Navigating the Kathmandu Airport or The Saga of Much Security and Many Stamps

An open letter to Jeff and Jen

Leave early for the airport. Bring aspirin. Breathe deep.

First, stand in line to get into the airport building. It’s slow progress because
1. There’s a crush of people.
2. Suitcases go through an x-ray machine with a warning sign: Caution – put no body parts inside this machine.
3. The suitcases are wrapped with a yellow security band before they are released.
4. Men are searched in the line and women are searched inside of a small curtained area. I’m not sure what I was searched for but I rarely put things in the places that were checked.
5. Everyone pushes.

So, you get inside and purchase a departure coupon at the bank. There are two lines – for nationals and foreigners. For us, the foreigners line was on the left and was much shorter but progress was slow. The charge to go to Delhi was 1365 and we didn’t have enough Rupees so had to combine payment in US dollars at an unfavorable exchange rate.

The coupon is actually a set of 4 coupons, perforated on one sheet. Periodically these will be stamped and torn and collected.

The next step is to go to the check-in line. Jet Air was on the far left of the terminal near where we jostled to enter the building. We stood in a line that we evaluated as moving at a snail’s pace. Little did we know.

The sign said that there could be only one carry on but when we were on the plane we saw people with up to four carry on cases so it’s an expansive “one”.

Finally we went upstairs where we stood for an hour without moving. None of the lines seemed to move. We stopped to fill in our embarkation forms and moved to the line but I recommend that you take a form to the line and work on it in line. It’ll give you something to do.

We stood and stood and talked and talked – with an American couple who had spent a lovely time in Nepal and looked forward to three weeks in India. I didn’t envy them the next three weeks.

We were standing behind 20 people at our boarding time so we jumped over to the diplomat line and begged. They sent us back. Other people jumped and went through so we returned to the diplomat line and with the help of another agent we were allowed to stay. Stickers were affixed to our passports and the boarding pass was stamped and I think the last bits of our departure tickets were collected so we were on our way. Except we weren’t.

There was another security check. The bags went through on the far left and people were checked on the right – separate areas for men and women again. We walked right down the center of the room to leave but were sent back to a row of tables for a visual check of our bags and stamps on both sides of our boarding passes.

We were not certain what people were looking at or for. We didn’t take our liquids out of our bags and nobody looked at my computer. Rick even came through with a bottle of water.

So, we went to the boarding area and we were on our way except that we weren’t.

Jet Air uses the second waiting room and the woman at the door said that it would be at least 30 minutes before boarding so I went into the restroom and came out to find all hell had broken loose. They announced boarding for flight 9w262. We were on flight 9w261.

Did Jet Air have two flights to Delhi at the same time? It didn’t seem right so I gently shoved forward (learned this in recent line experience) to ask and was told that the two numbers were the same flight. We went to the boarding bus.

Finally, we were going to be on the plane and out of lines – or not. At the bottom of the stairs was a little tent with one more security check of our bags and one more physical search of the men on the steps and of the women inside a curtained area.

The whole thing took 3 hours from the time we left our hotel for the 30 minute taxi ride until we sat on the plane. We were in a queue all of that time, never sat down and only made it to our plane because it was 15 minutes late and that’s with jumping into the diplomat’s line. When I filled out the evaluation for Jet Air I mentioned some of this though fatigue kept the comments short.

When you leave Kathmandu, you should consider giving yourself lots of time. May the 36 million gods of the Hindus smile on you and your luggage.

Namaste,
Elaine

PS: The Delhi airport isn’t much easier to deal with. They say that you can’t go in more than three hours before your flight and so offer space in a lounge for 30 Rupees for 3 hours, The lounge has a blaring TV set, a monitor for flight information, a couple of souvenir shops and some nasty chairs.

We sat chairs that were chained together in front of the chained emergency exit on a long glass wall. On the other side of the glass were dozens of people stretched out under or on blankets on the ground sleeping. Our entire 6 hour stay was punctuated with beeping horns. I honestly and without exaggeration don’t think that there were more than a few two-second pauses in the beeping the whole time.

There is a toilet downstairs that offers free urinals, 1 Rupee flush toilets and 2 Rupee baths. Rick offered me 3 Rupees if I would take a bath there and while I needed one I declined.

On the level with the lounge are other toilets. In the lady’s the attendant slept fitfully on a sheet of cardboard. She must have been exhausted and I wondered if she worked 2 or more jobs. As a bonus to travelers the toilets are free and have the comforts of home.

