Here are a few more photos from Nepal:
Kids LOVE Catherine
Rice Harvest
Kids were able to get their kites hundreds of feet in the air
They could get themselves almost as high
Early morning in the jungle
Please?
If I had to choose one farm animal to epitomize this trip, it would have to be the goat. (I know you’ve been wondering.) This started, obviously, with our experience on the French dairy farm, in which our daily existence revolved around the milking needs of 28 goats.
But our interactions with goats didn’t end there. Every country we’ve been in has had goats, and they’ve all looked slightly different. We’ve seen black goats, white long-haired goats, stumpy looking pygmy goats, and goats with long, floppy ears that make them look like bassett hounds. We’ve seen goats on farms, goats on the side of the road, goats galloping across pastures, goats perched on top of buckets, goats riding on luggage racks and, my personal favorite, a goat traveling on the back seat of a bus (it had the whole row to itself). I’ve started developing a real soft spot for the goats, the sort of affection I usually reserve for golden retriever puppies. I’ve also started wanting a goat of my own.
We admitted our goat love to Mark and Teresa, a couple we met at the yoga center and whom we later stayed with in Hong Kong. It turned out that they, too, shared our goat obsession. And as we discussed the many attributes of the goat, we came to a startling conclusion: goats might just be the ultimate green pet.
Think about it:
1. Goats eat everything. Forget the time-consuming process of composting your kitchen scraps. Just feed it to your goat!
2. Goats make fertilizer. Yesterday’s leftovers = today’s soil booster. My mother recently told me that she saw alpaca droppings being marketed for use in home gardens. A great idea, but when it comes to farm animal pets, alpacas seem a little bourgeois. Goats are much more down to earth.
3. Goats keep you warm. Get an angora goat and you can make a sweater. And if you don’t have a garden in need of fertilizer, you can use goat droppings the Tibetan way: burn them as kindling. A little smelly, yes, but the tiny pellets are surprisingly effective fire-starters.
4. Goats make good cheese. Impress family and friends with your homemade chevre. You can’t do that with a dog.
5. If all else fails, you can eat them.
In conclusion, I believe that goats are the ultimate green pet. Now I just need to figure out if they’re allowed in Philly.
Note to inquiring parents: we’re actually in Cambodia right now, about to leave for Thailand. I’m just way behind in blog posts!
The first activity we did in Nepal was to spend five days at a yoga retreat set on a hill overlooking Kathmandu. It was a lovely experience that included yoga and meditation classes, good food and, best of all, a daily “therapy” session for which we got to choose between a massage, an oil treatment, or a steam bath. On our first day at the center, Peter and I both opted for the oil treatment.
It’s called shirodhara, and is an Ayurvedic therapy in which a stream of oil is slowly poured onto your forehead over your so-called third eye. The idea is that having constant light, dribbling pressure on your forehead will help your concentration and give you a point of focus on which to meditate. It’s definitely a little weird. Nonetheless, this same treatment is offered for several hundred dollars at the Hyatt and other luxury hotels, so I was grateful to get to try it for free.
But while the concept is the same, I’d imagine the setting is a bit different at the Hyatt – at my scheduled appointment time, I was led into a small, concrete-floored room next to the kitchen, with a massage table-like bed at its side. At its head sat an oil-soaked, heart-shaped pillow, above which dangled a round pot with a small hole at its bottom, suspended from the ceiling by several chains. There were no flowers or pleasant scents or new age music soundtracks gently playing in the background. Just me, the doctor in charge of the yoga center, and the table.
I took off my glasses and lay down. The doctor carefully placed two gauze pads over my eyes, released my hair from its bun, and rearranged me so that my neck up was squarely on the pillow. Then he began massaging my face, vigorously rubbing my temples and the bone around my eye with such intensity I worried there’d be a bruise.
Next came the oil itself. The doctor filled the bowl above my head and as it began to stream on my forehead, he carefully repositioned me so that it would hit the right spot. I could feel it drip down my head and into my hair, steadily drumming against my skull. Then the doctor walked out of the room.
