Change In Plans

Namaste from Pokhara, the jumping off point for treks in Western Nepal.  This post is about our activities over the last two days, since we flew up from Kathmandu.  My writing may be more choppy than usual for two different reasons:

• I am sitting in the administrative office of our hotel, the Fishtail Lodge, and there is a rat the size of a soda bottle running around in the small office with me.  I’m not exactly afraid of rats, but it is distracting.
• Nepal does not generate enough electricity, so there is a “load shedding” program in place.  This means that the power goes off suddenly at arbitrary times.

Having established that Pokhara is a little off the beaten path, we have been having a good time here.

The flight from Kathmandu is only about 25 minutes (apparently the 200 kilometer drive takes about 10 hours), but is very dramatic.  From the right side of the plane, the views of Annapurna and Fishtail are spectacular.  Because the passengers are told that the right-side seats have the views, and because there are no assigned seats, there is a huge scramble during boarding.  It was fun for Tallulah and me to watch my highly competitive wife and son wade into the planeside scrum with two dozen equally competitive Japanese tourists.   India and Zola prevailed, and we ended up with great seats.

Yesterday afternoon we took a long walk through the town of Pokhara, and up to an old Hindu temple on a hillside. 

We started by walking through a Tibetan refugee camp, which was completely different from what I expected.  The fact that “Tibetan Refugee Camp” is marked on the maps of many Nepalese cities indicates their longstanding presence.  The Pokhara camp has been in place since 1959, and looks permanent.  The houses are made of cement, and have sewer and electricity.  There are schools and shops and a monastery.  The streets are tarred, and swept clean.

We visited a women’s rug-making co-operative, where Zola demonstrated handicrafts skills that he learned at the Willow School.  It was very sweet to see him carding wool excitedly with the elder Tibetan ladies on the porch (carding duty comes when their eyesight fails).  Inside, Zola and Tallulah helped make several rows in a couple of carpets, while the women sang, and their little kids played.  The whole visit was so pleasant that I happily gave in when Tallulah insisted on getting a tiger carpet for “her room” (a hypothetical room for the time being).

We walked across to the schools just as they were letting out, and Zola and I got to play cricket for about 45 minutes with a group of teenagers.  Nepalese (and Tibetans) are nowhere near as cricket mad as Indians, but these kids told us that they play every afternoon.  I think they were pretty good, and I was flat-out horrible, but they humored us (”Nice bowling, sir, nice bowling”), and we had fun. 

Zola interviewed a 10-year-old monk named Yeshi, who lives at the monastery next to the cricket field.  Families frequently “give” their eldest sons to monasteries at the age of four, knowing that they will learn to read and write.  Everyone’s karma gets improved in the process.  During the brief interview, some older monks came out and glared at us, which was a little uncomfortable. I think Zola came away appreciating that he does not live in a monastery. 

[Incidentally, the rat running around here in the ceiling sounds a lot like rain falling on a metal roof.]

Pokhara itself is not very scenic, although the views of the mountains are amazing when the clouds lift.   Our walk up through the town was mostly interesting because we saw families preparing their dinners, and kids playing on the sidewalks, and packed buses dropping off adults coming home from work.  We saw groups of talcum-dusted young men playing Karom, the billiards-like game where you flick little disks into four corner pockets.  The talcum makes the disks slide more smoothly.  Zola and I have played against each other a few times in India and Nepal, so we appreciated how amazingly good these players are.

This morning, Sangeeta led us on an 11-kilometer walk through the mountains, starting in the town of Sangkot.  The dirt road goes past the jump-off point for Nepal’s #1 paragliding route, and then through about a dozen tiny mountain villages.  Because this is a touristy area, and well supported by private and inter-governmental aid, I think these villages are much more prosperous than most in rural Nepal.  The homes were made of stone, and all had electricity.  Water was being piped into homes and communal wells.  We passed eight or nine schools, all of which thanked foreign sponsors on signs outside their buildings.   The neatly terraced fields looked fertile and well irrigated (but what do I know about that?)

We talked to scores of uniformed school kids, as they walked home in small groups from the half-day.  90% of them just wanted to say hi and look at Tallulah and Zola.  It was surprising to me that literally every kid over the age of five spoke enough English to have at least a short conversation. 

A few of the kids asked for money, mostly using exactly the same technique: asking  “Where are you from?” and  “Do you read English?” and then whipping out a handwritten appeal on notebook paper , that asked for help in funding “The Mountain Sports Club for Boys” or the “Village Pencil Club.”  When we said no, they were polite and gave up smilingly.  We only saw about ten tourists while we were walking, but there must be enough to warrant carrying these sheets of paper around every day.

In one village, two separate groups of very small kids linked hands and blocked the road, while singing a “welcome to our village” song. When we stopped, the kids formed a tight circle around India, and literally would not let her go until she paid for the singing.  This was pretty aggressive (although not really threatening from seven and eight year olds).  India handled it with grace and firmness, and no money, but it definitely freaked Zola out a little. 

Overall, the walk was great.  The scenery was beautiful, looking hundreds of feet down into a valley on one side, and at the distant Himalayas on the other.  It was also fun to see so many kids and families.  Both kids were troopers, even though it was a long walk (although, to be honest, Lu spent a fair amount of time riding on my shoulders).  As she always is on hikes, India was as happy as can be.

We ended the day with a paddle boat cruise on Lake Pakhora.  The big, square paddle boat looked like an end-of-year project for the metal-shop and wood-shop classes at a junior high school.  There was a lot of badly welded and rewelded cast iron, sheet metal fastened with thousands of rivets, and awkwardly constructed wooden benches.  We had fun, and the boat didn’t sink, so all was well. 

With Zola at the helm, though, we nearly did crash into the rock wall of the lake’s man-made island.  With me saying “Turn to starboard” and “Hard to starboard,” he jammed the rudder to his right, steering us hard to port.  After we stopped paddling, and the danger passed, Zola literally said “I thought you meant my other starboard.”

It’s a laugh a minute, here in Pokhara.  The power has stayed on, and the rat has not run across my feet.  Tomorrow morning we are driving down to Chitwan National Park to go on an elephant safari and watch the world elephant polo championships.