Two hours before our flight we dutifully began seeking our boarding area. Rick chased down a man in a Finn Air sweater when he came out of the men’s room and this man directed us to gate 3 but there were hundreds of people crowding the area so it was difficult to find where progress toward entry could be made.

Getting in took time and as with the Kathmandu airport we went through security and had our bags banded but didn’t thankfully need a departure coupon. If everyone in that airport had to stand in line for a departure ticket, planes would never take off.

Clutching boarding passes we went through customs and then through another security check where I was shunted off to a curtained area for my body search. If Rick hadn’t been there to pick up my computer and bag I don’t know what would have happened.

It took 2 hours to get inside, get the passes, go through customs and security and our flight was called to board while I was still in line to be searched.

All of which is to say, don’t expect an easy time in the Delhi airport and allow yourself 3 (miserable) hours.

Post PS
We made it to Helsinki, sat for hours and hours and boarded the plane but someone had a medical emergency and the plane took her to Iceland. The stop wasn't quick because of course they had to remove her luggage also.

The extra trip meant an extra 4 hours and we missed our connection to Rochester. Since Finn Air didn't have to take us further they didn't owe us anything and we have to sit around here for 12 hours to go home. As a bonus, our car parking will expire before we get to it so there is some chance it will be towed. Can you hear me scream?

Baktapur, Nepal

The city gate:


A bell clangs, a hundred bells clang and the sound bounces over and around the chugging engines, beeping horns, chanting monks, bargaining shoppers and endless drums and flutes. In the far distance the dying day glows pink on mountain snow and over the valley a huge flock of white birds settles then explodes again into the air looking for a night roost.

Red and pink shawls warm shoulders of women buying, women selling, women walking with children tied to their backs and everywhere there is another sound, another movement and another temple toward which the sounds are offered. This is Bhaktapur, Nepal, the city that holds its heritage.

We came here with Jeff, the last member of our India tour we hugged good-by. Rick and I had a room for our last night in Nepal but Jeff came only to walk about and have lunch before returning to Kathmandu. Shortly he’ll leave for Tibet and we will head for home.

Inside the taxi was one century but outside time was braided: ancient history, middle ages and modern times. We found internet cafes and pottery smoldering in straw fired pits. Tarps on streets or temple steps were covered with rice drying in the sun while people talked on cell phones. At noon a live goat led a parade to the main temple where it was sacrificed leaving a large puddle of blood on cobblestones – all of it captured on digital movie cameras. It’s, as I sometimes say, not Kansas.

Baktapur is the most impressive of the World Heritage sites we have seen during this trip. A large, complex entity, the city is a living museum with hundreds of temples and wells (there is little indoor water service) and more carvings than a person could count in a decade. The wooden doorways, windows, balconies and roof tops are carved with Ganish, elephants, goddesses unknown, Garuda, birds, feathers, fruits, diamonds and flowers.


The main square has all of this but Rick and I also walked the back alleys peeking in a doorway where a woman cooked over an open fire while surrounded by as many people as the small floor would hold. Hens pecked at stray grains of rice between their fluttering chicks. A young girl jumped rope in a courtyard and an old man slept on a bit of burlap next to knitting women and sleeping babies.

Everywhere there is one more structure worthy of a photograph.


Once just a bit of a trading road to Tibet what is now Bhaktapur became a town under the efforts of King Ananda Malla 1080, more or less. For 200 years, from 1400 onward it was the most powerful city in the area. Most of the knock-your-yak-wool-socks-off architecture is from that period or from the 17th century. Apparently it would be even more dramatic but an earthquake in 1934 destroyed many ornate temples. It’s hard to believe that any were lost since they are everywhere but at the peak there were 172 temples and monasteries here as well as 172 pilgrim shelters, now used as shaded meeting areas for old men during the day. (Though this one is stacked with pots not people.)


It seems as if there must be 172 stores selling CDs of monks chanting or of Nepali music because one hears this everywhere. Our guidebook says that this city, the architecture and pace, is what Kathmandu was 30 years ago. As I write we are sitting on the roof of our hotel sipping tea, listening to all that is Baktapur while I type on the laptop by the light of a candle sheltered from the wind by the middle part of a plastic one liter water bottle. Gotta love recycling.