This was the moment when I realized my mistake: it turns out that I don’t like being blindfolded and having oil dripped on my head for forty-five minutes. I couldn’t open my eyes because of the gauze, so I had no idea what time it was, how much time there was left, or why the temperature of the oil kept changing (I thought my mind must have played tricks on me but I later learned that the doctor returned to mix warm oil into the cool batch and vice versa). My senses were limited to one main thing: the feeling of a stream of oil being poured onto my face, dripping through my hair, and tinkling into a basin on the floor. I was supposed to be relaxed and meditative, but instead, I kept comparing the experience to what it would be like to have someone squat over your face and urinate on your forehead.
On and on it went, the flow of the oil, the unpleasant feeling of it dripping through my hair, the doctor occasionally coming back to refill the supply or readjust its aim, sometimes moving the bowl slightly to trace figure eights on my forehead. Instead of relaxing or mediating, I split my time between trying not to fall asleep, and becoming obsessed with how I was going to get the oil out of my hair. Please tell me it’s just flowing over my scalp and dripping right out, I said to myself. Please tell me my hair is not entirely saturated with oil.
Unfortunately, it was saturated. Root to tip, it was completely covered in oil – so much so that when the doctor returned to finish the treatment, he had to wring it out. Three showers later, it still felt greasy.
My hair, post-treatment.
But it still might have been better than the steam box. In that one, you stripped down naked and sat in a white wooden box with a hole cut out the top for your neck. The therapist then lit a propane stove in the corner to heat up herb-scented water and piped the steam into the box. It looked like I’d gotten trapped in some primitive version of a top-load washing machine.
I should have just stuck to the massages.
The day after the elephant bathing, we headed to Bandipur, a small town between Chitwan and Pokara that had been recommended to us as a great place to see local Dasain festivities. Here’s what the owner of our guest house told us we had to look forward to: “A sacred sword from Khadga Devi Temple is taken out on a procession by the head priest from the temple to the town square, where a sheep is sacrificed, igniting a tug-o-war between rival villagers to get hold of the sacrificed sheep – considered as a catch of pride.” What’s more, he said, there were festivities in the streets and all-day animal sacrifices at the local temple. This is not the way I usually like to celebrate holidays, but you know how the saying goes: “When in Rome, play tug-o-war with a sheep.” Or, at least watch other people do so. We rearranged our itinerary to be in town for the main event.
But it’s not all fun and games in Bandipur. When we arrived in the town – which is a Newari village with stunning views across a valley to the Himalayas (and which has a blissfully traffic-free main street) – we were greeted by one of the most bizarre signs we’ve encountered on our travels so far – a large billboard that said “Heartly welcome to you in open defecation-free V.D.C. Bandipur.”
I’ve thought about this for a while and still have no idea what it means. I suspect, though, that we may have inadvertently stumbled upon a clue: just before reaching Bandipur, our driver stopped at a waterfall on the side of the road. It was a lovely setting, except that people appeared to use it as a dump. Scratch that. People used it to take a dump – a fact Peter and I learned when we both stepped in an enormous mound of moist human feces. We never identified its original location, but perhaps this type of open defecation was the inspiration for Bandipur’s sign.
Regardless of the motivation, Bandipur’s streets – if not our shoes — were defecation free. But that’s not to say it was clean. As previously noted, it was a day of animal sacrifices, and we saw numerous people, often small children, walking down the street holding on to the feet of freshly slaughtered, headless chickens, blood dripping onto the pavement. We traced the blood drops to the source – the temple – where the steps were bright red and sticky, with clumps of matted feathers fluttering in the breeze. In the courtyard below the entrance, a room of the temple had been turned into a temporary abattoir where an old, guru-like guy, topless, a white robe tied around his waist, was holding court as younger men (also topless and spattered head to toe in blood) killed chickens as he blessed them. I have never seen (or smelled) anything like it. 
Back in town we asked a young man when the sheep tug-o-war was scheduled and were both disappointed and a bit relieved when he said that it had been cancelled. Last year, things had gotten violent, he explained – which isn’t particularly surprising, considering that it was an opportunity for inebriated young men from rival towns to show their manhood by pulling apart an animal. Instead, at the scheduled time for tug-o-war, the temple guru simply carried the sword down from the temple, accompanied by a crowd of people and a marching band of helpers banging cymbals and drums, and then carried it back up again. Villagers crowded around him tossing money in his path, which was quickly snatched up by kids.
