Return to Asia

Emily asked if I had had a crisis. 

Why exactly had I run away from Erasmus in Madrid, itself running away from Edinburgh, to Nepal? 

Well, I confess, although it was largely that I feared she was so difficult to get hold of in person that pitching up in the Indian subcontinent seemed like the best plan of action to sustaining our friendship it did have something to do with an unrequited love. So here's what 3 impromptu weeks in Nepal looks like:

Annapurna from Poon Hill

Golum's passage

Sadly these are in fact actors - they could be real monks and novices employed by a film crew but as it was we just intruded upon the filming of raiders of the lost ark part n

Anisha & Mamta supervising the children

It was an inauspicious start - my friends had suddenly gone silent at the crucial weekend for their crossing into Nepal - I had no idea where they were or where to meet them. Somehow although I nervously pinged off increasingly frequent facebooks I wasn't so racked with nerves that I refused to let my feet leave terra firma - perhaps the vestiges of an exuberant birthday weekend with Luce and Jos in Madrid were still lurking. More likely I was distracted by the water cascading down the walls in the flat after a particularly boisterous thunderstorm. In any case, at 12.25 as I was unplugging my electricals and handing over the keys to the porter to let the plumber in the worst happened:

DUNCAN:

" Iona so terribly sorry but E.G hospitalised in Delhi with particularly virulent stomach bug and we've just found an Internet cafe. To put it horribly bluntly we won't be in Nepal for another 3-4* days. Is there anyway you can get to Delhi? "

As it happened no - my flights were via Doha. Undeterred I left the dampness of Valliciergo in the hands of the plumber and a sledgehammer and tore through Madrid on the high speed cercanias in an effort to shave off precious minutes to chat to the Qatar airlines desk.

The prettily made up girl at the counter informed me in perfect castellano what my English brain already knew: No my flights are not refundable, transferable, flexible in any way and its not possible to miss the Doha-Kathmandu connection and buy a new flight to Delhi from there. Helpfully she suggested I buy an entirely new flight.

I thought that was the plan scuppered somewhat but in the sunny confines of the sole food vendor at check-in (MacDonalds - I did resist the McIberico special though) I realised I could buy a flight on from Kathmandu to Delhi. They were fairly reasonable - perfect. I happily munched down the burger and attempted to book the flight on my iPhone. Not a good plan, iPhone couldn't really cope with time sensitive data rich pages. Cue increasingly frantic calls to mum and dad to say plan change I need to book this flight please use a computer. No-one picks up. The flights sell out and I can't wait any longer to check my baggage. I imagine my last voicemail was either angry or pitiful enough that as I touched down in Doha airport (which thankfully has free wifi) I was greeted by a barrage of messages from the parentals.

They'd been busy - ambassadors had been woken and apparently someone's teenage daughter was lost in Nepal - oh that was meant to be me! In any case it was decided whilst I queued to board my connection that I ought to wait in Nepal. After-all, my friends would arrive, tail between legs, slightly green and certainly diseased in a couple of days time I could hide in the embassy if it was all too horrible before then. 

Touch down in a baking Kathmandu, the air crackling with the imminent threat of rain and my own slightly stressed out self no doubt. Visa's are fortunately very easy to obtain on arrival, less fortunately they are only payable in Nepali rupees or dollars - did I have either of these currencies? Was the ATM broken? So whilst asking where I might the able to obtain the readies in return for a hostage passport my first kindness in Nepal befell me. 

The lady in front, Sue from Godalming, turned and paid it without ceremony. As we went to collect our luggage, try to organise onward flights (some business class seats it transpired were still available to Delhi) I asked Sue what brought her to Nepal and her onward destination - Pokhara. It transpired she was volunteering as a teacher trainer in a school for underprivileged Nepalese children founded and run by a colleague of hers. These conversations I might add were punctuated by regular haggling, terminal changing, car trips around the airport etc. all of which had a promised if allusive ATM en route. They didn't and Sue's flight in the domestic terminal was boarding. I promised to pay the $25 in donation to the school in lieu of being able to pay her. A few laps of thamel the backpackers district in search of a travel agent with a better deal on delhi flights later I made peace with staying alone in nepal checked into a €5/room and then it struck me - why not volunteer for the weekend? The term hadn't started and there was apparently plenty of manual work to be done too. Hastily more data parcels leaked out from the exceptionally slow computer in the hostel. I collapsed into bed for a few hours but when i woke there was still no reply. As a final resort I traipsed up the tourist track and booked a 4day trek to end in Pokhara since my friends were due to wind their way past the Taj Mahal and Varanasi into Nepal's second city via some notoriously hideous border towns. 

http://www.shamrock-school.org/

Returning to the hostel the bar staff took pity on me and after a little conferring invited me to supper with them once their shift ended. How nice thought I. It turned out one (the hostel owners son) was a Gorkamundi - the Kathmandu mafia - so before I knew it we were being given gifts in the street and plates of food kept appearing without being ordered. This branch of the omnipresent mafioso family assured me that as they only ran the tourist racket they were perfectly harmless and in fact they were ashamed and angry when people  suggested their money was 'black money'. Anyway they were observing a mourning period so I was fed and watered whilst watching a (surprisingly good) tribute band sing the favourite songs of the deceased. He was a big power ballad fan. I was walked home soberly and I promised to look them up with my friends when we got back to Kathmandu. 