In the 1970s a German consortium decided to support Baktapur by building a sewage system and repaving the streets with cobblestone and brick and also began a continuing restoration of buildings and temples. Now one pays $10 to enter and the money is used to restore old buildings brick by brick and clay tile by clay tile. Only photos will do to explain this town wide party with momo steamers (a sort of dumpling stuffed with veggies or chicken or buffalo) on every block.

Part 2

One never knows what one will find on any street but when on a street in a foreign city he chances of seeing something outlandishly different increases. Baktapura’s streets are as foreign as they come and they have provided us with shock, amusement and fascination.

A three-year old girl’s toy was the creepiest thing though I can only say that because we missed the goat sacrifice in the afternoon. She was running and laughing while waving about a hypodermic needle. (Let’s reassess the danger level of “runs with scissors”.)The needle was huge, the holding several ml of what looked like very dirty water (sewage??) and brandishing a 2 inch long needle. Rick and I cleared out of her way. Can you imagine being stabbed with an old hypodermic needle with unknown fluid inside?

Later another tiny girl ran between us with a burning stick. She was among a group of 3-10 year olds who were burning bits of trash in the corner of a temple.
Their "clay store" was a series of large mounds under tarps and lean-tos left in such a condition that intense wedging was required and so they were intensely wedging the black clay.





The pots dry in sunny potter's square and is pit fired to a red and is finished with paints or some kind of clear coating and is sold directly to tourists (ie the elephant vases)


but most of their work is of functional vessels traded for rice.
In a safer part of our evening walk we went to Potter’s Square. We had been there in the afternoon when we saw pots being stacked on a straw bed, packed with more straw and layered with more pots and more straw. By evening the pots were covered in straw and buried in ash in preparation for a 3-day firing.

Another load of pots had been fired and another was in the process of firing with smoke leaking out all around it. This pit firing was being tended by a man who fed scraps of wood into each of the ports at the bottom. He would continue to do this all night.

We went to our hotel room for the night when I heard cymbals and drums and looked out the window. There was a dancing parade of the nine manifestations of Durga, living gods that are particularly revered and feared in Baktapura. During certain few occasions and particularly during the festival of Dasain (now), members of the cast of flower sellers are chosen to don the masks and parade through the street.

The masks are specially made and used for only one year. When on, the masks empower the wearer with the embodiment of the deity and so they are living gods. They dance throughout the city to of the major temples and then they disappear into the monastery where only they and initiates can go. I wanted a photo but was told that someone might smash my camera and beat me for photographing a living god so it's good that they ran inside a gate and that I didn't follow trying for a good shot but, again I ask, where do these ideas come from?

Part 3

Through the COLD night there were periodic bells clanging but the bells began in earnest at 4:30 and were ferocious for a while being joined by blaring horns and the occasional fire cracker. Dressed in every layer we had we ventured out, creeping down the stairs intending to go to the square for a closer look but the night clerk slept under a thick blanket in the lobby and the doors were closed and bared. We were locked in but in isn’t really the right word.


The hotel rooms are closed but the restaurant is in the open courtyard and the stairs lead to the roof-top café so the building is more open (cold) air than enclosed but without leaping over the outer walls or waking the guy on the sofa we were locked in.

Jen Brown, a new friend from the India tour, leaves today for base camp at Everest. We’re chilled to the bone here and can’t imagine what she will face. Rick particularly is feeling awful today, so awful he finds nothing of interest in the streets.

getting to Kathmandu

Kathmandu

We had a decent bus for the trip from Pokhara though we started by backtracking over the rutted road that rattled our brains two days earlier. We passed the land slide with chunks of mud like small huts and over the same shaky single-lane bridge. There is only this one road to Pokhara. Monika began to get nauseous so when we stopped for tea she went to the front seat. Why not? There was room for three people and one was empty and it would be easier on her if she sat up front.

She called to me to look out the window because a man was riding a motorcycle with chickens tied to it. The guy had 30 very unhappy chickens hanging by their feet from the luggage rack and handlebars. And we thought our transportation was lacking.

We drove for a few hours eventually reaching a better road so Monika asked if we could stop for a potty break. We did but I want to say that I used the world’s highest toilet in Peru and now possibly the world’s dirtiest toilet here in Nepal. Happily we stayed at the stop to stretch our legs a bit and so photographed some of those great Nepali trucks as they drove by. The backs of the trucks have messages such as: push horn, horn please, honk please, please honk, see you and on the rare occasion one is decorated with heart love. The fronts are all flowers and vines and tinsel garlands. Very cool.







