You'll have to excuse my spelling on this entry. I'm currently sat in a internet cafe in Kathmandu with a classica Nepali keyboard balanced on my lap. The keys are falling off and not only have the letters been written on in tippex they have been written on wrong. Luckily for me I can remember where the letters normally go, but the whole set up isn’t idea J
So last time I wrote we were leaving Pokhrara. Yet again I left it a little too long without writing a blog so i have a lot to catch up on.
The journey to Bandipur was my favourite journey so far. We were all so sad to be leaving our new home from home, and on the morning of the 13th, we finally checked out of the Butterfly Lodge and Myke, Freya, Yvan and I made our way to the local bus park (basically a strip of dusty road with a load of buses crammed onto it). After some seriously hardcore arguing with a lot of nepali taxi drivers and bus conductors (one of which i actually had to fight my luggage off of when he dragged it onto his bus and tried to drive off) we finally bargained a local bus to take us to Dumre. It was so ridiculously hot and looking inside the crowded bus it didn't look so pleasant. So, breaking a hell of a lot of innate rules about how no to die travelling across asia we slung our bas onto the roof and climbed ontop of the bus. It was the most epic journey I've made in a long time....We clung on to the railings as the bus thundered up mountain, across valleys of paddi fields and through bustling bazaar towns. With the wind in our hair we had the most incredible view of Nepal I have ever seen. When we first started off I was clinging on for dear life and as we rattled up the narrow passes it was hard not to think we might be moments from plummeting to our deaths. However, after a couple of hours flew b, we were all sunbathing on the roof, shouting namaste to local kids, hypnotised by the views of mountains and fields of flowers as the bus carried us through lush green countryside. The time flew by before we knew it we had reached Dumre. Dumre gave us our first glimpse into Indian-style hustling and we struggled to strike a deal with any of the local jeep-drivers to take us to Bandipur. They refused point blank and laughed at us as we sat sweating in the road, the sun beating down on our heavy bags, and they gestured for us to take a rickety local bus. I point blank refused, seeing the tiny crumbling path that wound its way up to Bandipur, no bus could possibly maneuver up that. Finally, after a lot of bartering we managed to secure a ride with a banged up old jeep, and after throwing us and our bags in a cage on the back, the driver began to take us up the mountain, around terrifying hairpins and up and up to where the tiny hamlet of Bandipur was nestled on a hilltop.
Bandipur wins hands down the award for the most beautiful place I’ve seen in my lifetime. The complete opposite to pokhara, it was completely unchanged by time or tourism. The tiny brown buildings tinkled with bells and the little cobbled streets wound around the hillside, free from litter, cars, noise and full of children playing, elderly locals playing chess, flowers, chickens and goats. It was a real Newari hamlet, and the people greeted us with friendly Namastes and curious stares. The views from our guesthouse (a tiny tumbledown newari house with bucket wash facilities and rickety wooden stairs) was of the whole valley, tipped with mountains and with literally thousands of swallows swooping about before the sunset. I have never in all my life been anywhere so peaceful.
Our time in Bandipur was spent walking around the village, playing with the children, exploring the hills around. My fondest memories are of waking up in the early mornin to the sound of children playing, women sweeping the perfect village square clean, sitting out on the street watching the locals doing their sewing...We would have breakfast on tiny wooden balconies that overhung the paddy fields full of flowers, looking down over the misty valley, listening to the morning bells ringing. One night we walked out from the hamlet and up to a nearby hill to look at the stars. The four of us sat there for hours looking up a entire galaxies, ive never seen the sky so bright. Another day we trekked out of the village and up and over the hills, throught tiny settlements of Newari houses, over the other side and down through the thick forest to a huge cave a few hours away. After exploring the cave we trekked down into the valley through orchards of lime trees and into a little village. We sat in the shade with the locals sipping cold bottles of coke after our exhausting walk. Afterwards we walked to the river to take a dip surrounded by hemp bushes and happy little goats, before htch hiking back to Dumre. Unfortunately on this day, the jeep drivers in Dumre were even more unhelpful than the last time, and we got drawn into quite a heated argument with one of them who refuse point blank to take us anywhere for the price we had been given the time before. Finally we found a bus and decided it was the only way we would get home, so we climbed aboard and held on with white knuckles as a bus the size of, well, any normal bus, wound its way up hairpin turns that were too narrow for a rickshaw. Inside the bus, however, the crackling Nepali music turned the journey into just another magical one, and I sat on the backseats with Yvan playing with the local children and trying to ignore the sheer cliffs that plummered outside the window.
