Sauhara
The facts: Royal Chitwan National Park is in the Nepali lowland area, the Terai. One quarter of all Asian rhinoceri live here; so do significant numbers of tigers, wild elephants, huge #s of birds, monkeys, etc. Some of it is flatland, some swamp, and some low hills. The area is I believe a World Heritage Site, and has located nearby an elephant and a crocodile breeding center. Westayed outside, in Sahaura.
The experience:
We arrive in Thandi Bazaar after our bus driver is arrested. We are dripping with sweat. Macke digs in his pack and finds his camera and glasses have been stolen from off the roof. As the hotel touts swarm us-- "you come nice hotel very good price"-- Macke groans "I need some space, man!" and we leave it to the Dutchman to find wheels to Sahaura. He finds Danish, an affable Nepali youth in a red tanktop.
The hotel is called maybe "Rainforest Jungle Safari Lodge"-- every place in town has a similar name. We book a trek into the jungle with Danish and Yaron-- by law you must hire two guides, who will deal with angry rhinoceri, dumb questions, ticks, and what have you.
At five oclock a grey wall of rain pounds down. Outside my room water buffalo chew cud and drip grey saliva. In the pounding rain two Nepali women get totally nude and wash. Macke, who is off with the Dutchman smoking and staring at the corn, would appreciate the view. The corn thrashes madly in the wind and rain.
6:00 a.m. At breakfast, Danish tells us to put on shoes, long pants, and darker colours. I cuss inside-- I'm already soaked in sweat. The Russian who is coming along is wearing brilliant red and green clothes, and gets no instructions to change. perhaps he will be fed to the rhinos.
6:30 We sit in a dugout and are poled into the slow shallow river, the only sounds birdcries echoing and the swish of water. Elephants drink on the far bank in the orange morninglight and on the near bank people wash.
6:45 We slide past a young woman washing her hair. "Meera, Meera" calls Danish. She turns away and hides behind her hair.
7:00 We put ashore. From the top of the sndy bank we look down onto a black rhino, who takes his slow time wadign the river. He's a two-ton armoured armed pig with all the time in the world. The Russian and his guides disappear on their trek. Yaron makes monkey calls and the rhesi answer. Birds shriek in the gloom and we truck past piles of elephant shit and around muddy rhino wallowing pits. There are tiger pawmarks in the mud, and yellow flowers, and suddenly Macke is dripping blood. A leech has crawled onto his leg. We wade through elephant grass, poke aroudn in forests, and a few hours later are back on the river shore, baking.
"Hey, Danesh," says Macke, "what was up with that girl Meera on the river?"
"Well,"says Danesh, "she's divorced. We had a good time and then she wanted to marry. But I didn't. It's like a resturant. WHen you get tired of one kind of food, you go to another place."
In the afternoon we go to the Elephant Breeding Center. I buy thirty bananas. Macke and ther Dutchman laugh-- "hey man, is that enough bananas, you think?" At the center we're chased by baby elephants-- they're about four feet high and act more or less like an 8th grader the day after Halloween-- who communicate telepathically about the huge banana stash we've got.
Later a wall of black rain drives us into a hostel where hail bigger than golfballs pounds the roof and makes it sound like we're inside a popcorn popper. The light is dim and green.
After, air washed and orange in sunset, we take a muddy track back and see a tall youth arguing with an old shoe-cobbler. They start hitting each other. Luckily one of them appears drunk and neither can land a punch. At the school, children play tag, covered in brown mud-- one game for boys and the Two Cool Girls, and another for the girls. The flagpole is black and has a green orange cord crawling up it.
We are stranded for three days in Sahaura because the Maoists have declared a strike. Mornings are breakfast on the shaded patio with birds chattering and the incidental teaching of English to Danish's protege, Munn, who is one foot shorter and about three thousand vocab items behind Danesh. Days, elephants are bathed in the riverby their mahouts, who get the elephants to put their smokes onto the roofs of huts before heading into the water to be cleaned. Afternoons the skies turn black and the light sick yellow, and then the rains come and from thatched huts on the riverside I watch the rain pluck at the river and lightning boom and flicker around the sky. Evenings we drink tea and wander through streets, full of cricketrsounds and frogburps, whose black puddles hold streetlights and whose edges are rimmed with light.
We bike to Twenty Thousand Lakes and swim in canals, see termite mounds seven feet tall, and weatch a rhino from thirty feet away. Kids flip and dive into warm water and old men amble by in the baking green heat of the forest. At the next village there are amaryli, succulent red against purplish green broadleaves. The air is crystalised sweat. WOmen in red; men in black grey brown and white.
One evening we try H. We smoke it with Danesh. Macke vomits and then feels fine, I feel mildly relaxed, and we later agree that it was a huge waste of money and an experience not worth repeating. "Kids: drugs are bad, m'kay?" You've all seen rhart South Park episode, right?
I spend one day walking. At an orphanage kids in blue mount bicycles en masse and head to school. I have roast corn and tea with a farmer. We discuss fertiliser, manure, Maoists, Nepali history and school. His wife shows me her kids' straight-A report cards and his father-- a six foot six beanpole of a man wearing shorts! weird for a Nepali-- ambles by and beams at us. Women in brilliant red thresh wheat and wash clothes. Men sit under pipal trees and smoke.
