Varanasi

A few years ago I found a photo of my parents in India before I was born. It shows them sitting in a boat, with a distinctly Indian city on the shore behind them. For Christmas I framed it for them, and Dad told me that it was from an early-morning boat road that they took on the Ganges at Varanasi. This morning Jamie took a photo of me in a boat, with a similar backdrop (I even have a mustache like Dad did in the shot).

The hassle that Jamie and I had to go through with touts to get the boat is probably more than they had to deal with, but the city has probably changed very little. Indeed, the city has had a continuous history as the city at the centre of Hinduism since at least 600BC, and it has achieved that in part by changing very little, and not getting involved with greater politics.

The city is stretched along the western bank of the Ganges with an endless string of ghats (bathing steps) along the shore. The other bank is completely bare, without a single building or sign of human intervention. While tourists are conspicuous, along with hostels, bakeries and stores advertising to them, the city really has a life of its own and it is very easy to step aside and just watch the city do its thing.

Jamie and I have had a blast the last few days here, though I suppose we haven't actually done much. We have just been wandering around the fiendishly complex network of alleyways behind the ghats, sampling food and watching the rituals of daily life. The food has been a big hilight for us. Street food in Nepal was not too interesting or varied, but in Varanasi there are many little stalls serving all sorts of vegetarian delights to Pilgrims at high speed, so the food is always very fresh and hot.

We have found a very good little place where the guys stand in front of big pots of fresh food, serving it out as fast as physically possible. We also have a very friendly chai man whose chai sells for less than 10 cents a hit, with lots of sugar and a hint of cardamom. And this morning I got a great video of a pro making chapati at a little stall that only serves a three types of curry with chapati. It matters that they get their chapati right! It is great to see the chapati rolled out, then placed on a hot plate for a minute, then put straight on a bed of hot coals where it puffs up instantly, then removed and patted down to make it flat.

On the first day, just after checking in in our hotel after the long and tiring 24 hour bus-rickshaw-jeep-train-rickshaw journey from Pokhara, I went for a wander and found a lassi shop called Blue Lassi. Lassis are made from creamy yogurt that is worked in with sugar until it becomes smooth. Good ones are served with thick lumps of cream and a dash of rosewater infused with saffron on top. Jamie and I have made them a two-a-day ritual, and at 30 cents a pop we can afford to.

The lassi shop is on a narrow lane that leads down to the main ghat where the dead are cremated on wooden pires. Every five minutes a group of men chanting a simple mantra will walk past carrying a body wrapped in a shroud and covered in marigolds towards the ghats. After a while you end up chanting the mantra to yourself while waiting for your lassi (now rated as my "best in world", replacing the Lassi Wallah in Jaipur).

I am getting along a lot better with Indians in general this time, which is probably because I knew what to expect and I have a slightly higher budget! It is nice to not worry so much about getting ripped off, and letting the hotel make rail bookings and such for you instead of having to sort it out myself. There have still been a few exasperated moments, but nothing that a head wobble and patience can't solve.

I have booked my train tickets to Hyderabad tomorrow, and from there I will getting another train and bus to Hampi, where my fingers will hopefully be in good form on the rocks. So the next post should see me very happy and relaxed in Southern India. Of course, this is India, so I am not taking anything for granted!

Water

Bad Manners

Kirk and I got a local bus from Sundurijal to Kathmandu at the end of our hike. Kirk was lucky enough to have a young lad "practice English" with him. The kid had some strong opinions, particularly on the offence caused to the Nepali people by foreigners who don't learn to speak Nepali and refuse to drink water out of the tap: "Nepalese water is fine, very clean. You are being rude by drinking bottled water instead of tap water."

We had just walked past a village with open sewers that flowed into small streams that then fed a small reservoir that supplied water to Kathmandu. This occurs everwhere, with all sewage flowing directly into water courses, which closes the loop very nicely for guardia. It would seem that a large portion of the population must have the disease; it is certainly very cheap to buy tinedazol, the drug for treating the disease.

Nepalese people do not travel well on buses. The tout has to run back and forward distributing plastic bags for people who are going to be ill, and you have to be careful that vomit from someone throwing up out a window at the front doesn't come back through your window toward the rear (speaking from experience). After taking a bus ride while recovering from a case of gardia and struggling to hold onto my lunch, Kirk and I came up with a new theory that upset stomachs might be behind much of the bus illness problems.