In Bandipur we formed a close group of friends with some other travellers; Freddie, a lovely Swiss punk and his girlfriend Benedict from France. We also met Lena, a German girl and the seven of us spent the days and the evenings enjyin each other’s company in the peaceful village square. When the time came to leave we decided to journey back to Kathmandu together, and it was quite a journey indeed..
We had wanted to ride again on the roof of a local bus, because the area we were in was so ridiculously humid being crammed in with all our bags would be unbearable. However, on the morning of leaving, we had got up too late to catch it, so we piled into a minibus full of Nepali people and were on our way. After traveling for an hour or so we started driving along some seriously crazy roads (minibus drivers are even faster and more death defying than the bus drivers), and on one corner we passed the local bus we would have got in the morning, smashed nearly in half with a head on collision with a lorry. I felt like I was going to be sick as we slowed down to drive past the wreckage. We would have been on the roof. I coulsn’t actually believe it.
As we neared the Kathmandu valley, we hit a traffic jam. And it was a traffic jam like i've never seen before. It baking hot, we had no water, no air conditioning: Freya, Benedict, Lena and I sat on the back seats of the bus cooking, whilst Yvan tried to keep spirits up in the front playing his guitar. The road in front of us as gridlocked as far as we could say in a long, long winding road all the way around a mountain. Nothing was moving, and it was 35 degrees. Every half an hour or so the traffic wold lurch forward a few hundred yards, but as we finally crawled around the road to the end of the hillside, the hairpin turn would reveal another road stretching out just a far, exactly the same. For 5 hours, we barely moved. It was absolutely the most intense traffic jam I have ever seen, and it was lucky that we met some people we could buy water off in the traffic. Finally the air began to taste more and more foul and the noise and beeping grew and grew…as the traffic widened to a beeping, honking mass of noise and pollution, I realized we were back. Back in the noise and the chaos of the Kathmandu we had left so long ago.
Coming back to Kathmandu much more of a shock than I thought it would be. Arriving here from Delhi, the heat, the sounds and the smell never occured to me, but comin back from Pokhar, Mt Panchasse and the timeless beauty of Bandipur, it felt like a kich in the teeth and was really hard to take. After rumbling down the road for just a few minutes my contact lenses were already , itchy with the dust and when we slugged our bags out of the minibus along a death defying highway into the city centre, the noise was unbearable. A child was kissing my feet and asking for money, his mother tuggin at my arm and begging in Nepali, taxi drivers and minubus drivers tried to take our bags and shouted at us that the bus we wanted for Freak Street didn’t exist. We had to practically fight our way across the main road to find the right bus. However, after a couple more bus journeys we were back in Thamel, the tourist capital (it seems) of the world, and it looked so different after seeing the real Nepal.
We headed back to Freak street. Thamel was just too noisy, and Freya, Myke, Yvan and I checked in at a threadbare but clean hotel for 100rs a night (about a pound). For the past few days we have been staying there, leaving our big bags and taking trips out for the day, returning at night. We had a few day in Kathmandu being tourists and regaining our strength, and a few days exploring the older Nepali parts of Kathmandu, which were insane. It was much more how I imagined India to be: people people people, in every direction, pushing past, trying to sell you stuff, beggars on the floor, street kids sniffing glue. One day we were followed by a young Nepali guy who was part of some sort of Kathmandu mafia, asking for protection money. He followed us back to our hotel armed with a massive bamboo pole and luckily for us, the crowded place meant when Yvan squared up to him and told him to leave us alone he moved on. It was pretty scary though. Kathmandu also has world cup fever, which is pretty funny, and on the opening night of the world cup we all piled into a sheesha bar and cheered on the match with the locals. They love it! Now we are back in Kathmanu again after a trip to a place called Dhulikhel which was fantastic. (Kathmandu has a weird magnetic power a lot of people have commented on) .
