Friday, 5/25.  Final post.  Transfer to Kathmandu was uneventful.  Farewell dinner.  Wedding event at the hotel.  As with other SE Asia countries, weddings require three days.  This was day two.  Pool party.  Heavily armed security, I think for specific guests because they left before the party was over.

Nepal was fascinating, as were the other countries I visited.  But their diet is not nearly as varied as the USA, again as were the other countries.  I think this was possibly the design of the tour group to 1) keep things simple for our tender stomachs, and 2) stick with foods which conforms with the nation’s tradition.  I found the food repetitive and largely bland(!).  There were limited attempts to vary the meals, but in the end it failed for me.  I leave this 50 day adventure desperate for a host of differing foods.

Final pictures:

Looks like a Bachelorette Party, but there are guys there too. There was also a dance rehearsal.

Live cows in the middle of the road. Just another day of traffic. I had a thought: What if Hinduism had decided that elephants were sacred?

Thursday, 5/24.  Last real day of this Adventure.  An elephant briefing, then a fantastic time giving her a scrub with a rock.  Extremely well behaved.  Throw my hat on the round, she kindly picked it up and handed (trunked?) it to her handler.  Twice, because the first time I was too amazed to take a picture.  I’d compare the experience favorably with the Panda Sanctuary.  I have the option of riding an elephant tomorrow, but I’ll pass.  I doubt that it can compare with washing one.

Four hour drive around the National Park.  It’s a preserve, so no guaranteed look at anything.  Mostly trees and bushes.  The rhinos were the high point.  A brief look at a komodo dragon, many deer, birds galore.  Gators in a breeding farm.  (During monsoon season Nepal’s gators flow downstream to India, so they have to keep releasing more into the wild.  I don’t know what India thinks about the process.)  No sign of wild elephants or tigers.  The Army has 1,000 soldiers stationed in the park to discourage poachers.  It works: last year not a single rhino was poached.

Tomorrow we fly 20 minutes to Kathmandu (109 miles: a drive would take 5 hours!).  A farewell dinner.  Saturday I fly to New Delhi (a five hour layover) , then Hong Kong (six hours), then LA.  Arrive Sunday.  I shall probably post a recap of the entire Adventure, but it may take a while to get all my thoughts in order.  Movies to see, ribeye steaks to eat.  Pizza!

During the briefing, she would rest her trunk on the post.

Feeding.

My hat!

Very cool hat retrieval system.

This snail is no less than four inches long.

Mon-Wed, 5/21-23.  (Pictures will follow.)  Another long drive over bad roads.  Met Rafting crew.  Captain is smart and funny.  Paddling instructions simple.  “And Stooooooooop. Thank you very much.”  First day not much of anything.  Lunch boxes.  Kit Kats were a melted mess.  Camp is above average, as usual for the tour company.  My tent was the only one directly connected to my personal bathroom.  Others had to unzip the tent, then zip the tent (bugs), then walk three feet to their personal bathrooms.  Don’t know how I lucked out.

Hot! Humid!  Bad sleep, but it wasn’t as bad as I feared.  Between two and five I slept like the dead.  Massive spider on tent wall.  Not poisonous.

Rain in the morning, sometimes heavy.  Took the opportunity to skip the walk.  Sun came out at noon, so I did the afternoon walk to a “village” and suspended walkway.  Incredibly humid.  Everyone regretted the trek.

Slept badly again, though it again could have been worse.  I desperately wanted to get back to either cool air or AC. Rafting was much more exciting.  Wet.  At destination we encountered a fairly smooth, brand new road!  A first for Nepal.  It’s the main road from India.  About five miles of heaven.  Then we were back on Nepal-normal bumps.

Our Chitwan National Park Resort has the weirdest rooms.  Entry from outside into an open air vestibule with a pond and couch.  Right is the AC bedroom.  Left is the non-AC bathroom.  The shower is only partially covered.

Chitwan is incredibly hot and humid (I’m repeating myself).  Ox ride into a very poor community village.  Old-style hand-water pumps in the front yards.  Brought joy to one extended family with printed pictures of them.  Back at the resort I took a dip in the pool with my Bhutan Buddies and talked about the “others”.  Just before dinner we had a big surprise.  It was one person’s birthday, and Sanjeev arranged for an elephant to walk into the pool patio with a sign and cake!  Petting the elephant was a blast.  Fed her an apple.

5/16-19. A partial display.