At 6am next morning checking my email before I left of course a cheery email from the school - Shamrock - greeted me. I was rather loathe to head on trekking alone save for my sherpa given the offer but the chips were down and I was bundled into the local bus beside some trainee gurkas returning to base after their first weekends leave. On the bus ride I learnt the meaning of ventilation after the windscreen developed a worrying network of cracks - which were dutifully tapped, prodded and even wiped as if this would somehow eradicated before it was decided we should just carry on regardless. Crash, the windscreen in its entirety appeared in my lap. My gurkha friends were furious it had collapsed on me but my Sherpa didn't bat an eyelid and didn't need to- after being dusted down and fed a cucumber with spicy sauce it was perfectly clear I was fine and there was no question of not continuing the journey - it wasn't raining why would we want a windscreen? 

Very dusty but glad for a bed I crashed after watching the sunset over Pokharas lake with an Israeli contingent for 10hours until the next 6am start to begin trekking, woefully unprepared since I'd been told I didn't need to rent boots/head torch etc. although I had at least borrowed my flatmates sleeping bag. 

Starting a few miles down the road from thikidungha I was initially underwhelmed - this track was accommodating the odd 4x4, my very sweet but unforthcoming Sherpa failed to mention this was just an economising measure and that the actual trek would start once we'd left the valley floor. 

Leaving picturesque village after village on the way up through ever denser green the sheer scale of Nepal's mountain ranges hits you. Summiting our first peak I felt a little foolish to have brought along food for my including meals - guesthouses galore align the route so that trekkers have an excuse to call in for tea to mask their exhaustion at yet another vertical incline interminably winding up the mountainside. It was at one of these guesthouses I told Prabesh I thought we ought to try and cram the trek into 2 or 3 days as I was anxious to get back to shamrock before term started. 

We passed through whole flanks of the mountain encased in hydrangeas - a Willy Wonka fantasy of colour ranging from 5 to 50ft tall. Yaks, neks (the female and therefore only producer of 'yak' dairy products) proliferated - Jos and dads tales of fermented yaks milk wrung in my ears - in fact Nek cheese was quite pleasant if very mild. Otherwise children and teenagers in impossibly fashion conscious styles bounded up the hillside with mobiles clamped to an ear whilst their parents and grandparents struggled on with the livestock and looming in more traditional scenes. 

I passed the staircase of Ulleri muttering grimly it seemed worse than Golum's passage to Mordor - it was certainly as steep and unending. But the view of undulating mountains carpeted in luscious greens broken only by copper ribbons glinting between them pushed the grumbling voice in my head complaining that 2000/3000ft up was just an impractical place to locate a village. 

At 2pm, fed, we'd passed Hile where we were meant to break the trek for the night. We'd walk onto Gorephani. A few hours later plastered in sweat with my legs starting to cramp I looked up and gave thanks for the eponymous guesthouse of said village  proudly standing in front of me. Exceptional luck dictated that after the sober nights preceding some friendly New Zealand based older men were happily uncorking bottles of Shiraz a poor porter of theirs had been carrying for the Annapurna base circuit. Though plenty of live chickens were in evidence I stuck to veggie dal bhat (I may also have been influenced by the price).  

A little bleary eyed we woke at 4.30 and stumbled through the dark  to what I was under the assumption was a quick jog to the summit of poon hill with a spectacular panorama of the Annapurna Himalaya range. Wrong wrong wrong. Wrapped in every item of clothing and towel to keep warm I only kept going since the light was rising relentlessly and I hadn't slogged up the mountain and got up at Spanish bedtime to miss the sunrise. All the more improved by the New Zealand boys having thermos' of chai and having rustled me up an appropriately aged Norwegian girlfriend! Sunrise came in broken rays first alighting on Daleghiri looming through the mist and then on Fishtail and Annapurna herself. It was spectacular there're enough pictures to bore you to tears of this sunrise. I managed a to match Prabesh's personal best and raced down the mountain accompanied by new friend Ida we ate a delicious meal of steamed momo's (Tibetan gyozas) and alau parantha in a picturesque town where the kids were playing in the river below. I'd made the 4 days in 2 but was very glad not to have another mountain to climb the next day. 