A couple of days ago we left our bags in Freak Street and with a little bag of clothes each and some money we fought our way across town to catch a local bus to Bhaktapur. Bhaktapur is a sort of ancient redbrick medieval town in the Kathmandu valley, but we soon learnt that we had to pay 700rs to enter, which we couldn't afford. We were originally planning to go to Nagarkot, where you could view a panoramic view of the Himalayas with Everest as it’s wind torn crown. However, as we sat in a cafe in Bhaktapur, we decided Dhulikhel, a 'perfectly preserved newari town with views to rival nagarkot'. Sounded less touristy. So, we changed our plans and found a local bus that would take us there.
Our bus journey took us into the far east of the Kathmandu valley where the views were amazing and the air was clear. On the way we passed a huge golden statue of Shiva atop a hill that must have stood over a hundred meters high. Then our bus climbed higher into the hills to Dhulikhel, where we spent a while exploring the town and trying to find a cheap guesthouse. The town however, seemed to have become something of a boomtown, and we were struggling to find a guesthouse cheap enough and far enough away from the bustle. Every place we found seemed to look down onto the busy main road, and the sunrise walk that we had come here for was miles away.
After a while exploing Dhulikhel however, we were accosted by a friendly tibetan man on a motorbike trying to sell us the usual guesthouse story. We had had enough of the guesthouse spiel, so began to walk away, when he shouted, “100 rupeees!" We stopped in our tracks. "How far away is this guest house?" we asked. “40 minutes walk,” he replied. So there was a catch. "So no sunrise walk?" we asked. “No, no…it is the start of the sunrise walk, and you can even see the sunrise from the rooftop,” he explained. It all seemed too good to be true. “How much commission do you get for us taking us to the door, then?" but he said, “It's my guesthouse.” We looked at each other. It seemed too good to be true, and as much as the guy seemed very genuine, I was aware that in Nepal, when something seems too good to be true, it normally is. But what other options did we have? For a hundred rupees, we would have an adventure at least. So, we broke all the backpackers rules and got on the back of 2 complete strangers' motorbikes to be driven out into the wilderness. I am so glad we did.
Prem, who introduced himself as we drove along, was something of an entrepreneur He had helped build a local school for the children and this hotel was his new venture. It had not been open long but he seeemed desperate to prove how good it was. I was feeling skeptical, but as we drove further and further away from Dhulikhel and into the hills, the views started to change my mind. It was stunning. We rumbled up a long dirt path and eventually came to a huge house that looked as if it had only just been built. Covered with tibetan prayer flags, it stood atop a hill surrounded by a quaint village. This was Prem's hotel. It seemed too good to be true, but in actual fact we were just really lucky. Prem was the nicest guy, and his hotel and family were amazing. Our stay with him was an absolute joy, and he made us feel like guests in his home.
His wife cooked for us, he bought us cold beers ans we sat on the roof watching the monsoon in the far away hills. The children in the village came and sang to us, and his little boy even took us on a walk through the local village, down to a stupa in the woods and on a walk around the surrounding area. In the evening we all sat together drinking home made Raxi (millet wine) by candlelight. The view from the roof was amazing, there were stars lighting up the sky all the way out to the mountains and the lights of a thousand lantens flickered on the hills opposite and through the village below.
Yesterday morning we woke u at 5am to catch the sun rise over the peaks. The view was too misty to see Everest, butit was still an amazing view. We were up before the rooster started crowing, and when it did, the village below began to ring out with the chanting of the villagers, the prayer flags fluttering around our feet.
Then yesterday we went on one last trek. We left Prem's house early to walk to a place called Nammaboudah. There was a monastry and a stupa there commemorating the buddah who fed himself to s starving lion in the surrounding hills. We walked for an hour to a small village where we sat with the locals sharpening knives and smoking some of their local hashish, and then continued up some incredibly steep and dusty paths. It dawned on me how just a few hours travelled can make such a difference to the weather. In contrast to the stormy Pokhara, here there was no rain, in contrast to Bandipur, where the humidity was something like 80%, in Dhulikhel it was dry, so the dappled sunlight was very effective in providing relief from the midday sun. However, after walking for a little while more, we realized that we had left all our water back at the first village. This could spell disaster. It was so incredibly hot, and we had no idea how much longer we had to walk to get to Nammaboudah. We walked, parched up dustier and dustier hillsides, that seemed to be held together by nothing by marijuana plants and tree roots. A couple of friendly Nepali boys began walking with us too, and when we told them we had been walking for two hours, they told us they had just walked 5 hours from school.