Hazy Day. A look across the valley. Farms everywhere, but many plots are unused. Reduced population.

Nearly every house has a beehive. They pull out the honey twice a year.

Our baggage handlers. Baskets are carried with straps laying across their foreheads.

Assistant mountain guide who brought up the rear. Since I hung back from the talkative pack, we hiked together. Silently.

Cheerful basket weaver.

Midwives in their midwife uniform.

Annapurna South. (Point of interest: For locals, if the top snow melts away in summer, it’s a “hill”, not a mountain. Yikes.)

Nice picture I think. Extremely well behaved children.  Teachers simply murmur, students respond.

Sun, 5/20.  Trying to upload a few pictures.

International Mountain Museum.  Too much to see in the time allotted.  Building is repurposed from a warehouse(?).  Cavernous.  I could have spent days in the place.  Bought “Into Thin Air”, apparently a nonfiction book about how not to climb mountains.

Tibetan refugee camp.  They make carpets of questionable quality (when compared to Morocco, etc.).  Low prices.  They’ve been in Nepal since the 50s, yet are still people without a country.  They don’t want to return to Tibet and China wouldn’t let them in anyway.  Nepal won’t give them citizenship.  What a stubborn world.  The same situation exists with Nepalese in Bhutan (there since the 1920s!), though the Bhutan king seems to be bending a little.

We did the boat ride.  A party boat with foot-powered paddle wheels.  I was too large and inflexible to paddle much.  Boring.

After lunch I rested.  Bought a simple watch for tomorrow’s river rafting.  

Dinner was at a local home.  The 13-year-old spoke the best English, but he kept popping over to the uncle’s house, who was also hosting some of us.  Apparently they were more fun.  The 17 year-old, whose English was heavily accented, supports the outlawed but still prevalent caste system (they are in the highest caste, so . . .).  Wants to be a banker.  Dinner was pretty much what we’ve been served all week, so I have to believe they were told what to serve.  Yogurt (dessert) is liquid, which I’m beginning to prefer.  All in all, it seemed to me that they host foreigners just for the extra income (they are paid).  They father was distant.  The house was unprepared for guests.  Went to the same bar as last night.  New band.  “I Want to Hold Your Hand”.  Great guitar, very questionable vocals.  Delicious apple pie.

Out of touch until Wednesday. Rafting.  I think everyone in the group has done rafting somewhere in the world before.  We don’t expect much rapids, being the wrong time of year for high water.  I’m not very excited.  It’s going to be hot and humid, with bugs.  Limited showers and questionable water quality at the two day overnight spot.

Wed – Sat, 5/19.  Poor connectivity to the internet.  No pictures yet.  Flew to Pokhara (30 minute flight vice 6 hour drive).  City is Nepal’s second largest and a key recreation mecca.  Met mountain guide and had lunch with a lake view.  Drove 90 minutes (about 25 miles) to trekking start.  A few miles of the road was detoured to literally a river bed (with flowing water) while they repair a section of the road before the monsoon season.  Roads are better than Kathmandu, but only marginally.  At no time did we exceed 30 MPH.  Fortunately, no earthquake damage.

The trek was easy.  Mostly a dirt road.  Walked through one village with an outdoor seamstress and blacksmith shop.  Saw a white-faced monkey.  We arrived at the resort with little interruptions to point out birds.  (Our leader is an avid birder.)  The lodge is new, with two-roomed cottages spread over on side of the large, deep valley.  It was cloudy most of the time so we didn’t get the benefit of a view of the massive Himalayan mountain range.  Power, hot water, no wifi.  Booze.  Lots of birds.  (I’ve become aware that every meal for the past six weeks have been slow, leisurely affairs, which I normally abhor.  Now that I’ve noticed, they are now irritating.)

Thursday involved a hike to an upper village and medical clinic.  Friday had us hiking to a lower village and small school.  Due to light rain the leeches came out.  Bug spray on feet, then socks, then shoes.  Salt applied also.  A few people got bit anyway.  I did not.  