I arrived, as instructed at Shamrock School, after an incredibly uncomfortable night in Ida's hostel and goodbye to the New Zealanders in one of Pokhara's famous casinos where I somehow managed to walk out with $250 from the $10 minimum bet, at 8am. Feeling somewhat sheepish given my whereabouts the night before and that feeling a little unsafe getting back to the hostel with a van following until the dirt track through shanty housing had sprinted the last section and upon finding the gates locked vaulted the retaining wall onto unyielding concrete below. 

None of the staff appeared to be in. Some of the children showed me around and handed me a plate of breakfast - Nepalese milk tea, egg, large loaf of bread - I was rather embarrassed but ate it watched by all before finding class 6 chopping the veg for the thakali and teaching the boys how to slice, chop and dice without endangering their fingers which was much in evidence behind the shed where the potatoes, onions, tomatoes, garlic, chilli, apples and cauliflower were being dealt with. At 9am the English training staff arrived - having said our hellos and divvied out tasks we waited for the Nepalese staff before taking the first days 10.50am assembly (Nepalese school runs Sunday-Friday although the hours are quite short this was a boarding facility to cope with the students' need). They were between 5 and 30 minutes late whilst the children continued to clean in the increasingly hot rays. All very Spanish but new manager Michael (the Sargent Major) was turning an unfortunate shade of puce.

A classroom painted later a quite delicious thakali, dal bhat, fresh pickle and rice was doled out in enormous quantities to one and all, the wide eyed new children in class 5 (10yrs old) staring incredulously down at plates half their own size of food. We needed it as we'd also trekked out to the German run orphanage at Bakundi where many of the children had connections. I say trek but in fact we were made to jog large stretches and I looked particularly silly weighed down by an army surplus bag of sports kit; and I thought I was done with trekking! 

Andy, calling the shots for the week asked I'd had any teaching experience and could I help observing the new English teacher who herself only graduated from Shamrock the previous year (aged 17) and in return for food, board and her college fees was the matron too. I explained my minimal experience and private tutoring but he was happy to throw me in to teaching straight it turned out so when class 10's maths teacher did a no show (missing teachers became a boringly repetitive theme over the week) I took them for extra English writing in coloured chalk on the wall outside for lack of a dry freshly painted classroom. 

By day 2 I had to give example classes and join the teacher training evening sessions between renovating the dorms and trying to calm Tod, the hardest working plumber you'll ever meet who was volunteering for the week by sneaking him extra rations and the odd cool beer. He was beside himself trying to get the water sorted which has previously been collected from the lake as a punishment for bad behaviour. All the showers, loos and tanks needed fixing in shamrocks premises (a former hotel in the lakeside district of Pokhara) the problems were endless - the water came through a dribble at best and was filthy, the power and water were constantly on the blink and very rarely functioned at the same time, the pumps were too weak, the tubes not long enough, the water commissions delivery lorry (a last resort) couldn't fit through the gate..... Tod eventually finished the job at 10.30pm the night before he left with Michael and I holding an ankle each as he dangled off the roof welding the last fixings. I sewed up curtains, painted walls, taught a couple of science lessons instructed a class on the political spectrum and recent British history with a little help on the visual aids provided by the commemorative Thatcher issue of the spectator.  I also picked up a little carpentry, Nepali and plumbing knowledge. 

Feeling somewhat guilty at my own good fortune and grateful to shamrock for the experience as well as the delicious lunches produced on a shoestring by Mukti I decided to get the boys / girls something they wanted for their rooms inspired after installing the 'curtains' (read flimsy already broken cotton sheets of which there weren't enough). The boys chose football flags to decorate their dorm rooms and proudly recited votes for each of the premier league teams / La Liga classics. The girls were somewhat more practical asking for clocks and flip flops for the bathroom. The trip with the students up to the market district of Pokhara was a splendid insight into their relations and boundaries both reflective of wider cultural mores and the vacuum in which quite a few of the orphaned students had grown up. It also gave me an advantage to stock up the much depleted sports store with some quality made kit. My casino winnings at least found a good home. 

My friends were somewhat surprised once they arrived at my activities in their absence. At 10.30pm when they arrived on the Tuesday I'd just eaten momos with Mamta the new English teacher and helped the new students set up emails to send their introductory emails to the schools founder before a quick afterwork drink in the usual restaurant with one of the NZ chaps interested in donating and some OE type similarly inclined. As a result in walking my starving friends (since they'd only had Indian rupees on the bus from surani - as hellish a border town by all accounts as the guidebooks warned) a stream of 15 children emerged from a cyber cafe, converging with a group of the boys chasing their new football whilst the waiters called out my name from the restaurant opposite.... Ali said she'd been expecting a morose figure hunched over a thrice read copy of el pais with a candlelit supper for one. 

