are not concentrated solely in the cities' Durbar Squares. In virtually any part of the three towns' older sections one will come across temples and shrines. At one intersection in Kathmandu, the front of a relatively modern building, there is a small, inconspicuous Buddha statue which is said to be well over a thousand years old. Bakthapur has a small square in the town's oldest section (predating its Durbar Square) with several ancient temples and nearby there is a wooden window fantastically carved in the shape of a peacock. Scattered around Patan are four Buddhist stupas said to originally have been erected by the Indian emperor Ashoka over two thousand years ago, and throughout all three cities one comes across red-painted rocks sticking out between the paving stones which offerings have been placed on.

We saw a number of interesting street scenes while in the Kathmandu valley. Once while eating dinner in a second-floor restaurant in Bhaktapur, next to the valley's highest temple, we watched as large numbers of children in the square below taunted and were chased by a man wearing a mask and costume (actually there were two men but they took turns). Occasionally they would stop running around and ask for money from adults passing thru the square. Also in Bhaktapur, and in Patan as well, we saw snake charmers with crowds gathered around them.

One of the biggest differences between Nepal and the west (or Japan, Taiwan, etc.) is wealth --- we have it, they don't. Fortunately not all Nepalese treat tourists like walking money trees, but some do (and though irritating, it isn't hard to see why, when the average annual income is below US$200). As mentioned before, Nepal has large numbers of people selling all sorts of stuff, to the point where it is difficult to stand or sit in one place for a minute without being approached. In Kathmandu's Durbar Square, while we sat on the steps of a temple, we were approached by a boy of about eleven or twelve who first tried to sell us a souvenir, then wanted to change money, and finally, offered to be our guide. His English was quite good, and when I told him I was from Taiwan he simply replied "I don't think so." Nearby on Freak Street we encountered a guy who offered us some "dynamite" ("It'll blow you sky high, man").

Aside from those trying to sell something, there are, naturally, plenty of beggars. A special type are the sadhus --- normally these are men who give up their worldly possessions and go on a spiritual search, living on whatever alms they are given, but some are less genuine than others. In tourist areas some sadhus will come straight up to tourists, sprinkle flowers on their hair, smear red paste on their foreheads and ask for payment for the (unsolicited) blessing they've given. A far more common type of beggar is children --- a large proportion of them will, upon seeing a foreigner, stop whatever they're doing and ran over asking for "one rupee, school pen, chocolate" or offering to pose for "one photo" (for payment, of course).

Despite all this, we enjoyed our time in Kathmandu immensely, and after leaving Nepal, looked back longingly on its tourist-oriented Western restaurants (some of Asia's best Italian food can be found in Nepal [this may be a slight exaggeration, but I can't remember well enough to be sure]). Since, however, we didn't want to spend all our time in the Kathmandu valley, after five days we took a tourist mini-bus (the passengers were mostly but not all foreigners) south over incredible -- and at times incredibly scary -- mountain roads down to the Terai, the flat area which makes up Nepal's southern half. This part of the country is semi-tropical, and much of it is covered in forest (though, as elsewhere, not so much forest as in centuries past). Since malaria was mostly eradicated in the fifties, it has become the most heavily populated part of the country.

Our objective, however, was a place known not for its human population (it has almost none) but its non-human one -- Royal Chitwan National Park. The bus dropped us off in a town called Tadi Bazaar. Upon getting off the bus we were immediately surrounded by a horde of touts (at least twenty) offering lodging and/or jeep rides. We went along with one of them, the jeep bouncing its way over dirt roads and a ford (we were told that during monsoon season they had to use boats) to the village of Sauhara on the edge of the park. The village still has plenty of people living fairly primitively, and it had only gotten electricity a few weeks before we arrived, but there is also a lot of accommodation for park visitors.

