1:15pm – Walk & 100 Squats, Around Town
So, I’ve been in Lyndon Station, Wisconsin since Wednesday evening. I am here visiting my parents and grandparents…and it’s cold. Very cold. It’s been a high of 19-28 degrees on any given day I’ve been here and much colder at night. Also, Lyndon Station is a town of a little over four hundred people, so there isn’t really much to do or anywhere to go, to speak of. As a result I’ve been a little stir crazy and haven’t worked out since I left LA.
I had to get out and get moving a little bit today, even if it wasn’t a workout. It was about 19-20 degrees outside, so it wasn’t really great for doing a workout or going on a run, but my parents house is also not all that big and I’ve learned that trying to workout indoors while family is around doesn’t usually go very smoothly, which I totally get ‘cause they’re just curious about what I’m doing.
Anyway, I decided to get some fresh air, since there is plenty of that here, and go for a half hour walk. I was wearing two pair of pants, two shirts and a parka…and I was still cold. So, I stopped periodically to do sets of 20 squats. I did either 100 or 120 squats over the course of my walk and probably walked a couple miles. The squats did the trick and warmed me up.
Here is a pic of “down town” Lyndon Station.
Once I made it through immigration and customs, I bought a round trip train ticket to Hong Kong Island. The airport is on the north side of Lantau Island. The train takes about twenty-four minutes, stopping a couple times along the way. The ticket cost me about twelve dollars American.
I did discover that this part of Hong Kong was not pedestrian friendly and kept having to double back to find elevated walk ways and walk bridges. Eventually I found myself near a pier and that’s when I spotted the double decker bus. It looked just like one I rode last year with my parents in Los Angeles. The side said an all day pass was fifty Hong Kong dollars, that’s about seven dollars American. I saw the bus drive away, but noticed where it had come from and headed that direction.
I did get off at the Hong Kong Zoological and Botanical Gardens, though. The gardens were gorgeous and the zoo was entertaining. They had a large aviary, including “American Flamingoes” and a large collection of various monkeys. One of the monkey areas had monkeys that were SO energetic. They were doing gymnastic routines chasing each other all other their pen. It was really entertaining to watch — and really impressive!
After that I was back on the bus. Although the bus was bumpy at times and Hong Kong very hilly (it reminds me of mashing San Francisco and New York together into one city), I was quite adept at taking photos from the top deck. Tour buses are nothing after conquering photo-taking off an elephant!
After lunch my schedule today was to visit three of the more prominent temples around the city. This was the tour that Hom arranged for me since my trip was…well, basically not the trip I paid for.
My guide asked me at one point if we bury people in the States or if we have pyres. I was like, “Uhhh, no pyres.”
When I got back from the temple tour, I was already checked out of my room at the hostel, so I did some souvenir shopping to spend the last of my Nepali money. I ate lunch at a place called The Third Eye, in search of a more authentic meal. It was a “Newari” meal. The Newar people are the indigenous people of the Kathmandu Valley. It was a pretty awful meal, although I think not all Newari food is necessarily so. The meat here is just impossible for me to eat. It was the darkest sinewiest chicken meat I’ve ever seen. The soup, vegetable curry, spinach, rice, and rice pudding were all good, though.
Durbar Square is right near an area known as Freak Street so I headed over there to check it out. Again, most everything was closed, but it was cool to walk up and down it. Freak Street was the hip place to go in the 1960’s when hippies traveled to Kathmandu.
As I was walking down the sidewalk to Thamel, I heard music down an alleyway. I looked and through a low passage I could see people gathered. I ducked through the passage and discovered a group of men drumming and two other men holding what were probably thirty foot long poles decorated in flags. They were spinning the poles around to the music. It looked really difficult! I watched them for a while. I was glad to have stumbled upon it.
Similarly, I must say that I am always a bit taken a back when I see the hammer and sickle symbol on display. I believe they are now known as the Unified Communist Party, but the Maoist Party has had a strong presence in Nepal since the 1990’s, including launching a civil war in 1996 and continuing to fight against the Nepalese Army and the former monarchy intermittently until 2006 when they were recognized as an official party. They now hold the majority of the seats in one of the houses of parliament. Currently Nepal has no Prime Minister, however, and has been in the process of writing a new constitution for the last two years.
Eventually, I wound up in a place called Hanuman Dhoka Durbar Square. It was chaos. There were a number of gigantic temples, statues, and other monuments within a couple square block area. There were hundreds and hundreds of people lined up to get into the main temple. There were vendors everywhere selling trinkets, cotton candy, and all sorts of other things. There were a lot of tourists taking photographs and also some local television crews filming. Women were selling marigolds to be offered up at the temple.
The river was a complete horror. From bank to bank it was filled with garbage. Mountains of garbage. There were people climbing around in it and little shanty houses built amongst the refuse. Along the edges of the bridge people were selling things. I saw an old man trying to sell a crate of crushed eggs. Women were selling produce that didn’t look fit for consumption. As I walked by some children called out to me. I turned to look back at them and my heart just broke. To see children in this situation, playing, but dirty from head to toe, and living in this scenario every single day. I can’t even imagine what kind of “home” these children went to at the end of the day. It broke my heart to know there was nothing to do about it. There is no way to change the existence of these situations. There is no way to help these people…and so many people are living this way. It was horrifying and overwhelming.