For the next couple of days I worked half days in the school sometimes aided by Emily's excellent drawing skills and half days relaxing with the team or discovering hilltop restaurants and the world peace stupa in the monsoon that came in, seemingly with the arrival of my friends. A particularly bad monsoon rains hit as we were on an excursion to yet another lake, as we'd trekked up to a particularly isolated bar overlooking the lake which served Mars bar's and chips we had a somewhat irate taxi driver to answer to when the rains eventually subsided and we made it back down.

monsoon + small boat = bad plan

On Saturday we left for chitwan national park having exhausted supplies of baba ganoush from the olive cafe. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the price we paid, our bus felt like a death trap and the two upturned lorries perched precariously on warped struts and blown out tyres did little for the faint hearted on the outside seat around the endless series of hairpin bends. There was little respite for the inside lane passenger watching the elaborately decorated Tata trucks hurtling perilously close to the minibus and selfishly far from the inside bend at breakneck speeds (well not the up hills as this was the domain for the minibus to undercut or rev around trucks struggling to gain ground uphill amidst clouds of smoke). 

When we arrived in chitwan the pick up unceremoniously dumped us at the 'Royal Chitwan Safari Hotel' which I'm sure would have been nice if they'd finished building it or if they didn't serve vegetable cutlet for an arrival lunch. Fortunately this was the only attempt at western food and it got (very marginally) better. Luckily the rooms were largely built and we indulged in the luxury of not organising anything ourselves but being whisked around jungle paths and harru Hindi/Nepali villages before the next day elephant trekking, washing and canoeing in a dugout from which we saw crocodiles, monkeys, deer, hummingbirds, storks and river snakes. 

Finally we were to have a short jungle trek to the elephant sanctuary via a hidden lake which was rather more lively than we were hoping given we'd brought our guide a beer and a little looser he was happily telling us about the man eating tiger on the loose that had killed 7 villagers the previous evening a few kilometres away. In the end we needn't have worried about the tigers but one of the rhinos from the elephant trek which was at first excitingly close and rapidly dangerously close and moving eater fast. Our guide snapped to at this point ordering shoes off and pointing out the easiest trees to climb. Option 2 is apparently to run around a tree in circles as rhinos aren't very adept and that. Frantic running to banks out of view in periods of poor sight line for the rhino ensued - we were nearly back to the crocodile colony we spotted, great. In the end we all felt a little silly after the rhino didn't charge and lumbered off but its a good story and meant we were particularly happy to arrive at the sanctuary of the elephant breeding centre where the baby elephants were playing games with the blankies - all very Bellelike. We finished the evening by being dragged on-stage for a cultural dance - the boys very upset they didn't get to join in the war dances exhibited earlier. 

From chitwan we had another hair raising journey to Kathmandu and checked into a particularly grotty and not remotely well appointed hotel comfort. It was however very cheap even if the power never worked and they insisted the large hole in the wall was 'not a problem' cheerily. From Kathmandu we explored the stonkingly beautiful world heritage sites of braktipur (the others are going back to stay in this living ankor wat where we spent much of the day trying to persuade the film crew there to let us be white extras); Patan where one of the years most important festivals was taking place although one of the ceremonial towers very nearly careered through a recently restored 12th century temple. A tragedy only prevented under the instruction of the military police and 40 odd men anchoring ropes to keep it horizontal for the 6 odd hours before the structure free stood again even if it was now nicknamed the leaning tower of Patan in the group. Finally we saw the Durbur square of Kathmandu which although differing hugely from the other two (former rival city states) lacked a romanticism and coherence to their architecture. We did however time things right to see the kumari appear after a slice of chocolate cake in Nepals' best bakery. The kumari is a living deity; an incarnation of earth goddess tulejel and is selected on 32 criteria of beauty and bravery at the age of 3 in the villages. The kumari then takes up residence in her kathmandu palace until she reaches puberty or suffers any major illness. The current kumari is eight years old and appeared silently and haughtily at her window for a minute at the side of her priest and guardians who wore very nondescript modern clothes in contrast to her full make-up and robes. It was a fittingly bizarre ending to my time in Nepal. 

I congratulate you for reading this far; I'm off to try and get an upgrade in Doha airport to make the next 10hrs somewhat more bearable! I do also have quite a lot of admin to do since enlivening. Trip in Nepal was news from the home front that the flats going up for sale in July so I need a new pad and Edinburgh have cancelled my exchange program after spiralling violence of campus ended in the riot police breaking up a violent occupation of my faculty/assaults in staff and finding stockpiles of weapons.... All quite exciting if nothing else!