I just couldn't stop taking photos of these trucks





so I continued to snap through that break.





Monika wanted to get back in the front seat but Brahm told her that he had to do some work and needed space and she should sit in the back seat. She didn’t want to make a fuss so she went in the bumpy back.

We passed an industrial area with brick making and with large scale poultry barns and then the air became dust mixed with diesel fumes and I knew we were getting near Kathmandu.

Work was being done to construct a wider road but for now, loads of stone and sand restrict passage so that our movement was measured in dusty feet per minute.

Kathmandu

Words escape me still but I’ll work on describing it. Perhaps I could just say it’s busy and crowded and as old as Buddha. We’ve traded cows and goats for monkeys. It’s more like Delhi than any where else except that people smile and remove trash here.

Our arrival was on Friday and while Friday is Pie Day in Alfred it is Party Hearty in Kathmandu. Near our hotel live bands played with ear-splitting exuberance from 2 am till after the roosters began to crow. It was louder in our room than we could bear and the band wasn’t anywhere near us so I there might not have been a way to measure the decibel level at ground zero. It was a miserable night.

Looking back

We like Kathmandu more than India. When we walked to a restaurant Sunday morning people swept the street and when we passed by later the trash was gone. It was, we later learned, spread out on a larger street for recycling, of sorts. People picked through it to find cardboard and useful things. Maybe it will be taken away later. There were no piles when we arrived so there must be some kind of system.

There are traffic lights and cross walks. There are sidewalks and few places that smell of urine.


In the old city, there is mass traffic and massive confusion but in the new part of the city there is order. We walked past the king’s palace and saw the royal carriage pulled by huge horses and guarded by soldiers. Our only major adventure was the monkey temple.


The monkey temple isn’t about monkeys but somehow they live there. Hundreds of aggressive furry families that mill about stealing food from people’s hands and messing with the offerings.

This man sat outside of the temple and patiently used his hands and feet to unweave this plastic sack and then wove the bits of plastic thread into rope.

There is a huge tree near the top and it wears more prayer flags than we have previously seen in one place. There are people praying and spinning prayer wheels, lighting candles and selling flowers, making offerings and asking visitors to buy their carvings. We didn’t stay very long.

Later we visited the Yak and Yeti, a famous old hotel built in part using an old palace. The room rate online is $86 per night including breakfast so we thought we could afford a pleasant dinner there. Dinner was closer to $86 per person so quite out of our budge but we did walk through the upscale shops and accepted the salute of the doorman.

In general, we may have had enough chaos, confusion, clutter and noise and might be ready for home.

Kathmandu post script

Our few days in Kathmandu left us impressed with the cleanliness of the city when compared with Delhi or Varanasi. We noticed a couple of large piles of trash around dumpsters but people were picking through it and we thought that it was some kind of recycling effort. While visiting with people in a non-moving custom’s line at the airport we learned that Kathmandu’s garbage collectors have been on strike for a week. Color us surprised.

Departmental Obsersvations

Departmental Observations

On the main tourist road in Pokhara, Nepal, there are 2 departmental stores. We went inside one looking for snacks.

The doorway is lined with bottles of water and stacks of big, soft rolls of toilet paper. After our time in India, such a display is as appealing as the Hope Diamond would be in a jewelry store.

The second aisle offered snacks: a hundred brands and flavors of chocolate including M&Ms and Cadbury lots of European dark chocolates but also prepackaged bags of nuts and trail mix.

Nuts sounded good so I picked up a couple of packs of almonds and cashews. Hey, they were packaged in nice, sanitary, plastic bags. Wasn’t that great? I carried them around the store and looked at a huge display of scissors, soaps, teas, socks, paper and more cookies than a town full of trekkers could dunk in morning tea.

Then I found two men sitting on the floor in the back. One reached into a large sack of cashews and measured the nuts on a scale. When he had the right amount, he picked up a bag and poured them in. He handed the bag to the other man who held the edges of the bag in a candle flame to seal it thereby creating the sanitary packages of nuts stacked so nicely by the chocolate bars.

I returned nuts to the nice sanitary display.