Getting Crook, Spotting Critters

All three of us got gardia around the same time. Kirk and I think we got it from water used to wash our cups and plates the appalling accomodation that we were forced to accept on the last night of our trek. We took the appropriate tablets in Kathmandu, then got a bus to Royal Chitwan National Park the next day. The bus ride got quite hairy towards the end, as the road followed the side of a river in a steep valley. There were many breakdowns, crashes and nutty drivers. One truck loaded up with bamboo had rolled over and was balanced on the cliff beside the road, with two shaken drivers sitting next to it.

No sooner had we made ourselves comfortable in the Tiger Safari Lodge (not to be confused with the inferior accomodation offered by the Safari Tiger Lodge and the Tiger Lodge), than Dave turned up on a noisy Royal Enfield motorbike (India's Harley Davidson). Dave is a loud, hilarious Enlishman (Torquay) who could talk the legs off a chair . We met on the Langtang walk and have bumped into him at each stop of our trip.

When you meet Dave drink. You don't have any option. We have bumped into him three times, and the consequences have always been both hilarious and terrible. Unluckily the timing of our beer and red wine session in Chitwan didn't agree with our stomachs, and Kirk and I spent an uncomfortable night being violently ill (Kirk had it worse).

The next day Jamie and I played with the elephants during washing time at the river. We would climb on the elephant who would stand up and try to throw us in the water, which it always managed to do in the end. That afternoon we went for an elephant ride on a magnificent big elephant with huge tusks. Chitwan has lots of animals, with the biggest drawcard being its population of 400-500 one-horned Asian rhinos.

We spotted lots of deer, and a hilarious monkey that threatened to make my day by almost falling out of it's tree (regular readers in the past will be aware that I don't like monkeys). Unfortunately footprints and dung piles were all that we saw of the rhinos.

The next day Kirk had recovered enough to join us for a half day hike and half day jeep safari in the park. It took us less than half an hour to find a rhino, which we had to view by climbing a tree. It is quite dangerous walking around with such large and unpredictable animals lurking in the long grass. Another walking group who had been in the same canoe as us got chased 80 metres by an angry male rhino, with one of their group lucky to be uninjured after the rhino threw him in the air.

We got a far better view of a rhino during out jeep safari, when a big male walked out onto the road about 10 metres behind our jeep. He had a good look at us, before deciding that we weren't worth the effort of chasing, and wandered off into the bush. Up close such animals look very large, and just a bit intimidating.

Lakeside Living

We are now in Pokhara, a town beside a peaceful lake with great views of the Annarpurna range. We got here a couple of days ago, though one of those days was a bit of a write off because we bumped into Dave and had to put the day towards nursing hangovers.

It is very close to the end of our time in Nepal. Jamie and I are going to take the long trip to the Indian border and onto Varanarsi tomorrow, and we just saw Kirk ride off on a rented motorbike. He is going to attempt to ride along the recently completed Annapurna road to the village of Muktinath where Julian and I once nearly got run out of town (see "This Town Isn't Big Enough" here).

I hope everyone back home is well. The next post will have details of the craziness and culture shock of India. As such it promises to be funnier and more entertaining than these pleasant Nepalese posts.

On The Road Again

This is the first post for a long time. And, like the first post in this blog, it is being written in Kathmandu. This time around I am travelling with my brother Kirk, and my friend of too-many years/partner in crime Jamie. We are in Nepal for a month to do some trekking, then Jamie and I will be going to India where I plan to do lots of climbing in Hampi and eat a lot of curry (two of my favorite things.)

We flew out of Brisbane on the first at midnight. More often than not, flights involve some sort of cock-up for me, and this one was no different. At least in wasn't my fault. Kirk and I had adjacent seats because we have the same last name, but Jamie was down the front of the plane. When we got off for our stop over in Singapore he wasn't waiting at the gate. We waited half an hour, checked the sick bays and had him paged, because we had to be sure he was OK. It turned out that he had just wandered off to do some shopping without touching base as would be reasonably expected. We didn't see him until just before boarding of our flight four hours later.

You couldn't pick two more different international airports than Singapore and Kathmandu. One has automated everything (there are multicoloured LEDs above each urinal in Singapore that alert the user as the the status of the loo), the other has a chalk boards above the luggage carousels that are meant to have the appropriate flight number for the luggage written on them (the luggage seems to come out at random, with a head wobble the most detailed information that the staff can give you.)

We did quite well getting out of the airport and into a reasonably-priced taxi with a minimum of fuss. We got railroaded into a hotel run by some an annoying bunch of gentlemen by the smooth co-driver of the the tourist taxi. They turned each transaction, such as filling out the check-in forms, into a tag team operation to try and sell us tours, get us trekking permits or ask if we had ever heard of Nepalese "chocolate". But it was a clean room that took no effort to find.

