591 Miles from Everest…….in India!

Over the Hindu festival of Dashain in Nepal everything shuts down as the equivilant of the Christmas holidays are upon us. With the office also closed we took the opportunity to spend a few days in neighbouring India playing tourist at some of its many monuments and sights.

So less than two hours after leaving Nepal we found ourselves in Delhi.  Living in Kathmandu we thought we would be prepared for the chaos that is the capital, and we probably were more so than if we had come from the UK, but it was still an assault on the senses.  In comparison, Kathmandu now appears calm, clean and almost traffic free at times!  Not something we thought we’d find ourselves saying!

But that aside our few days in the capital afforded us the chance to see some of the incredible heritage sights and monuments it has to offer.  For us two days was enough but the guide books could have you there for weeks seeing more and more of what is on offer!

So at 4:30am the next morning we headed off to Agra, a town most famous as the home of the Taj Mahal. By contrast Agra is calmer and a lot more relaxed than Delhi. Our hotel was within the environmental zone that surrounds the Taj, providing a lovely haven from the bustle of the street life.  Agra too had some beautiful sights, but the Taj Mahal as expected stole the show and having viewed it at sunset from across the river the day before we enjoyed a sunrise walk around its grounds and exploring the tomb itself before the crowds got too big or the sun got too hot. You have to take your shoes off and walk around on the tiled floor barefoot (unless you come with a swanky tour that is well prepared enough to give you shoe coverings, which we did not!)  so as the sun gets higher in the sky the floor gets hotter underfoot!

One of the oddest things about being in India was that although Hindi is not dissimilar to Nepali with some words shared, Nepali is not readily understood in this area of India. So whilst many aspects of the way things operated were very Nepali we found ourselves struggling to speak English in a context that seemed so much more familiar to the Nepali side of our brains!

It was great to have a few days out, but we were very glad to return to what we now think of as the calm of Kathmandu and home. 

100miles from everest……. and on Shaky ground

Last night the earthquake we now know emanated from India. At 6.8 on the richter scale the ripples reached Kathmandu, but most damage was done in the rural eastern region of the country.

It is a place of sporadic population, mainly agricultural, like most of Nepal with fields precariously perched on the slopes of the Himalayas.  The effects of the quake, were found in the landslides that washed away the years produce, the access roads to markets, and aid.

Sadly as more news trickles in it appears that a lot of the deaths caused in Nepal were not due to the quake itself but in the panic that ensued. Some jumped from third floor windows, some got caught in stampeding crowds. Despite being a country that has had seven quakes this year alone, it is not one that seems culturally or practically prepared.  There is little awareness of earthquake safety although there are organisations working hard to address this issue.  But as we have been told by more than one Nepali friend, “ We don’t have an earthquake kit, if we are meant to die, we will die. I don’t want to think about it, if I buy one I will have to think about it.” Whilst this is by no means the attitude of all, in a fatalistic society the idea of preparing for such an event in this way is hard to comprehend.  This attitude is hard for westerners to understand, but as the buildings swayed and the earth trembled, the bells rang out in fury as Hindus and Buddhists alike ran to their temples to appease the gods who had shaken the earth and offer a puja for safety. This is their version of an earthquake kit.

Whilst our “go bag” was checked and rechecked again this morning, and remains firmly under our bed in case of need, it did make us remember in whom our safety is found.  Not in stone carvings that need to be appeased so as to remain in their favour, but in the God whose love is unshakeable, and our firm foundation.

100 miles from Everest and Home..... Finally!!

Well we made it back to Nepal in one piece, sorry it has taken so long to publish this blog, it has been written for a while waiting to be uploaded. 

 

The journey to our home here in Nepal has been windy to say the least, but a little over a year, six moves and three spare rooms later we have made it! Our flat is on the first floor of a two storey building, with offices underneath and the landlord’s family living in the flat above.

The landlord’s share their flat with Clifford, a very amusing black Labrador. When the stairwell of the building was being repainted a rather bright salmon pink colour last week, he decided to help out the decorators, ending up with a pink paint splatter down his black head and back and not too much paint on the walls! Sadly he didn’t stay still long enough for a photo.

We are settling in well and have found adapting back to the practicalities of filtering our water, remembering the load shedding schedule and showering in a bucket, an easier transition than expected after the relative ease of the UK.