Annapurna Mountains

In the Annapurna Mountains

It seems days ago now but at 4 this morning a knock at the door set us in motion to view the sunrise on the top of a hill overlooking the valley town of Pokhara. We almost didn’t make it up because the car in front of our van had a problem. People gathered around it and pushed it up the hill until the engine caught but it went only a few feet and stalled again. Another group gathered around and pushed and again it faltered so they pushed it to the side of the road so our van and others could labor to the top.

We found coffee shops and souvenir stands and a flood of pink sunlight crawling up from the other side of the distant hills. There were many tourists there taking photos of the sunrise, the mountain tops and themselves. When the red ball broke over the hill there was a combination of frenzied shutter action, applause and prayer to the sun god – a mini festival.

We returned to the hotel to regroup for breakfast and then to hire taxis to the dam where we crossed a swaying wooden foot bridge and began what Amanda timed as a one hour hike but I’m sure her watch stopped for at least 50 minutes because I did 2 hours worth of puffing and sweating.

The taxi driver actually insisted that we not take this walk. It was a long walk and “not good.” He couldn’t define “not good” so we went. It wasn’t good in that it was mostly in the woods and so the view was limited but we did peek through the trees at the lake and the mountains and we passed a couple of snack stands and found an observation point fairly covered with prayer flags. It was wild, crazy prayer flaggage. The workout was good for us after so many long hours of bus bouncing.

We found our way with the help of a young man who came along on the trail because at first we weren’t sure about how to go but there were actually signs (Who could expect such a thing?) and we would have been fine but it was all good, share the wealth and all. We walked a long time without being able to see the stupa so his presence was good security.

Early in the walk we passed people working in the rice fields. Water buffalo tramped in a circle over rice to loosen the grains and then men beat the rice on the ground to remove the grain. Nearby a group of women cooked what was most likely a hard earned meal and together they painted a lovely scene under the huge blue sky.

Not far from the rice fields, Amy decided she was too ill for a hike so she and Gordon walked back. They got a closer look at the rice work in the field and decided to take a walk in the river where women were washing clothes. This ended with their paying the women for foot massages and then taking a taxi back to the hotel

The point of the hike was the World Peace Pagoda created by a Japanese group some time ago. The Pagoda was closed for renovation. No problem. It was a nice walk through the woods followed by a direct walk down steps to the lake where we hired two boats to take us back to the hotel.

One boat came with a boatman but Rob was handed a paddle and pronounced driver of the other so he and Jeff had to pay for a boat ride and then do the work themselves (and us). It’s like that sometimes and it’s all okay in Nepal.

Pokhara, Nepal

Pokhara

Sorry, the internet is so slow I still can't post photos but I have about 500 of them.

Our group’s numerous demands and not inconsiderable whining brought us a larger, newer, cleaner bus which made both a potty stop and a food stop (at a restaurant with many toilets – one of them western style).

We traveled from Chitwan to Pukhara on a road built in 1973. Before the road this particular trip was a ten-day mule train trek. For us it was a 5 hour drive that involved as much bouncing as a ten-day mule train trek.

I’m pleased that the road is there – all 220 km of it – but the sad little road suffers from pot holes like craters and the occasional rock or mud slide damage that creates a great deal of unevenness so that travel is slow, halting, and amazingly bouncy. We spent the whole trip listening to Nepalese or Indian rock music which was okay at first but seemed to grow in volume toward the last hour until our heads were raw from the piercing sounds of thin, high pitched women’s voices.

This bus ride started with a bit of excitement – we chased a run-away horse. We were leaving the village and had just crossed the bridge when Rick pointed out a little horse cart with a cute cover. He called it the “surrey with the fringe on top” but suddenly said surrey took off without a driver.

Amy saw the driver panic and run and Amanda watched the cart speed away. The man smacked on the side of the van and though not a word was spoken the driver realized that he was being commandeered as a rescue vehicle so he slowed the van, the man jumped onto the ladder at the rear and we were in pursuit.

We drove for quite a while and I thought that the pony must have turned somewhere. I watched the man through the back window as he glanced up side roads and driveways but always returned to the forward view with extreme concern and distress.

We must have gone the better part of a mile when we saw the pony stopped on the road. A crowd gathered much like one did when our bus locked together with a pink car in some other town on a previous endless bus ride.

That accident was on a busy street full of cars, bikes, motorcycles, people and all kinds of animals so it was no surprise that there were suddenly enough people to lift the car and pull the vehicles apart but this was a relatively quiet street suddenly full of people ready to help. Where did they come from?