Soon the lacking in water was beginning to feel like quite a real worry. My mouth was like sandpaper and I was feeling so dizzy, how long would it be before we found water in this dusty landscape? However, soon a huge lorry came rumbling up the path behind us. Yvan ran alongside it, flagging it down, and the irnmediately the driver gestured for us all to hop on. He was going to Nammaboudah! We all piled in the back and clung on for dear life as the huge metal truck rattled through potholes and flung us around as it climbed along the mountain sides. I have never felt such an adrenaline rush from a journey. The noise was incredible and we were all covered in cement dust by the time we arrived in Nammaboudah over an hour later. It was clear if we had walked it would have taken us the whole day, if not longer, and without water it might have been disastarous. I was so greatful we had jumped aboard when we did, it seemed we were incredibly lucky once again, and when we arrived in Nammaboudah it was in style.
We spent the day exploring the temple and the monastary which was amazing, but my camera running out of battery meant I didn’t get a single photograph. The ancient building was stood atop a sheer hill and there were so many prayer flags wrapped around it it seemed to be fluttering in the wind. As we climbed the steps up to the temple,elderly tibeten women sat about the courtyards, smoking, covered in gold, and thousands of prayer flags fluttered in the trees. The sound of chanting echoed all around and we sat in the shade, listening to the wind and the chanting, the tinkle of prayer flags and insence on the wind. At the stupa below, hundreds of photographs and portraits of deceased loved ones had been hung along the Cliffside, and I sat and watched from a tiny café as a Tibetan woman crawled on her hands and knees in pilgrimage around the stupa. Apparently some of them do it all the way to Lhasa in Tibet taking ten, twenty years sometimes. Incredible,
Later in the day we made our way back down through a forest and began to walk to the next town, a timeless hamlet that looked just like Hobbiton. The walk took hours and it felt as though there wssn’t a soul around, it wss so isolated and when we got lost I felt sure this time there wouldn’t be a lorry to come and pick us up. Eventually we managed to find our way through a steep valley and followed a river to a tiny town where a bus stood waiting. We hopped aboard and asked the driver when it was leaving. He said “3 o clock.” And the time was 3:20. Nepali timekeeping always tickles me pink, and we ended up sitting aboard smoking for over an hour until it finally began to rumble the rest of the journey down into the plains of the Kathmandu Valley again.
The adventure to Dhulikhel had been an epic one; in twenty four hours we has travelled by bus, on the back of a stranger’s motorbike, had hiked through mountains, hitchhiked on the back of a lorry and taken a crazy local bus. When we arrived back in Freak Street we were exhausted and very much in need of a shower. We spent the evening relaxing in the rooftop restaurant near our guesthouse, as the dogs barked and rickshaws beeped quietly below. It was good to be back.
Around this point our plans began to change, because our researching into different rafting operators was making it apparent how expensive ten days rafting the Sun Koshi would be. It was going to cost about 260 pounds, and as much as that sort of experience would be worth the money, that amount of cash would also suffice for most of the trip if I kept it for other uses. We would also have to pay for a visa extension, so decided that we would try to stick with our original visa dates and get out of the country by the 19th. , giving us just a few days left in Nepal. Freya and Myke are planning on leaving tomorrow but Yvan has to stay another day to organize his Indian visa and I would really like to visit a place we passed on our journey back from Dhulikhel called Pinauti. So, Yvan and I are going to leave on Friday. We are planning on taking a night bus from Kathmandu to Sounali (a dusty border town), in order to cross the border by Saturday morning. Then we will take a coach to Gorakhpur, and make a connection there with a train to Varanassi. At Varanassi we will be meeting Freya and Myke, and then it's India all the way.
I'm feeling apprehensive about entering India after all the hustle and hassle we have been experiencing in the past week. As much as I think it has given me a good introduction to what India will be like I’m also guessing nothing will be able to prepare me for what a lot have people have described to me as being 'the single hardest place for a woman to travel.’ Moreover, I just checked the weather report for Varanassi and when we arrive on Sunday the weather is going to be 46'c, with 'sunny spells'. I can’t even begin to imagine heat like that.
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