Our time back in the UK had some real highlights, and we so loved the unexpected joy of seeing so many of you again, long before we thought we would. We were able to attend weddings of great friends we thought we would miss and share in fun and fellowship with many.

That said, recovering from para-typhoid took a lot longer than we had hoped and it was not until the beginning of August that we finally got normal blood tests back for our livers and could start the task of regaining strength.  It was a trying time, in which we reluctantly learnt even more patience and whilst people and places we longed for were tantalisingly close, we were committed to returning to Nepal healthy as soon as possible and that meant refraining from some very tempting invitations!

Returning to Nepal brought with it some anxieties, it had been a hard place for us to be during our first six months with so much uncertainty and some heavy burdens to bear in the absence of close friends and fellowship. Not to mention the idea of being that sick again was not one we cherished!  But whilst we are maybe a little more paranoid about where we eat, some of the uncertainties we encountered have thankfully been answered and although we still feel the weight of some of the issues we face, we join David’s cry to God from the dessert “My heart is steadfast oh God, My heart is steadfast.”

192.43 miles from Everest (Annapurna Base Camp)

It has been a while since we updated this blog and so much has happened, so forgive us if we try and condense it a little. We went away for 10 days over Easter to go trekking with some friends up to Annapurna base camp. 

It was great to get out of the city, and having climbed Kilimanjaro last year we thought we’d be OK.  We were, but it was a very different kind of trek. The Annapurnas have something that Killi lacks….steps and lots of them!!

To get through the valleys, up in to the Himalayas you must first conquer the hill country.  So we spent the first three days climbing the ultimate stair master’s to the crest of the hills (note that a Nepali hill is higher than anything Britain possesses) only to find that continuing meant descending almost to the valley floors again in order to go up the other side.  Any relief in the downhills was tainted by the knowledge that for every meter you walked down you would have to walk up again and some!! That said the peaks of the mountains get a little closer each day, and as their magnitude becomes more and more apparent, we realised there had to be more up to come……and there was. 

Annapurna base camp is shielded from view until the final day.  This is because as you approach it up the valley, what stands before you is the impressive stature of  the Annapurna South peak.  But on the last day instead of going straight up (finally no more steps!) you go around the side of this monster and find yourself behind it, at the base of an immense bowl in which the peaks of the Annapurnas surround you on 360degrees. They hem you in on every side, and on a clear day at sunrise as the peaks flame red and then turn golden with the sun as it peeks over the rim, you would climb all those steps and more just to get a glimpse of something that majestic.

Back in Kathmandu May the 10th has come and gone, there is still no agreement, so we are leaving at the end of the month and as yet we are not sure where to or how long for.  As we look back on our time here in Nepal so far it feels very much like our trek.  We have had some wonderful highs, meeting some amazing people, making precious new friends. The achievement of making yourself understood even if you are only asking for your groceries, the excitement of finding you have power when you are supposed to be in the middle of a 10hr cut.  But there have also been some lows, shocking and deeply painful family news, deaths of those dear to us, uncertainty with jobs and home and country.

Right now as we prepare to leave Nepal with no idea of a return date we are having to let go of a lot of our “highs” and carry with us on the uphill most of the “lows”.  But we trust that the sunrise God has in store for us at the top will be worth each step, even if we cant see where we are going until we get there. Until then when the next step feels more than we can bear we cling on to the knowledge that we may be hard pressed on every side, but we are not crushed. We may be perplexed but we are not overwhelmed. We may be struck down, but we are not destroyed.  The God who has gone before us has walked each step.

180.26 miles from Everest (Kaskikot)

We have just come back from two weeks staying in the village of Kaskikot, north of Pokhara near the Anapurna mountain range. It was the final step in our 10 week long language learning marathon! As such we thought we would take you through our time there using some of the new words we learnt.

Muso. This was the first word we learnt, it is Nepali for mouse but also, as we quickly discovered, for rat. Let us put it in context for you….

We arrived in the pitch black in the middle of some serious rain. After meeting our host Ama and Baa (Mum and Dad) we were shown by torch light up a ladder in the house to our room. As we climbed the ladder we were told “there may be muso’s up here at night”. The next morning and after no sleep Lucy was able to confidently say in Nepali “yes there are very big muso’s at night!”. Thankfully six days later we added the word Mareko to our vocabulary which means dead.

