Nepal
Experience
Our
first day in Kathmandu involved running to the Indian Embassy to apply for a
visa, as this was going to take 5 days. Already here Sertx managed to make
friends with the security guard who helped us jump the 2 hour queue; we
therefore wasted little time and went straight into touring the city centre. We
visited Durbar Square in Kathmandu,
Durbar Square in Patan
and Durbar Square in Bhaktapur,
where we saw countless statues of gods, goddesses, deities and Buddhas, carved
out of wood, metal and brick into the many different kinds of houses &
temples which make up the squares. We saw the palace where the virgin goddess,
Kumari Devi, lives – this tradition of worshiping young pre-pubescent girls as
a manifestation of the divine female energy, has been practiced by Hindus since
the 17th century. We also visited the small temples Changu Narayan & Gokarna
Mahadev known for their numerous Hindu goddess statues, and spent many
evenings walking around the world’s largest stupa at Bodhnath, alongside the
locals who carry their rosaries, whispering their prayers.
The
Nepalese women are Chinese-looking, dressed in brightly coloured Indian-like
saris and the Tibetan woman wear multi-coloured striped silk aprons over their
plain dresses. As well as buying Tibetan flags to dress our bicycles, we also
bought some Tibetan herbal medicine – which resembles goat droppings, tastes
fowl yet apparently works wonders for one’s health. We drank many milky masala
chai’s and ate the spiciest & most delicious foods. In Nepal they use
cardamom, cumin, turmeric and chilli together with potato, pumpkin, squash,
green leaves, lentils and meats. The food is so tasty and we can’t get enough
of it.
Phenomenal Himalaya Mountain Views
On
cycling out of Kathmandu we were continuously surrounded by heavy honking
traffic, and at the end of the day, covered in a layer of brown dust from head
to toe. Thankfully the truck drivers in the mountains had softer sounding horns
and also beeped much less, sometimes just flashing their lights at us to
indicate a friendly hello. Yet the drivers still drive like crazy & we
already saw an accident where a tourist bus had flown off a cliff edge some 30
metres down into a river. The following day we read ‘17 killed and 26 injured’
in the local paper.
Not a comforting thought, however, we were cycling in a
beautiful subtropical country again, passing lush green land, rice fields, tiny
thatched-house villages & friendly water buffalos, so our minds were
distracted from the danger for most of our ride through the country. We spent 6
days cycling through the Terai, the flat plain land, which makes up 17% of
Nepal, with 50% of its population & 70% of its agriculture. This land rises
from 90m in the south to 8850m at Mount Everest in the north.
We
already spotted Mount Everest from the plane – its pyramidal summit, peeking
its way through two cloud layers. We stopped in a couple of towns to see the
best views of the mountain ranges; Bandipur,
a pretty little town on top of a mountain, to which we hitched a ride with the
presidential armed forces, (due to the last 5km being extremely steep) is a
great place to spot the Mahabharat mountain range from. Pokhara
was another town from which to see the Annapurna range. We spent a few days
in both towns waiting for the thick fog & rain to clear, before we could
see the amazing mountain peaks. It is said that the design of the local Newari
pagoda temples were inspired by the triangular-like mountain peaks.
Nepal
is stunning, and neither the constant power cuts nor the cockroaches who
visited us in every hotel we stayed in stopped us from adoring the country. One
massive cockroach even crawled through my hair and halfway across my face in
the middle of one night; but thankfully they don’t sting or do anything disgusting
& it only took 1 hour for Sertx to get rid of the rest of them hiding
behind the bed.
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