There was supposed to be a dance performance – held on a stage directly outside our bedroom window – but just before it began, the power went out (we’ve calculated that out of 15 days in Nepal, we only experienced 2 full days of electricity). The delay lasted till just before we went to sleep, at which point the lights came surging on, a cheer erupted from the crowd (which had just waited for the hour and a half of the outage, sitting outside in the dark) and loud Bollywood music began echoing through the street, giving Bandipur the impressive title of the loudest place in Nepal in which we’d spent the night.
The view across the valley.
We were so tired that we somehow managed to fall asleep during a stand-up comedy routine. The next morning we woke up without an alarm at 5:30, and came downstairs just in time to hear the horrible sound of a water buffalo having its head cut off by either an unskilled executioner or a very blunt knife. How do I know that’s what it was? Well, first, there were only so many creatures in town large enough to make that kind of noise. And second, when we mentioned the sound to the guide who was taking us down to the bus stop, he said, “Oh yes, a water buffalo! We cut off the head! There is another. Right there!” He pointed behind us, where a water buffalo stood in an open shed overlooking the valley, several men standing around it with knives. “You want to wait?” asked our guide with a friendly smile. We politely declined.
Luckily, on our way down the hill to the bus stop, we had a Dasain experience that we actually enjoyed. From a kid’s (and therefore our) perspective, one of the best parts of the holiday is when villages around the country erect homemade bamboo swings and wooden Ferris wheels in fields and yes, on hilltops, to play on. Children gather starting around seven in the morning and stay there day long. We found this wheel on the side of the road and asked our driver if we had time to take a break. We did – and he even convinced us to give it a try.
We saw swings like this all over the country.
Considering the epic post I wrote about our overland journey between Ulan Ude in Siberia and Ulan Bator in Mongolia, I am hesitant to regale/bore the five devoted readers of this blog with a play-by-play of our 8.5 hour journey from Kathmandu to Chitwan National Park. But since I’m on the subject of Nepali roads, there are some highlights worth pointing out:
– The distance between Kathmandu and Chitwan is approximately 150 kilometers. Not miles. Kilometers.
– The journey took eight and a half hours.
– It was our 2-year wedding anniversary.
– Our seats were in the back row of the bus, on the right side. This is significant because the exhaust pipe was also on the right side of the bus, directly in front of our window. The bus ran on diesel, the kind that produces smoke so black and noxious that in the States it’s released out of the top of trucks’ cabs so that no one has to breathe it.
– We were breathing it.
– After noticing black grit settling on my Kindle, I put on my industrial-strength face mask, the one I’d bought for eight euros in Helsinki to protect myself from the smoke in Moscow caused by this year’s forest fires. I still ended up with a sore throat. (Also, Moscow’s smoke was much more pleasant – it smelled kind of like the entire city were cozying up next to a wood-burning fireplace, as opposed to sucking on a diesel exhaust pipe.)
– During the two hours it took to get out of Kathmandu, the bus was moving so slowly that food vendors were actually hopping on the bus, working the aisle, and then hopping off the bus. This sounds treacherous, but given our speed, it was less dangerous than getting on a moving escalator.
– This turned out to be one of the relatively fast-moving parts of our journey, since as soon as we got out of the Kathmandu Valley, the traffic completely stopped. As in, engines were turned off, people got out of their cars, and we moved forward by 10-foot intervals for about two more hours, staring at a line of parked cars, buses and trucks snaking down the entire valley. I seriously suggested that we should walk back to Kathmandu. We decided not to, only because being back in Kathmandu actually sounded worse than being in a parked bus on the side of a mountain.
Please note the cars snaking down the hill in the background.
