Photos from Nepal are up!

Photos from Nepal are up at: http://community.webshots.com/user/rachelkgross

Rip-off festival and waking up to gross bodily function noises

I've been in Kathmandu for a couple days, which has been fun because I've been hanging out with some people I met on the trek, but also not fun because I am sick again. Same flu-type thing I had last month in Paraguay. Weird. At least I didn't have it while I was trekking. People here spit with great elan and hawk luggies very very loudly, and even though I am sick it still grosses me out. Almost every day this is the sound I wake up to. This morning the guy in the bathroom next to mine was spitting for at least 5 minutes. Loudly. Ugh.

Yesterday I went to the Indra Jatrah festival, the living goddess festival, which I was pretty excited about but it turned out that we sat (at least we were able to sit down) for 2 hours with people pushing, constantly, to see Kumari come out for 5 seconds. I actually saw the president for longer, he stood around quite awhile waving to people. I was kind of surprised that in a place with a history of unrest he wasn't behind a bullet proof shield-thingy, but then half of the military and a bunch of police were there, so it probably wouldn't be a great place for an assassination attempt if you wanted to live. Then all night people were loud and drunk and it was hard to sleep. Not a great festival. But I did think it was interesting that all the high-up officials drove economy cars, like a Toyota Corolla. You know your country is poor when members of congress can't even afford a Camry. The president was driving a Mercedes, but I have a feeling that was not his car.

Going back home today. Getting excited about going to a place where people don't spit loudly and Tylenol is legal (yes, Tylenol is illegal here. What do they use to break fevers around here?)

Chitwan National Park

Went to Chitwan National Park the other day. I met a couple Finnish girls and a British couple on the bus on the way down, which was good because I ended up on an elephant with the Brit couple and in front of the Finnish girls later. The road to Kathmandu was blocked by a landslide that day, so the only people getting in were coming from Pokhara, like me, which was not very many of us. I met 3 Americans at my lodge who were stuck there for the day, not a bad place to be stuck, but I ended up with the place for myself for about a day between the Americans leaving in the morning and everybody else coming in from Kathmandu in the evening.

All the hotels are pretty similar. There is a mass of people at the bus standing there trying to get you to stay at their place, so I just picked the guy from the hotel that was the least aggressive. The taxi ride is free if you stay there, but I think I lucked out- I got a second story room overlooking the river like I wanted, even without the aid of a guidebook, since mine was in Kathmandu.

In the morning me and 2 other guides went on a canoe trip and then a jungle walk. We walked over to a watering hole and climbed into a tree and saw 3 rhinos. Even though we were fairly safe in the tree, I was pretty scared. Rhinos have been known to charge people, but my guide said that he had only been charged once in 18 years. It's also really hard to climb wet trees in hiking boots.

**note to women traveling alone** this kind of situation was where I was a little leery of being by myself, so I whipped out the old wedding ring and when the guide started asking me if I wanted to grab a coke by the river and hang out later, I said I didn't like coke (true) and when he asked if I was single, I pointed to my ring and said I was married (also technically still true). He left me pretty much alone after that, although I did hear stories from the Americans about this guide hitting on other single women. Fortunately I was prepared and I made sure I was never alone with the guy. This was also why I was leery of getting a guide for the whole Annapurna circuit, out of concern that something like that would happen and I'd be stuck with someone like that for 12+ days.

Other than that, it was a pretty good trip. I went down to see the elephants being bathed by their mahouts (drivers?) by the river, and went on an elephant ride. The elephant ride was kind of strange- we were all on a webbing platform with a railing on it and four people would sit on it, so I was actually sitting backwards the whole time. It's surprisingly hard to take pictures from the back of a moving elephant- a little bumpy. We had gone for almost an hour and a half and hadn't seen anything but a few deer, and started coming out to the edge of the forest, about 100 meters from a soccer game, where we saw 2 rhinos, an adult and a juvenile. Then we walked back into the forest and saw a mommy rhino and a cute little baby! Plus some wild boars. Not quite as cute. You can get pretty close to the rhinos on elephant-back since all the rhinos smell is elephant, not human. It's good for the rhinos that they are so defensive against humans, because of all the poaching, but not so good for tourists.

Got back to Kathmandu yesterday after a long bus ride and ran into a couple people from the trek, so I've been hanging out with them all day. Tomorrow is the big day of the Living Goddess festival, so that should be interesting.

Half hour flight vs. 24 hour bus ride

I just spent about the last 24 hours traveling from Jomsom to Pokhara, the 2nd biggest city in Nepal. I met a woman, Keri, from Bellingham, who had a guide (named Pasang from First Environmental Trekking, who she highly recommends), on the trek, and we were supposed to fly out yesterday morning from Jomsom to Pokhara, a half-hour flight! Instead, all the flights were canceled due to cloudiness and rain the 2nd day in a row. It is a little annoying that this is flyable weather in the US, but I am glad they aren't flying in conditions that they don't have the technology to fly in.