We found a place to stay and during lunch the manager came to tell us about all the services they offered. We were taken to see the park's trained elephants and even fed one. The next day, accompanied by a guide, we took a canoe downriver into the park and walked back thru the forest, not without first being informed by our guide of the ways to deal with the various types of animals we might encounter. We saw a number of monkeys and even two crocodiles dozing in the sun on the bank of a stream. In addition we saw traces of other animals, such as the tracks of sloth bears and rhinos. On one tree we saw the claw marks of a tiger and elsewhere fresh tiger droppings [at least that's what the guide said they were].

On the following afternoon, we took a ride on one of the park's elephants, together with some friends from Taiwan who we met just by chance while going to the elephant landing [it was a British guy I'd lived with in a hostel in Taipei and his girlfriend; I'd had no idea they were in Nepal]. While on our hour and a half ride thru the park we saw seven rhinos (though we might have seen some twice) including a mother and calf [I recall that she was not too happy to see us, but compared to an elephant, even an adult rhino looked small, so she wasn't a real threat]. We ate that evening in a restaurant in the village we'd first visited the evening before and talked with the children who worked there (a girl of nine and a boy of seven, both with excellent English for their age). The next day we took a jeep to Tadi and a bus back up into the mountains.

This time our destination was a town several hundred kilometers west of Kathmandu called Pokhara. The attraction here is neither culture and history, as in Kathmandu, nor wildlife, as in Chitwan National Park, but mountains -- specifically the Himalaya, the world's greatest mountain range. Thought the Himalaya is visible at a distance from the Kathmandu Valley, it is often obscured by haze, pollution, or intervening smaller mountains. In Pokhara one is right up against them, a stunning array of towering white peaks. The portion of the Himalaya nearest Pokhara is known as the Annapurnas, a collection of mountains all over 7000 meters high. The nearest mountain of all is the slightly smaller (just under 7000 meters) Fishtail, which dominates the skyline. We spent several days enjoying the view [though I was briefly ill and acquired a tick bite on my shin, which later became slightly infected and left a scar which took a long time to fade], took a short hike up to a higher viewing point, and saw our friends off on a trek before heading back to Kathmandu on a video bus, meaning we were treated to an Indian [Bollywood] movie (action? comedy? romance? music? convoluted yet predictable plot? you name it, they've got it) and a Bruce Lee kung fu classic.

On arrival in Kathmandu we shook off the few (but very persistent) touts and got on a city mini-bus. It was no problem getting on as it started its route from the bus station, but it was no simple matter getting off -- it got so crowded we could barely see the door, even though we were sitting next to it (indeed, if another foreigner -- who looked like he might have first come to Nepal in its hippie heyday in the seventies -- hadn't told us when we arrived in Thamel, we might have missed our stop). We got a room in Mom's House (perhaps the best -- or worst -- named hotel in Asia) and spent a few more days enjoying Kathmandu's excellent restaurants (actually Pokhara's are also quite good) -- some of which also have great names, like Alice's Restaurant.

On our last full day in Kathmandu we took an auto-rickshaw (a three-wheeled mini-taxi) to a Hindu temple near the airport. There were huge crowd of people, many lining up to go in, others, like us, climbing a nearby hill to look down at the temple. We also visited a Tibetan Buddhist stupa, which like the similar stupa on the other side of town was surrounded by the relatively new houses of the relatively well-to-do Tibetans -- when one sees teenagers wearing jeans and other expensive Western-style clothes in Nepal, they're usually Tibetans. [I'm not sure how I knew this, assuming it is accurate, though simple appearance might have been the main basis.]

Back in the city, we noticed groups of children ambushing cars by pulling a string across narrow streets and demanding money from the driver or going to a shop entrance and shouting at the owner for the same purpose. That night there were many bonfires built around which people stood talking or singing. We learned that all this activity (and the crowds at the temple) was due to Shivarati, a holiday in honor of the god Shiva. The next day we caught a taxi to the airport and after waiting an hour or so in the waiting room (there was only one, as there was only one gate), boarded an airplane to our next destination.

So ends my account of our trip to Nepal. When I'll get around to finishing accounts to the other destinations on that trip or subsequent ones only time will tell.