Flying, Flying

Today began as a relaxing day - we ate a nice breakfast and drank a lot of tea, went shopping, bought more tea to bring home, and finished our packing. We even got to the Kathmandu airport with plenty of time to go before our flight. We did, though, lose Labiba - our airport navigator extraordinaire. Labiba, if you read this, you're going to shake your head at us.

Even though we were early to the airport in Kathmandu, our flight did not follow suite. We didn't even start boarding the plane until about 15 minutes before we supposed to take off. 20 minutes after we were supposed to take off, we were apparently ready to go, but there was an announcement that the entire airport would be shutting down for the next 40 minutes because there would be "VIP movement". Under normal circumstances this would not have been a big deal, but we had a two hour layover in Dehli in which we were supposed to collect our checked bags (which had only been checked to Delhi for some reason), go through customs and immigration, check into our next flight, and then go through security again. No easy task there for one hour of time in an airport.

Once we got to Delhi, one hour from our next flight departure, we were frantically running through the confusing Delhi airport and probably looking pretty ridiculous. A nice man who worked for Air India found us and decided to lead us through the rest of our airport adventure so that we actually did things in the correct order and without getting lost. This little man in an orange shirt led us around the airport and got us to the front of some lines. We even went through these weird back hallways to get around going through the duty free shops in the airport. We made our flight just in time, and all the thanks is due to this little man in the orange shirt. Labiba, if you were here he would not have found us running through the airport with looks of panic on our faces, but I'm sure you're glad you just get to hear about this airport adventure.

Our flights after that were far less exciting. We had a new leg of the trip to start - we checked in at the Mumbai International terminal (a lovely shuttle ride from the domestic terminal, which we had discovered last time we were at the Mumbai airports), flew to Paris, then back to Detroit. We lost Andrea on this part too, she went straight from Mumbai to Athens to have more adventures in Europe. Outside of some brief moments of delirium in the Paris airport everything went as scheduled. We flew to Paris, were judged for our plane clothes by the Parisians (who all wear heels and dresses to the airport. I'm not doing that for 40 hours of travel, thank you), then flew to Detroit and went home.

Home means laundry, the dentist (my wisdom teeth are coming out this summer...), and more visa applications!

The last bus day & Kathmandu

Yesterday was our last bus day...which is probably a good thing because my bus pants need to be washed. We went from Chitwan back to Kathmandu on a nice air conditioned bus, and even got to stop for a lovely buffet lunch. After arriving back in Kathmandu, we went straight back to our hostel - Sanu's House. It was good to be back and we were so excited about eating the food here after our experience with food in Chitwan. Before our dinner, we went for a walk and to do some shopping, though, which meant we were all very dusty and grimy once we arrived back for dinner. Dinner was not a let down; it was delicious and the tea was also just as delicious as we had all remembered it to be.

Today we explored a little more of Kathmandu. We had a nice breakfast, complete with tea, then went to the Bauddha Stupa. This Stupa is one of the largest in the world and one of the holiest Buddhist sites in Kathmandu. According to our hostel mother, you are supposed to walk around it 108 times in a clockwise direction. We walked around it once, which was enough for me, and I am pretty sure 108 times would take all day and make for some sore muscles.

After visiting the Stupa, we walked around in search of some of the nearby monasteries. We found a couple before we decided to eat lunch instead. We had lunch at a rooftop cafe overlooking the Stupa, a view in Kathmandu that's hard to beat.

After lunch we took a taxi to Pashupanith Temple. We made a friend at the hostel, Eric, who came with us today. He's a 6 foot something guy, so getting all 5 of us into a tiny Suzuki car from the mid-80's was interesting. Pashupanith is one of the most significant Hindu temples of Lord Shiva in the world, and since none of us were Hindu we didn't have access to many of the really cool parts of the complex.

We hadn't done much research on Pashupanith before we went, so we went in the back entrance (like our hostel mom told us to do) walked around for a bit, then were surprised to find cremation ghats right next to the front entrance. There were a couple cremations taking place, which startled us a little, so we didn't stay too long.