The horse stood in that particular place not because he had been caught and not because he was satisfied with that much freedom but because he ran over top of a westerner’s motorcycle which was then lodged between horse and cart. (It is unknown if the motorcycle was moving or not at the time of impact. The westerner was wearing gloves and helmet so it seems likely that he was riding but we missed the moment of impact.)

The crowd assessed the situation and the motorcyclist held the horse with a “what-the-hell-happened?” look on his face. Thankfully he seemed unharmed.

The horse’s owner jumped from the still moving bus and ran to the fray but it seemed the crowd was in process of detaching the cart so he held the horse as they lifted it from the motorcycle.

A bicyclist went down the street to tell everyone what the problem was. When he came to our bus driver there was a short conversation which must have included the driver reporting his part in the rescue. Smiles were exchanged and the bike rider went on. Everyone was quite patient.

The motorcyclist seemed okay as did the horse. The horse owner kept a tight hold on his animal. People moved the cart to the other side of the street out of the way so that the horse could be hitched to his cart again. The crowd picked up the motorcycle for the smiling rider who, when last I saw him through the back window, was putting his gloves back on and shaking his head.

The rest of our trip was relatively free of drama though the road seemed hardly wide enough for two buses to pass unscathed and it was occasionally nerve wracking. We drove past fields patch-worked in rice harvested and rice cut and drying. We crossed the river a few times once on a one lane bridge so creaky and rattlely that it seemed ready to collapse.

Right along side of the creaky bridge was another bridge under construction so maybe the old bridge will shortly be removed. On this day, only one vehicle crossed that bridge at a time which I thought was perfectly dandy but there didn’t seem to be any signs telling people to do that. How does everyone figure this stuff out?

We often had views of snow-capped mountains, lovely green valleys and winding rivers all watched by people with room to wiggle.

In Pokhara Rick and I walked the town and found an observation platform on the lake where we watched a pink sunset. Rick keeps thinking he is in Peru with pizza restaurants, cold air at night, fires burning in the restaurants and colorful knitted socks, mittens and hats for sale but we are certainly in Nepal where the eye of Buddha is on shirts, buildings, trucks and signs.

Again, the people seem friendly and happy. They interact with their children and greet without pushing one to buy, buy, buy. Also, we are all finding great joy not only in walking on sidewalks but in walking where there are no cow droppings to navigate.

Nepal, the antidote to India

I moved a comforter on a shelf and a lizard hopped off slithering under the cupboard. Welcome to Nepal where lizards patrol the ceiling, monkeys scramble in trees and elephants stop by the restaurant for potatoes.

Rick and I enjoy geckos and look forward to finding them on our walls but when one jumps out from a blanket that’s a different thing. Even so this is by far the nicest place we have stayed.

Called the Sapana Lodge, it is operated by Dhura Giri, the general manager, the person who has calmed our life, fed us well, given us a comfortable room and arranged for us to visit a local village, the source of our eggs, bread and vegetables and the place where Sapana Lodge will establish a medical clinic and school.

It’s been a wonderful day in Nepal, a country I can heartily recommend as a marvelous destination. This morning we rode a jeep to the Rapti River and boarded dugout canoes for a trip down the river looking for crocodiles, birds and rhinos and then hiked back. We saw 2 crocs sunning on a bank, birds everywhere, a monkey in a tree and the very coolest of red bugs, a cotton bug. Wonderful.

The river was dressed in mist so it seemed we must fall off the end of the earth. The water constantly gurgled over in swirling eddies while bird calls filled the air.

It was so tranquil and quiet that the stress of India fell into the water melting away.

After almost an hour we reached an area where our heavy western butts pushed the canoe into the stone river bottom so the boatman brought the boat to the bank to let us out. The bank was velvet soft sand undercut by the current in this area so before everyone was out of the canoe a huge chunk of land broke loose and smashed into the water and canoe sending one chair tumbling, nearly rocking Gordon overboard and splashing me with mud. Could have been worse.

The return trip was a jungle walk and those start with safety lessons. If a bear finds us come together in a group and make noise. For a tiger, make eye contact and walk backwards. If it’s a rhino climb a tree or hide behind a tree or run in a zigzag pattern while tossing a piece of clothing to distract it.

Coming down our narrow path was a mahout on his elephant. We all pushed into the plants along the path to make way and suddenly realized that her baby walked behind. They were out looking for elephant grass, a disappearing plant.