Yesterday we took 2 buses and 2 jeeps from Jomsom to Beni, a small river town that reminds me a lot of the area in the Amazon part of Ecuador, and then another jeep today from Beni to Pokhara. So it took us awhile to get here, but I think the drivers here are better than those in South America, even if the roads are worse. Our last jeep was also really nice- and had seat belts! Our 2nd bus broke down at one point, but they were able to fix it on the spot (a terminal on the battery was broken, but they had an extra lead wire, whatever that is). We also met a couple Australians on the trip, and the guy was a mechanic, so that was useful. They showed us a hotel in Pokhara they really liked, so we are staying there. Tomorrow I'm going to Chitwan National Park; hopefully the day after tomorrow I will be riding elephants!

Annapurna Circuit

Finished the Annapurna Circuit today. By "finish" I mean that I got to Jomsom, the first place you can fly out of, and decided that while this has been quite an enjoyable trek, there are other things I would like to see in Nepal too. Like elephants and living goddess festivals. So my plan now is to fly to Pokhara tomorrow, go to Chitwan National Park to go on an elephant safari, and then make it back to Kathmandu in time for the living goddess festival, Indra Jahtra.


In total, I hiked about 84 miles (including side trips), with a total elevation gain of about 15,000 feet, and the highest point was Thorung-La pass at 17,769. I took a bus from Kathmandu to Dumre, then another to Besi Sahar, then another to Bulbule. I only hiked for an hour the first day, accompanied by a group of guided Israelis (I met about 25 Israelis on this trip- the one group of 16 really upped their majority). I stopped in the outskirts of Ngadi, before I learned that you should stop in the last hotel in the village, not the first, so you have less to walk the first day. In this case, I was about 30 minutes outside actual Ngadi. Oh well. The next day I hiked to Jagat and met a lot of people on the trek, including a group of Euros, a few more Israelis, and a couple of Norwegians. This trip was pretty cool just because of all the people I met, and also because I didn't have to carry a tent.



For the first few days everybody seemed shocked that I was hiking "alone," which seemed ironic because I was not alone; I was with all of the people who were shocked. I usually hiked by myself, but I kept passing and being passed by the same people, and usually ate lunch with some people. The trail also links a lot of villages, so there were tons of locals coming through. The 2 times I got lost (both on the first day and followed by a group of guided Israelis- not sure how good their guide was) some guy with a donkey came by and told me I was going the wrong way within 5 minutes.


The scariest part of the trek was, for me, water crossings. As most people who have gone hiking with me know, I tend to get kind of scared of having to cross streams. Irrationally scared. But this trip has, if anything, cured me of that. At every sketchy crossing I was with friends, including the one where you basically had to walk through a waterfall. There are some Israelis with pictures of me doing this.


I also found out, in the waterfall, that my jacket is no longer waterproof. It's about 10 years old, this is logical, but I tested it in the sink before I left, but apparently I did not leave it in there long enough. This was kind of a problem since it's September in Nepal and it rains quite a bit. Eventually I used the trash bag I was using to keep my down dry to keep my core dry. At least my gore-tex pants are still waterproof.


I also found out that I brought way too much warm stuff. It's actually pretty warm here in September. I did not need my down jacket nor my mountaineering gloves and I probably could have gotten away with just using blankets and not bringing my sleeping bag. I crossed Thorung-La pass, the one at 17,769 feet, in my jacket with a short sleeve and long sleeve t-shirt on top, liner gloves, and gore-tex pants over zip-off pants. I never would have imagined I'd be this warm at that high of an elevation!


To acclimatize, I hiked up to Ice Lake with my new Swiss friend Oliver, and then spent a day hiking around the hills around Manang with various Europeans. I visited the Praken Gompa where the "100 Ruppee Lama" gave me a blessing for my crossing over the pass for, you guessed it, 100 ruppees!


I then hiked up to Letdar, where a bunch of us bonded over Yahtze and hot chocolate. All of the other American women I met on this trip were from Oregon or Washington, which was pretty cool. It started raining in the evening, and pretty much rained constantly for the next couple of days. I stayed at Thorung Phedi the night before the pass with the Norwegian couple, the Spanish couple, and the sick Israeli and sick American. Myself and the Norwegians and the lone Israeli started off at about 6:10am, everyone else having started from High Camp about 1000 feet higher, but I didn't want to sleep that high. By the way, the Thorung Phedi Base Camp Lodge is pretty cool. It stopped raining hard about 10 minutes after we started, but sort of rained intermittenly the rest of the time. This was annoying, because it was pretty warm, and I couldn't figure out whether to wear my long-sleeve t-shirt or my jacket. But since my jacket isn't really waterproof anyway, I just wore my long-sleeve t-shirt most of the time.