Getting Ready

The next day we left the hotel with a minimum of fuss, and located The Hotel Red Planet which I remembered from my last stay. This was no mean feat, given that Thamel - the travellers' district in Kathmandu - is a rat's nest of twisting lanes, buildings on buildings, and every type of transport jostling and trying to sell you Nepalese chocolate.

Once installed in our more pleasant digs we spent a day organising our trekking permits, which has become slightly more complex than last time I was here. Which is to say, it took a lot of vigorous debate and research just to to determine exactly where we had to go to get the permits. We guessed correctly and got the permits after trekking across town and filling out a bunch of forms and dealing with a few grinning, head-wobbling clerks.

The next challenge was to determine which bus station our bus left from the next morning. Once that was done we celebrated with lots of Everest beer, which gave us hang-overs from hell. They put something in the beer over here, and it isn't healthy.

The bus ride from Kathmandu to Siabhru Besi was long and painful, and took all day. Things started well, with the first part of the 70 kilometre journey going smoothly, but the distance covered started to resemble some logarithmic curve from hell as the road surface deteriorated and the number of treacherous switch backs increased. With an hour left on the eight-hour journey, a young lady lost her curry lunch all over Kirk's pants, which made everyone except us laugh.

A Short Walk In The Langtang Valley

The first of two treks that we were planning was the so-called Langtang walk that starts at the bottom of the Langtang valley which is steep, narrow and formed by a river, and follows the valley up to the top where it is wide and flat-bottomed because it was formed by a glacier.

The first couple of days were walking through thick sub-tropical forests in the lower part of the valley, and as we climbed higher the vegetation started to thin out. None of us were very fit, so the constant uphill gradient combined with thinning air as we gained altitude had us working fairly hard. It was considerably harder for Jamie, because he got very bad blisters on his heels that deteriorated each day. By the time we were in Kyangin Gompa at the head of the valley he had been reduced to Teevas.

There were plenty of great views, and friendly people along the way, but the highlight for me was when Kirk accepted my idle dare to jump the largest Yak in Langtang Village (that is yak with a capital Y). Watch this space for video evidence on Youtube.

While Jamie was resting his feet, Kirk and I made a couple of day trips. The first was to walk right up to the end of the valley for a great view from the base of the mountains that extended into Tibet. The second was to climb the 5000 metre high peak of Tserko Ri (well, actually 4984m, but you always round these things up) for a great view of the tops of the same mountains.

We had planned to return back to Syabhru Besi where we started the walk, and then head to the Annapurna region to to the Annapurna Base Camp walk, however we figured that would be pushed for time. Instead, we decided to extend our Langtang walk by crossing the high passes at the holy lake (for Hindus) of Gosankund into the Helambu region.

Jamie's feet were not getting any better, so he finished the walk at Syabhru Besi, and Kirk and I headed for Gosankund. We got laid-up by bad weather in the village Syabhru, which is balanced along a steep ridge. We saw the snow line drop by 1000 metres over the coarse of an hour while we ate our lunch - the clouds descended to cover the tops of the hills, and they left snow behind when they lifted.

The walk up to Gosankund was much easier after our earlier acclimatisation walks, with a beautiful day spent climbing 1700 metres through rhododendron then alpine forests to the high, windy ridge of Laurabina. From there we had uninterrupted views of the Himalaya from the length of the Annapurnas, the Himal Ganesh, into Tibet and to the Langtang peaks.

From Lauribina we had a short climb to the first 4100 metre pass. After the pass the trail was very narrow, carved into a steep slope, with snow on the trail and views over the first lakes below us. Just as we got to the snow line proper, we saw the lake of Gosankund. Hindu mythology holds that the body of Siva can be seen as some stones sticking out of the water where he threw himself for relief after drinking poison. The water was very cold, which would explain why pilgrims come here for ceremonial bathing in the middle of summer. I decided that to wash my face and make a small coin donation to the lake was as far as I was prepared to go.

To get to Helambu we had to cross a second pass of 4600 metres in the snow, which we did in our shorts with big grins after two days of fantastic walking. From there it was a tiring and long descent to Gopte where we were kept awake by a Dutch lady who was a prodigious snorer (thankfully she wasn't as bad as "Our Latvian Friend"). We finished the walk through Helambu to Sundarijal on the outskirts of Kathmandu in a couple of days, with some wonderful views of the Himalaya from the east to the west and changing landscape as high-mountain slopes gave way to well-tended terraces around villages.

We are now back in Kathmandu. We had planned to go to Royal Chitwan National Park for some wildlife spotting, but have postponed that for a day while Jamie recovers from a tummy upset (for once I am not the first to fall!) The bakeries of Kathmand keep us well fed and we import beer for more tolerable hangovers. Life is good.