It all turned out okay, though, because the next day, we got to go swimming with elephants. You know the quote in Ferris Bueller’s Day off where Ferris says, in reference to Cameron’s dad’s Ferrari, “If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up”? I could give a shit about cars, but when it comes to elephants, I strongly agree. We were staying at the Island Jungle Resort in Chitwan National Park, and every day, the lodge’s elephants get led down to the river to bathe. Guests are invited to join them. Unable to wait, Peter and I scampered down to the riverbank several minutes before their scheduled bathing time, and soon found ourselves sitting on their backs, legs wrapped around their backs, as a handler stood behind us on their bottom yelling commands – one of which translated to, “Please shoot a trunkful of water into the tourist’s face.” It was like a firehose – and left us both completely giddy.
A different handler invited me onto his elephant, and then things got a little more confusing. This elephant didn’t know the water-spraying trick. Instead, it was kneeling in the river, and its handler kept shouting, “Madam, hold on! Hold on, Madam!”
“To what?” I tried to ask him. This was bareback elephant riding, and there were no obvious handles. So instead I gripped more tightly with my legs and did my best to hold on as the elephant, again listening to some indecipherable cue from its handler, began to roll its head from side to side, nearly tipping me off into the river. (This was not a big deal, since we were already basically in the river, but I was worried the elephant might continue to roll – and no one wants to go swimming under an elephant.)
“Hold on, Madam!” the handler yelled again. I looked at him, confused. “Ears!” he shouted. “The ears!”
As soon as he said it, I realized that there were actually two obvious handles – they were flapping in front of me. The top of each ear was thick and fleshy, with long dark hairs that provided a good grip. No sooner had I grabbed on than the handler shouted a different command and this time, the elephant dunked its entire head under water.
Peter and I have since debated what I should have done in response, and I’m curious to hear your thoughts. Let go? Go under? Here’s what I did: for the first two or three dunks, I arched back and tried to keep my head above water, which sometimes required letting go of the ears and thus risking tumbling off. Eventually, I figured that the dunking was part of the point, so I kept hold of the ears and let the elephant pull me under, figuring that, as two land-dwelling mammals, we’d both have to come up before too long. But that was before I realized, thanks to Peter, that one of us actually had a built-in snorkle.
See that guy on the right? With the ducks? They're alive.
The remainder of our stay in Nepal was a bit quieter, though much bloodier, than our first week – we were there during the Dasain festival, one of Nepal’s biggest celebrations. It involves two weeks of festivities devoted to the goddess Durga, the highlight (or lowlight) of which is the day when hundreds of thousands of animals across the country are sacrificed to the gods. I’m not exaggerating. Chickens, goats, even buffalos are slaughtered, usually by chopping off their heads. I spent a good part of our trip debating how killing another creature really counts as a “sacrifice” – it seems the only one giving anything up is the goat. But that didn’t seem to bother people. The worst sound of the trip, by far, was a buffalo being decapitated across the valley from the deck where we were eating breakfast. I’ll leave it to you to imagine that soundtrack.
How convenient that I happened to match my outfit to the blood. (That's not paint.)
Most families kill at least one animal, and it’s also common to give an animal to your preferred means of transportation. According to a woodcarving salesman we met in the city of Bhaktapur, motorbikes get a chicken, cars might get a goat, trucks a buffalo. Our guidebook claims that Nepal Airlines actually sacrifices a goat for each one of its planes. On the runway. Granted, they only have about seven planes – but still? Can you imagine something like that going on at JFK?
Given the number of head-on collisions we saw – not to mention trucks driving down the road with suspiciously head-shaped holes in their windshields, or overturned vehicles lying on valley floors, or overcrowded public buses with upwards of 20 people clinging to the luggage rack (I am not kidding – and sometimes they shared the space with a precariously perched goat) – I have some suggestions for road safety that I might propose implementing before, I don’t know, chopping off a chicken’s head and dribbling blood on your handlebars. Like, perhaps, helmets. Or seatbelts.
We saw minibuses with about twice this number of people on them.
Interestingly, no one denies that road safety is a concern – most public buses and trucks had signs painted across their front bumpers that said things like “SPEED CONTROL” and “SPEED LIMIT 40 KMPH” (and, in one distressing instance, simply “OH! GOD”). But having been on Nepal’s roads, I don’t think speeding is really the issue. The roads are too crowded and in too poor of a condition for anyone to go too quickly. And if/when trucks do adhere to a low speed, it actually makes things more dangerous – cars and motorbikes simply leapfrog past them on tortuous mountain roads, putting themselves at risk of head-on collisions. I thought it was funny that instead of wearing her seatbelt, our Tibetan guide made sure to sprinkle some barley on the dashboard as we left Lhasa, just to be safe. But in retrospect, maybe I should have been more appreciative. I’d much prefer an offering of grain to a dead rooster.