Eventually I came to the conclusion that I was indeed lost. I had an idea of where I was, but upon finding a taxi and seeing which way he went to return me to Thamel, realized just how lost I was. It took him twenty-five minutes to drive me back to my hostel. The problem really was, that even though I had a street map with me, there are no street signs here. Every once in a while there’s a directional sign, but never in English. The only way I knew I was getting lost was because the businesses frequently put the neighborhood name on their placards in English. So, I knew I was no longer in Thamel, but didn’t know the geography well enough to know what direction I had gone.
My head hurt from the things I had seen on walk and I genuinely couldn’t stop crying every time I thought about it. Picturing kids playing in piles of garbage was just too much for my heart to handle. I sat in my room for a little while and put some dry clothes on. I realized I was incredibly hungry and hadn’t eaten all day.
I learned a lot about mandalas, though there is much more to learn I am sure. The process of the monks creating the mandalas through meditation and that it is a divine creation reminded me of the writing of icons in Christianity. The shop owner was incredibly helpful and must have shown us a hundred different mandalas to find the ones that we liked. He explained them all to us and told us how the oil ones different from acrylic, that they can take one to two months to create, and what all the symbols meant. He showed us one that is called the Reincarnation of the Dalai Lama because it is a rendering in paint of one that the Dalai Lama did in sand. The intricacy and detail of the mandals is truly impressive, given how tiny they are. I can only imagine what they must look like done in sand!
The experience at the restaurant could not have been more opposite of my morning. OR2K was a really hip, trendy, hippie feeling place. Almost all foreigners and a variety of fusion music pumping loudly. There were even black lights installed so our clothing glowed in the dim light. It vibe reminded me of East Lansing or Westwood. While I enjoyed the food a lot and the atmosphere was fun, it was just an odd place to end the day. I’m not a big fan of “liberal guilt” – I don’t think that’s useful or productive for anybody, but I did feel like I was on a crazy rollercoaster today and experiencing two drastically different ends of the spectrum as far as the Kathmandu experience.
I am back in Kathmandu now. The bus ride back from Chitwan was much better than the trip out. It only took about five and a half hours as opposed to nine. Other than my sit bones being tender to the touch from the elephant riding, today was much more comfortable on the bus than last time. We stopped in the same little town for lunch and this time I had some really tasty chow mein. It was less greasy than the food in Sauraha, too.
Hom, my trip organizer, told me he spoke with Ram, the Yeti Guest House director about me going on a tour of three temples tomorrow and it would not cost me anything because of my volunteer trip being mishandled. Today, when I got here, Ram says he never spoke to Hom. He called Hom and they sorted something out. So, now I am going to see some things tomorrow and Ram is trying to sell me on seeing more stuff that is further away. He is also telling me that getting me to the airport is going to be very difficult on Monday. I mostly want to strangle him. This happened when we arrived in Chitwan, too. They told us it was going to be very difficult to get a bus out of town. I guess there just has to be some sort of drama so I know how they’re going out of their way, but to me, it just comes across as not knowing what they’re doing and not delivering what they promised. My experience of “customer service” in Nepal, whether it be a guest house, internet café, etc, is that if you question anything you’re laughed at and told you’re wrong.
I gave chocolates to Raj, the hotel manager there, and to Delmaya, the hotel worker. I gave some the night before to our awesome jungle guide.
Alright, I’ve taken some time to settle in and get acclimated here. This neighborhood is very different from anywhere I’ve been yet. While the amenities are a step up — though the toilet and shower are still in the same room, meaning, the shower head is on the wall next to the toilet, no shower stall, which seems to be standard in Nepal — the neighborhood is also less authentic, in that it’s a big tourist trap here in Thamel. There are a ton of shops up and down the street and a lot of Western style restaurants and clubs. The streets are packed with travelers and shops selling trekking gear to people headed for Annapurna and Everest. If you want counterfeit North Face gear, this is the place to get it!
Ram has informed me I will now be going to see the three temples on Monday as they can get no drivers this weekend. I told him Monday was okay as long as it was for sure going to happen Monday. That is my last day and there will be no other time to go if it doesn’t happen Monday!
Thankfully Justine and I took the positions facing forward. The couple had to sit facing sideways/backwards the whole time with their son on their lap. I got a little nauseous as it was! Elephants are not a smooth ride by any means. The first twenty minutes of our ride took us from where we mounted the elephant to the edge of the jungle. It took about that long to figure out how to hold onto the basket in a way that wasn’t going to exhaust my arms and would be somewhat endurable. I discovered the key was to relax as much as possible and only grip when the elephant was at the most extreme point of tipping back and forth.
The best thing about the mahout was how he mounted and dismounted the elephant — he would climb up and down his trunk! The elephant would curl his trunk a little so the mahout could step on it, then he would grab onto the elephant’s ears and start climbing while the elephant raised his trunk. It was very funny to watch!