We also learned today about the festival of the living goddess and all about the living goddess from our hostel mother. There are apparently 9 goddesses around Kathmandu area. These are real girls that are chosen to be "goddess" when they are between 4 and 7 and then are no longer the goddess once they hit puberty. They are considered to be an actual goddess and some of these 9 goddesses are not even allowed to touch their feet to the ground outside of the monastery they live in. If this is the case, they are carried everywhere by monks. Right now, something called "the pulling" is about to happen in Patan and Kathmandu. This is related to the harvest season; the living goddess will be out during the entire day. We also learned that once the living goddess has aged out of being a goddess, she will still be called by "goddess" and her name, and that she is thought to have special powers if people make her angry. Men don't want to marry a former living goddess, since whenever they mess up they will be cursed.

After all of this learning about history and sightseeing, we ended our day with shopping. Since tomorrow is our last day in Nepal, we had a lot of Nepalese Rupees to get rid of. I can't think of any better way to do that than by shopping.

On our agenda for tomorrow is packing, more shopping, and our first two flights (out of four, eh). For now it's our last night in Nepal and we're enjoying the tea and company at Sanu's House.

An elephant of a day

This morning we woke up early to go on an elephant back safari. While we didn't see very many animals on our 1.5 hour safari, it was still an enjoyable experience to ride on the back of an elephant through a jungle. The only animals we saw were deer, wild boars, and chickens, and a fish-eating crocodile (different than a normal crocodile). Our elephant also had some problems going up and down hills and through water - usually we stopped at some crazy angle and at least two of us felt like we were going to fall out of the basket on the hills. Our guide got some nice pictures of us on our elephant - she was definitely the prettiest one in the bunch of them.

Labiba really enjoyed the elephant ride, and this was about the only type of picture we could take while actually on the elephants.

After the elephant-back safari, we went to bathe with elephants. The elephants basically sprayed us with water a few times then dumped us in the water. The water was about a foot and a half deep, so being dropped from any height was not the most pleasant experience ever, but the first part of the elephant bath made up for the drop into the water.

Here are some of the pictures from that event - there's also a video so you can get the full experience.

After bathing with the elephants we ate some lunch. We have discovered that our hostel loves to cook with tomatoes or carrots, even if a dish does not generally include any tomatoes or carrots. For example, this morning we ate egg and carrot omelets for breakfast. The sandwiches we ate for lunch had tomatoes and carrots on them, as well as coleslaw - on a cheese sandwich. 

After lunch we were scheduled to go on a jungle safari by jeep. Our new friend followed us about 1km to the national park. This should be a lesson to anyone - do not feed the stray dogs unless you want them to follow you EVERYWHERE. 

To get to our jeep for the safari, we had to climb down a rock wall that had been reinforced with some metal   chicken wire stuff. This made the rock wall much more difficult to climb down than it would have been otherwise. After we climbed down the rock wall, we crossed a river via canoe. We were also told by our guide about the crocodiles in the river that "like to eat people, especially white people". Very comforting. After crossing the river, we got to our jeep. We drove around for a few hours without much success in finding many animals. We saw more deer and wild boars, and were searching for a rhino when we took our mid-way break at a crocodile breeding center. There were a whole lot of crocodiles. The only relatively cute ones were in the "nursery pool" where the baby crocodiles live. 

After the crocodile breeding center, we finally found our rhinos. They're one horned rhinos and we found a group of three of them. They were very nice and ate a lot of grass. Rhinos also kind of remind me of dinosaurs. I think I'll have to read the wikipedia article about them once I have good internet.

After finding the rhinos we drove around for about another hour and did not see any more animals besides two peacocks flying around in trees. The long safari did not provide the most comfortable seat in the world, so we have been resting for the rest of the night. Tomorrow we leave to go back to Kathmandu where we'll be staying at the same hostel we stayed at upon arriving in Nepal. I'm so excited to get back there for the delicious food and the wonderful tea at every meal.