Good luck?
It seems that windshield decor often takes precedence over the driver's ability to see.
For previous sleepless nights, click here.
Here is how I know that I am a deep sleeper: there was a night during high school when a motorcycle caught on fire outside my bedroom window. Said window was on the 2nd floor of a Manhattan apartment building, about ten feet away from the curb. The motorcycle’s driver had spent the previous ten minutes revving the engine trying to get it to start, a process so loud and so absorbing that he failed to realize that there was gasoline leaking on his leg until a spark from the engine lit it on fire. Shouting, he jumped off the bike and extinguished his pants as his motorcycle began to burn. People ran out of the ABC studios next to our apartment to see what was going on. My own father tossed him a fire extinguisher from our window, which turned out to be so old that it didn’t work. Eventually, the motorcycle’s gas tank exploded, sending flames shooting to the third floor and destroying his bike.
I know this story is true because the next morning, as I left for school, my father showed me the blackened patch of pavement where the motorcycle had been parked. But personally, I don’t remember any of it. Not the shouting, not the flames, not the fire department, and not even the fact that my parents, worried that if the bike exploded it would shatter my bedroom windows, actually walked me out of bed and into their bedroom, then walked me back to my bed again. I didn’t wake up for any of it.
So you can trust me when I say that night time in Nepal is loud.
We spent our first few days in the country at a yoga retreat on a hill above Kathmandu, a peaceful enclave with fruit trees and carefully manicured lawns and “luxury safari tents” overlooking the valley below. It was a welcome break from the craziness that is Kathmandu, with its constant honking of horns, plumes of exhaust, and roaring motorcycles.
But that doesn’t mean that it was quiet. We got our first hint at what night time held during our orientation talk from the yoga teacher. “There are many insects at night,” he said, as crickets chirped in the background. “And birds. And animals. You know rooster?”
We knew rooster.
“And local women, they go to the hill to collect herbs, and when they come down, they leave offering for the gods and they ring a bell,” he explained. “They ring the bell sometimes very early. Maybe five, four, three thirty in the morning. There are many noises. So do not be afraid!”
We weren’t afraid, but we were a bit curious about what the fuss was for. Crickets and birds and roosters might be loud, but they’re not that unusual. Sure, bell-ringing women of the night sounded odd, but they couldn’t possibly ring the bell for that long. And besides, we were used to Kathmandu. How loud could it possibly be?
Oh, Catherine. How naive you were.
The first creatures to break the afternoon’s relative silence were the dogs. There are thousands of them in Kathmandu, and they all began barking around seven, just after the sun had gone down. It was as if there were an intricate system of communication between them, a sort of canine version of “Telephone” that could only begin after dusk. It started with one dog barking, then another would begin, then another, and before long there was a chorus of dogs echoing through the valley, as consistent as cicadas (which there also were), but much less pleasant. From what I could gather, the discussion appeared to be something like this:
Dog #1: I’m here! I’m here! I’m here!
Dog #2: And I’m here! Did you hear me? I’m right here!
Dog #3: Helloooo? I’m here, too! Whoah! Did you hear that echo? How cool is that! Helloooo!
Et cetera.
Exhausted from fourteen hours in the car (we had come from Everest Base Camp all the way to Kathmandu), neither of us had trouble falling asleep that first night, even with the dogs. But peaceful slumber did not last long. Despite my fatigue – and ear plugs – I was awoken at 3:27 am by a loud bell ringing somewhere that sounded like it was directly behind our tent. And it wasn’t a one-time ring. No. The herb-gathering women, apparently worried that the gods might be heavy sleepers, each rang the bell for five to ten seconds at a time. Ring ring ring ring ring. Silence. Twenty minutes. Ring ring ring ring ring. This went on until our 6:30am wakeup call, as if it were the world’s longest snooze button.