Justine had her heart set on seeing a rhino and our mahout did his best to oblige, but we never saw one. We saw three different types of deer and some wild peacocks. Apparently we just missed seeing a mother rhino and her baby at one point, we found out afterward. Our mahout said he thought all the elephant drivers should have cell phones so they could alert each other and make sure the tourists got to see everything.
We were very short on time and really wanted to make the sunset so we started walking but attempted to rent some bikes along the way. We didn’t have any luck, so we just walked really fast! Somewhere in here I started getting a migraine. I wasn’t surprised. Avoiding getting them is all about consistency and there has been nothing consistent at all on this trip. I didn’t have any food or Excedrin with me, so I just kept telling myself it wasn’t going to be a bad one. And, thankfully, it wasn’t. I couldn’t see very well for most of our walk to the village, but after that I only had a dull headache for the rest of the day.
The next museum we saw was called the Biodiversity Museum. I have to say, it totally tickled me. It reminded me of my favorite museum when I visited Russia, Peter the Great’s Museum of Ethnography. The collection was very quirky and just odd by Western standards. This particular museum had a lot of preserved dead animal fetuses and reproductive parts. Justine was kind of horrified. Again, I was totally amused. I love weird museums.
After we were only a short distance from the river at Chitwan National Park, so we continued walking and took some seats on one of the terrace restaurants to relax and watch the sun go down. I treated myself to a banana lassi while we sat. We ran into our Frenchman and his Belgian girlfriend there, as well.
Back in the room, I discovered that Delmaya, the hotel worker, had drawn artwork for Justine and I as parting gifts. It was very sweet of her. She put her address on one of them, so I think I will send her a care package of things when I get home to the States.
We walked to the park and went down to the river’s edge. The river marks the border of the park. The border of India demarcates the other edge of the park. The morning was very misty and made for a mysterious feel, especially when elephants started appearing out of the mist, on the opposite side of the river. They were wading through the river, government workers perched on their backs along with giant bundles of grass, and climbing up the opposite bank. They do this every morning, we were told, to carry food to the government elephant stables.
Eventually we were on our way and the mist was starting to burn off. We got in our canoe, which was a traditional dugout style canoe with a very wide bottom. Our guide maneuvered us to the opposite shore where we began our trek. Before we could actually take our first steps our guide talked us through what to do in the event of an emergency. An emergency meaning in the event we were chased by rhino, tigers, sloth bears, or elephants. I learned that if we encountered an aggressive sloth bear we were to stand together in a tight group and “make a horrible sound.” If we were chased by a rhino we were to run in zig zags and then hide behind a tree. If we saw a tiger we were to stop immediately and then begin slowly walking backwards. It was both an entertaining and sobering conversation.
A couple different times during the hike we climbed up tall viewing towers, like big tree houses out in the jungle. From there we could see great distances, as well as take a break from walking. The air was hot and humid when we were out in the flat areas and it always felt good to either be up one of the towers or under the canopy of the trees.
Back a the hotel for lunch, we ate a garden burger, fries and vegetables. The garden burger had a light curry flavor and the vegetables tasted as if they had come from frozen. I have had little opportunity to eat genuine Nepali food while I have been here. So much of what I have been served is an attempt at Western food. Justine said that is common as the Nepali people don’t eat out and therefore restaurants and hotels cater to Western travelers. At some point while I’m here in Chitwan I may get adventurous and try something from one of the shops claiming to be authentic food.
The funny part of it all though, was that at first the people at the internet café told me it was better for wifi if I sat outside, so they gave me a little stool and I sat on the stoop, on the edge of the street. As I sat there, elephants ridden by government workers passed by repeatedly, as well as carts pulled by oxen. The situation made me laugh, and again, I thought, who gets to do this?
We went back down to the river at the national park and back into a dugout canoe. This time we were going to canoe thirty minutes down the river so that we might see crocodiles and rhinoceroses. We saw many egrets and cranes. We saw some cows on the banks…and then finally at one point we saw just the head of one big sleeping crocodile. No rhinos to be found.
We passed some children bathing and playing in the water at one point. Our guide called out to them that there were crocodiles spotted in the water and they all froze instantaneously. Our guide started laughing and the children burst out laughing, too.
Then, we rounded a corner in the trail and our guide stopped cold. We instantly froze and became quiet, too. He started walking slowly and we followed him. We followed the direction of the finger he was pointing out toward a big puddle. And, lo and behold, a gigantic rhino was napping in the puddle. Our guide quickly informed us which way to run and which tree to get behind in the event something went wrong in the next few moments. Then we started tiptoeing forward. We kept edging our way towards the rhino until there was only about fifteen feet between us. My whole body was tense and it was completely exhilarating to be that close to that powerful of a wild animal.
At the elephant breeding ground we learned all about how domesticated elephants are raised and trained. Asian elephants exist in Nepal as both wild and domesticated animals. The domesticated elephants are used as service animals, a fair number of them by the Nepali Army. Elephants can traverse jungle terrain that vehicles cannot and are used to patrol outlying areas of the parks and jungles.