We would often help with some of the picking from the harvest first thing in the morning (7ish), most village houses have fields as agriculture is the main source of food and income.  Mainly we picked Kerau (peas) or Wah (Barley), which lead to hours of sitting in front of the house where we were often joined by kids from the village and could practice our latest phrases on them!

The kids adored Tom, and very quickly we added the word Gamble to our repertoire.  This is a street game that the kids played daily, involving a tower of rocks and two teams battling to either rebuild the knocked-down tower or “kill” the other team by hitting them with the sock-ball first.  We spent many happy hours playing with them all and some of the big kids of the village as well.  Tom soon became the local hero and we would wake up in the morning to calls of “Tomji Tomji…” from some excited little voices hoping to play before they went to school.

Onnuntis is another important word, this is 29, the number of dal bhats (lentils and rice) we ate in a row during our village stay.  Whilst all were meito cha (tasty) and had a surprising amount of variety for a meal that consists mainly of two things, we were day dreaming about something other than rice by the end.  Khana (food) is eaten twice a day, once around 10am and again at 8pm.  In between, cups of Nepali Chiya (milky sugary tea) are consumed and normally some Khadja (snacks) around 4:30 in the afternoon.

“Pani lyauchu” (I bring water) and Lucy did each day from the communal tap.  Women in the village work very very hard at home and in the fields from 6am to 9pm so it is difficult to get to know them if you are not working alongside them. Whilst we spent some time working with Ama at home, it was still difficult to infiltrate the world of the women in the village without our own house/field/children. So each afternoon the water was turned on for a couple of hours and all the women gathered at the local tap to fill up their tanks using water carriers. Lucy took on this responsibility for the two weeks we were there, and after a few days of bruised hips got the hang of things and happily sauntered back and forth with the 20litre water carrier until the tanks were full.

Garung gurung/melkano these are the words for thunder and lightening.  Early monsoons struck the village when we were there, with lightening so bright it blinded you for a few seconds when it struck. Each afternoon, just after the water was collected, the heavens opened and it would rain typically until late in the evening. This was made all the more spectacular by the tin roof which when combined with the rain played its own music to send you off to sleep!

Things you might see 100 miles from Everest....

214.953 miles from Everest

This weekend, after three weeks of intensive language study we took a couple of days off to spend some time with Lucy’s parents who were passing through on their way home from Singapore.  We decided to get out of the busyness of Kathmandu valley and head south to the Terai (the name given for the flat plains of Nepal that border with India).

In what felt a little like an MI5 style of travel arrangements we phoned a number given to us by a friend.  When the man answered at the other end we confirmed his identity then stated the name of our contact.  This eased the conversation and we were immediately given instructions to be outside a certain landmark on a certain day on a certain time and everything else would by then, we were assured, have been arranged.  So on the appropriate morning we were almost ready to leave when we got a phone call from an unknown number telling us “I am here.” After some frantic wracking of the brains and the subsequently cobbled together Nepali we realised that this was the person we were supposed to meet kindly just wanting to let us know that they were at the rendezvous. We met him with no further problems and were ushered unto the waiting vehicle where we were handed an envelope and the journey began!

Travelling in Nepal is more like a cross between a rollercoaster ride and being in a washing machine on spin cycle (well for your stomach at least!)  With no set rules that in practice apply one should not be surprised to find oneself playing chicken with an articulated lorry on a blind bend of an un-tarmaced road half way up what we might call a mountain (the Nepali’s would class as a hill) with a sheer drop beneath you leading to the dried up riverbed below, that is waiting for the monsoon rains, or you to fall, whichever comes first!  And so it was with incredible skill that our driver negotiated such roads that led us from Kathmandu valley in what would be classed as the middle hills with a backdrop of Himalayas to the flat lands of the Terai. Here the horizon stretched out as far as the eye can see in both directions uninterrupted by any kind on bump on the landscape, and the sky somehow seemed a whole lot bigger all of a sudden. The feel of the Terai is more tropical with the temperatures noticeably warmer at the lower altitude and miles of fields interspersed with traditional mud hut villages and the occasional bigger, more developed town. 

It was at one of these towns that we stopped without warning and another unknown man got into our vehicle and, after greeting us with a warm smile, asked if we had the paper. This we concluded must be the contents of the envelope we had received earlier. It appeared we were correct in our assumption and we drove on to our hotel and had a wonderful couple of days being introduced to some of the local culture and wildlife, which included a baby rhino and twin toddler elephants, before repeating the 4.5hr journey in reverse!