It seems that 9 years ago someone brought a vine from Africa and it is now going wild here. A true invasive plant, it grows over the elephant grass, the shrubs, the trees and everything else killing the native plants and removing habitat and food as it grows. Nothing eats it; nothing kills it. The people call it minute mile – because of its rapid growth.

After lunch most of the group went off for an elephant ride but Rick and I walked to town where we found everyone was incredibly pleasant. Children visited with us and this crazy guy asked us to take his photo. Shop keepers didn’t beg us to buy and carried on long conversations with us about where we live and what grows in our home.

The street had no roaming cows, no beeping horns, no tuktuks, no begging rickshaw drivers – only two bull carts, a collection of bike riders and many pedestrians most of whom smiled to say Nameste. By the time we were half way to the river we were waving and saying Nameste to everyone. Very cool.

We went to a store with fair trade items made by women’s collectives and a leprosy camp. The owner was very pleasant and proud of what he had to offer and how the art work was original and how fair prices went to his clients. Nepal is not India.

Our third big event was a visit to the Tharu village nearby. It was a bit of a mess because today is a festival in honor of Shiva. People come from about a 15 km radius to pray at Shiva’s temple and then gamble, eat, shop and visit. It’s a special day for the young girls to dress in their best clothes and meet young men from neighboring areas. The girls were gorgeous but the traffic was worse than in Delhi.

We had to cross a narrow bridge, a narrow bridge completely filled with people and bikes. The jeep drove slowly through the crowd that flowed around it almost like the river moved around our canoe. At one point a car came from the other direction but we made it then another jeep came. There wasn’t more than an inch clearance between the two. Wow.

We visited a house with a bio gas system. The put water buffalo dung into a vat and mix it with water. This goes into an underground storage tank and gives off methane. The methane is captured and piped into the house where plastic tubes take it to burners for cooking. It must seem like heaven to the woman there because she no longer has to search for fire wood. It also means less smoke in the house. Slick.

The houses by the way are mainly built of elephant grass covered on both sides with a mixture of buffalo dung and mud which dries into a hard coating. The floor is made of grass mats covered in buffalo dung and mud and it is hard enough to walk on and smooth enough to sweep. Just now homes have gotten a fresh coating of dung and mud to make them clean and they have been painted with handprints, prints of the foot of god and flowers. The paintings are there to invite the god of wealth to enter and bless the family.

The paintings are particularly concentrated around the doors to make certain the gods know where to enter. It’s a type of competition because the gods only go into the most inviting homes.

We went into a small house with only two rooms with most of the space filled with sacks and baskets of rice. The harvest we have seen across India is the same as in Nepal. It’s the rice for the family for the next year.

If they don’t thresh all the rice now they pack it into cylindrical stacks outside their doors and collect the rest of the rice later. The rice straw is animal food and is also used to make a sort of beer.

Near the homes are gardens for vegetables, darting chickens, goats, cows and bulls. Cows for milk and work and bulls for work.

One man was ripening bananas. He buried bananas under some loose dirt and then had on one side of the dirt pile an opening where he placed some rice straw. When we were there he lit the rice straw to get a smoldering fire and then covered the fire with more dirt. The smoke would surround the bananas and make them ripe in two days.

A woman held a curved knife with her foot while she sliced julienne potatoes as quick and even as any chef on Food TV and another woman showed us her tattoos. Women must have tattooed right arms before they are allowed to cook and serve food. Their arms must be beautiful when they had food to guests. Where do traditions originate?

Everywhere children played and people talked and laughed. Nepal is so not India.

Some of the houses were brick and some, mud or brick, had electricity. Many had water pumps but NONE had toilets. Washing is done in the river and squatting is done in the field between the village and the river. The central government provides nothing here. Even the roads and bridges are locally built.

This hotel was financed by a Dutch NGO in an effort to change things. They hired Dhurba Giri because he was born here and knows all the people but has business knowledge and is dedicated to using hotel resources to help the village.

Hotel furniture was made locally and the hotel buys food from villagers. There are nine workers living here and every one of them speaks English well and is skilled and organized. (I so missed organization in India.) The hotel opened only 2 months ago so this is the start but when it becomes profitable the money will be used for the local people.

As the perfect ending, two little lizards are now scuttling up the yellow wall with little, round, sticky feet so I will choose to believe one is the creature who startled me this morning and survived his fall and will eat mosquitoes all night.