To Chisapani
Even with our somewhat overwhelming introduction to Kathmandu (re-introduction for me), we were still excited to spend a couple of days doing some light trekking northeast of the Kathmandu Valley. We’d hired a guide and porter through Himalayan Holidays — the same company that Room to Read was working with for their anniversary trek — and they met us that Monday morning to start our trek. Laxman (our guide) and Jhalak (our porter) introduced themselves as cousin-brothers: their fathers are brothers (making them first cousins), their mothers are sisters (again, first cousins), and as it turns out, their wives are also sisters (making them brothers-in-law)! Pretty funny. They both spoke English well enough, and after a short drive out of the Kathmandu Valley, we started our trek up to Chisapani. (Check our our Nagarkot Trek photo album and follow along.)
;)
Now when I say “up”, I really mean “UP!” The first three hours of the trek involved nothing but climbing up stairs, most of them steep, and many of them only make-shift wedges cut into a dirty, rocky trail. We entered the Shivapuri National Park, but unlike at home, many families still live within the boundaries of the park, and we walked past numerous rustic farm houses and other homes. The air quality was still really bad, too, and Laura was feeling really nauseated for the first half of the day (I’m sure having spent the last three months at sea level with very little exercise had nothing to do with it!). :) She felt much better after we stopped to eat the sack lunches Laxman had packed for us (we were also higher and further from Kathmandu, so the air was a bit clearer), and the rest of the walk up to our teahouse for the night was a lot easier.
Our lodging for the night was the lovely Hotel Mountain & Galaxy Restaurant, a family-run teahouse in the little town (if you can even call it that) of Chisapani. Our hosts were very sweet, but the teahouse was this crazy, rickety collection of cinder blocks, steep cement stairs (with no lights or hand railings), loosely attached wooden railings, and squat toilets. Our third-floor room had an amazing view of the mountains (or where the mountains would be if there wasn’t so much smog) and an “en suite” bathroom, which normally would have been a big perk. Unfortunately, in this case, the bathroom didn’t have a working sink or shower, it reeked of urine (not uncommon when the flush mechanism is a big plastic bucket), and it lacked a door that closed all the way, so “en suite” in this case turned out to be less than sweet. Still, we made the best of it, and we had a nice home-cooked dinner and chatted a bit more with Laxman and Jhalak before heading to bed early.
To Nagarkot
;)
Laxman had told us that there was a good chance of seeing the nearby Himalayan mountains in the morning, before the smog and haze set in for the day. Sure enough, at 5:15AM I got up and watched a beautiful sunrise over the Himalayas from the roof of our teahouse. I couldn’t see Everest itself, but the Everest Range was clearly visible, as were a few other nearby mountain ranges. Laura even managed to rouse herself out of bed before 6:30 to get a look at the sunrise.
After a quick breakfast (I couldn’t resist chocolate pancakes!), we got an early start on our second day of trekking, a day that was described to us as “relatively short” but actually involved a 13-14 mile walk up and down numerous hills, including a steep climb at the end of the day (the Nepalis, it seems, love to take short cuts, which basically means skipping switchbacks and trudging straight uphill).
Our day was pretty quiet and uneventful, except for a few highlights. Our lunch stop was basically someone’s house, and unfortunately when we got there, there was only one person (a young girl) ready to cook for us. Laxman and Jhalak pitched in (Jhalak had been a chef in Norway for a couple of years), but lunch still took over an hour to prepare, and something else made us nervous: the sneezing, coughing, runny-nosed kids (little brothers, perhaps?) running around the kitchen, “helping” with the preparations, making numerous trips to the garden to grab veggies and “wash” them under the well water tap outside (yikes), and occasionally taking a break to pee. In the garden. Right next to the well water tap. Because that’s what you do. Double yikes. This, sadly, is where we’re pretty sure our undoing was done (or is it un-done?). More on that in a bit.
;)
Tuesday turned out to be an auspicious day for a small-town weddingWe saw some amazing Nepali countryside (they use pretty much every usable square meter of hillside for terraced farming); we saw (and heard!) a traditional wedding ceremony, complete with traditional music, dress, and dancing; we saw cute kids playing outside at a local school; we got some advice on another “shortcut” from a couple of school children (unfortunately, it wasn’t shorter); and we had two (and eventually three) dogs follow us for the last 3-4 hours our of trek, all the way to the town of Nagarkot. We made our way up the last steep part of the walk, then spent another half hour walking through the town of Nagarkot (our own dogs were barking at this point) before arriving at our lodging for the night, the very fancy and completely un-teahouse-like Club Himalaya.
Nagarkot is a town that you can drive to from Kathmandu, so it’s a popular weekend destination for local Nepalis. The Club Himalaya is probably the nicest place to stay in Nagarkot, and while we weren’t sure why our tour company had booked two nights of lodging for us that were so dramatically different from one another, we were thankful to have a clean room and a bathroom that had flush toilets and no detectable odor. We had a snack in the hotel bar, took a bit of a snooze (we were pretty beat after a longer-than-expected day of trekking), and enjoyed a really nice buffet dinner in the gorgeous, open dining room. We were even treated to some live music and had fun watching a group of Nepalis get up from their dinner tables and dance along to the singing.
Day From Hell
Laura and I slept well enough that night, but we woke up the next day feeling a bit “off”, and “off” quickly degenerated into “we could puke our guts out at any moment.” Constantly. Without relief. It was bad, and we both had it (whatever “it” was), which really sucked because we were thousands of miles away from home and neither one of us could take care of the other. As we lay in bed hoping not to have to use the trash cans strategically placed next to our bed, our only hope was that it was a short-term food bug of some sort, because in the next 24 hours we had to 1) pack up and drive two hours over bumpy, winding roads back to Kathmandu, 2) check into Hotel Royal Stinky again and take care of some last-minute shopping in Kathmandu, and 3) get up early the next morning to catch our flight to Bhutan for two weeks of intense, high-altitude trekking and some cultural sightseeing.
Alas, it was not a short-term food bug. It was the flu. A crazy Asian flu that our bodies had no idea how to deal with. And it kicked our asses (well, mine at least) for a few days before it moved on to torture other souls. We did make it to Bhutan as scheduled, but our illness threw a major wrench into our plans there. If only that was the last disruption Nepal had in store for us…