Upper village is nearly disappearing.  Only 80 inhabitants.  Mostly women are around, as men are looking for work in the cities or overseas.  (The Middle East employs a great number of Nepalese (male and female) people at reduced wages.  Fraudulent employment agencies are a risk.)  The women tend the fields and wild stock.  (Sanjeev admitted that even when the villages were filled with men, the women did most of the work.  The men sat around and got drunk.)  One woman manages a run-down museum for tourists.  There are a number of local resorts, though it seems that ours is the only one active this week.  The clinic is housed in a small building with very limited supplies and a staff of four.  Three of them commute from Pokhara!  About a 150 minute drive and hike, each way.  There are village clinics throughout Nepal.  This clinic services three villages, none approachable by car.  While we were there a meeting of about 17 midwives gathered.  That number seemed like overkill for such a small community.

The small school is below the lower village and has only 25 students, all below grade 6.  There were two other schools in the area for older children.  Four teachers (two paid).  Uniforms.  They’d won an award in 2017 as the best small village school in the region.  The head teacher (lives 90 minutes away, on foot) was very capable and carried an air of confident authority inconsistent with the size of the school.  She’d like to expand her nursery school from being just a shed and try to get internet access.  

The lower village had rebuilt itself to be a living museum.  We toured the basket makers, loom operator, seamstress, cook, “mayor”, goatherd, etc.  We also met an old man who had served as a Gurkha soldier in the British Army.  Had lunch, including their version of alcohol and water buffalo jerky.  Small collection of locally-made items for sale.  There was dancing.  

On the last morning the clouds parted a bit and we finally got a view of the Annapurna Massif, home to the world’s tenth tallest mountain and one of only 14 mountains over 800 meters.  There are peaks named Annapurna South, I (the highest), II, III and IV.  It reputedly has the highest death-to-successful climb ratio on Earth.  We were able to see Annapurna South.  Clouds still covered much of the scenery, so we didn’t get the full impact.  Pretty impressive though.  

On Saturday we trekked back to our bus and retraced our route back to Pokhara, including a ride in the riverbed.  (Motorcycle sped past at an improbable speed, axle deep in water. With a passenger!)  Saw farmers using water buffalos to plow their small fields (with, no doubt, a smartphone in their pockets).  They take advantage of the monsoon season to grow rice. 

Pokhara is on the shore of a large lake, which Sanjeev was keen on taking a boat ride, rain notwithstanding.  We rebelled, saying tomorrow’s another day.  Nice new hotel.  Long street of souvenirs, outfitters, tour offices, hotels, bars, etc.  All in English.  I stepped into a bar after dinner because the live band was playing a favorite Eagles song, then hung around.  At ten, the band folded up their show to make room for a live telecast of a championship soccer game between Chelsea and Manchester United.  Standing Room Only.  I departed.

Tomorrow we tour the city (and maybe do a boat ride).  The next day we begin a rafting adventure for three days.  No wifi, no power. 

Tue, 5/15.  Early morning trip to the airport for a sightseeing flight to Mt. Everest.  Very disappointing.  Windows were scratched up and there was haze.  My pictures on the commercial flight from Kathmandu to Bhutan were much better.  But you roll the dice with opportunities like this one.

After a late breakfast, departed to the Pashupatinath Temple, where cremations are performed along the Bagmati River.  Interesting.  There is a nature preserve nearby with spotted deer and those rascally monkeys.

Next came a drive to Bhaktapur City, on the outskirts of Kathmandu.  Though heavily damaged by the earthquake, city officials have been successful in making the traditional sites worthy of tourism.  Clean! Lots of evidence of damage.  Had a great lunch in an ancient pagoda-like building, on the third floor.  Not where I’d want to be in the event of another earthquake.

After returning to our hotel we were treated to a surprise presentation by a women (Maya Gurung) who has climbed Everest with six other Nepalese women.  They’ve since climbed the tallest mountain on all the continents.  Read about them at sevensummitswomen.org.

Tomorrow we fly to Pokhara and trek to a mountain lodge for three nights.  No wifi.  Barely any electricity.  “If we have hot water I’ll be amazed” says Sanjeev.  Visiting villages and a school.  Trying our hand at farming.  I’ll be going dark until Saturday.

You can’t see anything from the cockpit. Not encouraging.

Nice picture of a mountain. Not Everest.

Champagne on the flight.

Too late!

More evidence of damage.

Prep for a cremation. This person was very popular.

Another form of transportation.

Lots of damage. Note that the shops are still open.  Buy stuff quickly!

A house crow.

The story is that she got married in the USA but wanted photos in her home town. People stared. She ate it up.

The person on the left helps pull the shovel up to dump the cement into the basket. The guy with the shovel is barefoot.

I think she’s a sidewalk merchant.