The only altitude sickness problem I really had was shortness of breath, so I just had to hike slow. I was also a little nauseous, but this may have been from waking up at 4am. Our Isreali and one of the Norwegians, Tora, had pretty bad headaches that didn't get better until they got almost all the way down.


The day after the pass crossing I visited Jhong, a small village across the river from Muktinah, and then walked to Kagbeni. Pretty much everyone else had gone directly to Jomsom after crossing the pass, but Kagbeni was supposed to be a cool little old village, and it was. It is very old, the gompa (Buddhist temple) being over 500 years old. The little streets were barely streets, more like corridors. The old capital of Mustang used to be located there, and the fort is still there, actually attached to where my hotel was. There were cows, goats, and donkeys roaming around, and animist protector figures at the entrance to town. It was probably the most unique village on the circuit, I was surprised that so many people skipped it. However, I ran into the Norwegians there, and they recommended I go to Tiri, which is a little village about a half hour north of Kagbeni and is the furthest north you can go into the Kingdom of Mustang without a $500 permit. That was also a pretty cool village, with a very very old gompa where the paintings seemed more Hindu than Buddhist, and a random guy picking peaches gave me a couple. The Norwegians also recommended the apples, but I didn't find a guy picking apples.


The last couple hours of the trek were also pretty difficult. I got a couple more water crossings, including a big river, and then walked about an hour and a half in a huge wind AND rain with a Spanish couple. No easy finish to this trek.

Kathmandu

I landed in Kathmandu yesterday morning and promptly got lost as soon as I left my hotel because I apparently can't read maps on little sleep (maybe 6 hours over 48, total?) and went the exact opposite direction. I have some pretty good maps, but unfortunately I've only seen 2 street signs in English and cannot read Nepali. But it's OK, I got to see another non-touristy part of the city and people were really helpful in helping me find my way back. Once I get to a tourist area, I can use the hotels and stuff as landmarks because they are in my guidebook. And I haven't gotten lost since.

Once I got back to my supposed starting point, I used Lonely Planet's walking tour from Thamel (the tourist neighborhood) down to Durbar Square, which was the ancient capital and a UNESCO world heritage site.The walking tour can basically summarized as "look, here's a temple!" and look, another temple! I was almost templed-out by the time I got to Durbar Square. But I got a pretty good guide who explained a lot of stuff about the temples to me, which is helpful, since I know very little about Buddhism or Hinduism and some temples are both Buddhist and Nepalese temples, and there are figures in both religions that are important in both. What looks like the Star of David is also some sort of Buddhist symbol too, although I haven't learned its meaning yet.

I had a very strange bargaining experience yesterday. I was trying to sell back a book at a used bookstore, and the guy asked me to make an offer first, even after I explained that I had no idea what the prices were. I looked around the store a bit and offered 300 ruppees. He then offered 150 and refused to budge. I didn't understand why he didn't just offer 150 in the first place, if he wasn't going to bargain at all. I got kind of upset, and he just kept saying Namaste (hello/goodbye) & bowing and trying to get me out of there. So I went somewhere else, where they offered me 150 too, which was fine, I didn't care about the price, but at least we didn't do some song and dance about it. Maybe he was just hoping I would offer less than 150.

Today I got the 2nd permit that I needed for my hike (I need a general Nepal registration card & an Annapurna area permit), and then walked over to the Monkey Temple. I bought 2 empanada-type things along the way, and ate one. It was pretty good, actually. But then a monkey stole the 2nd one, just as I was thinking, I should put this in my bag. Of course, that's the first thing I should have done when I saw the monkey, instead of take pictures of it. A buddhist monk laughed as I cursed at the monkey eating the rest of my lunch.

This temple was more buddhist than Hindu, but had some Hindu elements too. It was visually pretty impressive.

Headed off to start the Annapurna circuit tomorrow. At the earliest, the next post will be within 12 days, but I am planning on doing the whole 17 day trek, so it might not be for 17.

India is so humid that my glasses fogged up

I landed in India during their evening, when it was about 8am Eastern time. I didn't sleep much on the plane, so I'm hoping that will help me adjust to the jetlag better. I try to look like I know something about what I'm doing when I get to a new place, but even my taxi driver in Delhi told me I looked bewildered. Part of it was my glasses fogging up made it hard to see, but I was also a little shocked about how hot it was. I thought I was used to the heat, but Delhi makes DC seem cool. I can honestly say that my shower in India was the only one that I have ever enjoyed cold. I can get through a cold shower, but I think this was the one time that a cold shower was a relief. Even in DC when the AC was out in the summer I would turn on a little warm water.

Even though I had to fly out the next morning, I decided to stay in the city so I could see a little bit of India. I'm really glad I did. Apparently Krishna's birthday was the day I flew in, so I got to see a big parade. What I saw of India was actually pretty similar to what I expected. Maybe I've just seen too many movies filmed here. There is still a lot I would like to see and learn about there, but for now, it's off to Nepal!