Then came the buglers. We were near some sort of military training post, and from what I could tell, they spent the majority of their day trying, rather unsuccessfully, to play arpeggios in unison on instruments left over from World War II. Slow and methodical, they would skip up the scale and back down again, sounding less like a military band than a third grade recital held at 7 in the morning. Instead of silence, their brief breaks were filled by the sound of Nepali pop music playing from a neighbor’s radio (who left it on all day, starting around 6am), occasionally broken by the screaming of a nearby baby. Afternoon would usually bring some quiet, and then the dogs would begin again.
This routine played out for the four nights we were there, but the strangest was undoubtedly the fifth, when I awoke at 2:45 a.m. to hear what sounded like someone blowing through a conch shell, then chanting loudly, over and over again, as he walked the path behind my tent. In my half-awake state I worried for a moment that this might be some sort of night time rebel trying to incite people to launch an attack on the yoga center. This was not the case; I think it was a local man who, like the herb-gathering women, had a habit of wandering the hills in the wee hours of the night, making unconscionable amounts of noise in an attempt to alert slumbering deities (and yoga students) to his presence.
When we left the yoga place for Bhaktapur, a fascinating city several kilometers outside of Kathmandu, I expected the barking of the dogs to be replaced by cars and motorbikes – not particularly relaxing, but at least something I had grown up with.
But nothing, it turned out, could have prepared me for what we got instead.
The first odd thing I noticed, while still fast asleep, was a dream: I was in a high school auditorium, watching the band play. There were lots of cymbals in the band, drums, too, and – in the odd logic that so often permeates dreams – the reason for the cacophany was that this was a special type of band in which one half of the group played instruments and the other half acted as conductors. “Of course!” I remember thinking, before taking a seat to listen to their concert. “It’s a student-run, student-performed concert! How fun!”
Then I suddenly woke up and realized that the sounds had not been a dream – there were loud cymbals and drums echoing through the courtyard outside our window. It sounded like someone had decided to schedule a Chinese dragon dance for 3:45 in the morning. Peter groaned; I believe I said something along the lines of “What the hell is that?”
I pulled myself out of bed and looked out the window, but there was no one in the courtyard except for a few shadowy figures who appeared to be approaching the courtyard’s central shrine, their entrance marked by a familiar ringing sound – another goddamn bell. (“It’s probably not a good idea to get a hotel room next to a temple,” muttered Peter, half asleep.)
True enough, but that didn’t explain where the other noise was coming from, loud crashes and bangs that waxed and waned as if the parade were marching through the streets. The noise faded for a moment as the procession became more distant; then, several minutes later, it returned – this time with flutes. Loud flutes. Was this a special ritual for the Dasain festival? Had some concert organizer gotten the schedule wrong?
The parade lasted for about twenty minutes and Peter and I drifted off into a light sleep that was frequently interrupted by the ringing of the courtyard’s bell. I almost thought I had imagined the whole thing, but here is a video that speaks to its reality:
The next morning, we asked the owner of the hotel what the noise had been.
“Oh, that’s the Buddhists. They do that every morning around three,” she said, cheerfully. Whereas I might have interpreted three a.m as “the middle of the night” and apologized to my bleary-eyed guests – or at least offered them earplugs – she said this as casually as one might relay the opening time for the breakfast buffet. “Well, the Buddhists hold a marching band parade from 3 till 3:30, and we start serving coffee at six. Enjoy your stay!”
It was the same nonchalance she exhibited when we explained that our toilet didn’t flush. “I know,” she said with a smile. “We tried to get a plumber. But he is busy because of the festival.” She then handed us a plastic bucket.
It turned out that she was referring to a different toilet problem, though – previously, there had been no water flowing into the toilet (again, a fact that would have been nice to know before I discovered it myself). But on the afternoon when we arrived, something was preventing the water from flowing out. When we explained that the toilet was actually clogged, she sent up a maintenance man, who got down on his knees and plunged his bare hand into the bowl.
“Do you want some soap?” I asked him, as he emerged from the bathroom with a bucket full of wet toilet paper and a dripping arm.
“No. It is okay,” he said. And then, in what must be the best accent-produced double entendre I have ever heard: “It is my doody.”