I meet a Nepali human rights worker in a restaurant and he says he's happy that the King has taken over the government.
"Why?" I ask him
"Because people here don't understand democracy. They think that democracy means, "hey, I can break things, steal things, blow things up." We need a strong arm!"
He holds a glass of water over the stone floor.
He says "If I drop this and break it, oen of my countrymen would say "hey, it's democracy, I can do whatever I want" and then shakes his head.
Finally, three days later, we leave-- Macke for more kayaking, the Dutchman for eastern nepal, and me to Kathmandu.
Next-- Kathmandu Valley's religious sites, the Dutch lady rolling stone, and preparations for my next destination-- TIBET!
The experience:
We arrive in Thandi Bazaar after our bus driver is arrested. We are dripping with sweat. Macke digs in his pack and finds his camera and glasses have been stolen from off the roof. As the hotel touts swarm us-- "you come nice hotel very good price"-- Macke groans "I need some space, man!" and we leave it to the Dutchman to find wheels to Sahaura. He finds Danish, an affable Nepali youth in a red tanktop.
The hotel is called maybe "Rainforest Jungle Safari Lodge"-- every place in town has a similar name. We book a trek into the jungle with Danish and Yaron-- by law you must hire two guides, who will deal with angry rhinoceri, dumb questions, ticks, and what have you.
At five oclock a grey wall of rain pounds down. Outside my room water buffalo chew cud and drip grey saliva. In the pounding rain two Nepali women get totally nude and wash. Macke, who is off with the Dutchman smoking and staring at the corn, would appreciate the view. The corn thrashes madly in the wind and rain.
6:00 a.m. At breakfast, Danish tells us to put on shoes, long pants, and darker colours. I cuss inside-- I'm already soaked in sweat. The Russian who is coming along is wearing brilliant red and green clothes, and gets no instructions to change. perhaps he will be fed to the rhinos.
6:30 We sit in a dugout and are poled into the slow shallow river, the only sounds birdcries echoing and the swish of water. Elephants drink on the far bank in the orange morninglight and on the near bank people wash.
6:45 We slide past a young woman washing her hair. "Meera, Meera" calls Danish. She turns away and hides behind her hair.
7:00 We put ashore. From the top of the sndy bank we look down onto a black rhino, who takes his slow time wadign the river. He's a two-ton armoured armed pig with all the time in the world. The Russian and his guides disappear on their trek. Yaron makes monkey calls and the rhesi answer. Birds shriek in the gloom and we truck past piles of elephant shit and around muddy rhino wallowing pits. There are tiger pawmarks in the mud, and yellow flowers, and suddenly Macke is dripping blood. A leech has crawled onto his leg. We wade through elephant grass, poke aroudn in forests, and a few hours later are back on the river shore, baking.
"Hey, Danesh," says Macke, "what was up with that girl Meera on the river?"
"Well,"says Danesh, "she's divorced. We had a good time and then she wanted to marry. But I didn't. It's like a resturant. WHen you get tired of one kind of food, you go to another place."
In the afternoon we go to the Elephant Breeding Center. I buy thirty bananas. Macke and ther Dutchman laugh-- "hey man, is that enough bananas, you think?" At the center we're chased by baby elephants-- they're about four feet high and act more or less like an 8th grader the day after Halloween-- who communicate telepathically about the huge banana stash we've got.
Later a wall of black rain drives us into a hostel where hail bigger than golfballs pounds the roof and makes it sound like we're inside a popcorn popper. The light is dim and green.
After, air washed and orange in sunset, we take a muddy track back and see a tall youth arguing with an old shoe-cobbler. They start hitting each other. Luckily one of them appears drunk and neither can land a punch. At the school, children play tag, covered in brown mud-- one game for boys and the Two Cool Girls, and another for the girls. The flagpole is black and has a green orange cord crawling up it.
We are stranded for three days in Sahaura because the Maoists have declared a strike. Mornings are breakfast on the shaded patio with birds chattering and the incidental teaching of English to Danish's protege, Munn, who is one foot shorter and about three thousand vocab items behind Danesh. Days, elephants are bathed in the riverby their mahouts, who get the elephants to put their smokes onto the roofs of huts before heading into the water to be cleaned. Afternoons the skies turn black and the light sick yellow, and then the rains come and from thatched huts on the riverside I watch the rain pluck at the river and lightning boom and flicker around the sky. Evenings we drink tea and wander through streets, full of cricketrsounds and frogburps, whose black puddles hold streetlights and whose edges are rimmed with light.
We bike to Twenty Thousand Lakes and swim in canals, see termite mounds seven feet tall, and weatch a rhino from thirty feet away. Kids flip and dive into warm water and old men amble by in the baking green heat of the forest. At the next village there are amaryli, succulent red against purplish green broadleaves. The air is crystalised sweat. WOmen in red; men in black grey brown and white.
One evening we try H. We smoke it with Danesh. Macke vomits and then feels fine, I feel mildly relaxed, and we later agree that it was a huge waste of money and an experience not worth repeating. "Kids: drugs are bad, m'kay?" You've all seen rhart South Park episode, right?
I spend one day walking. At an orphanage kids in blue mount bicycles en masse and head to school. I have roast corn and tea with a farmer. We discuss fertiliser, manure, Maoists, Nepali history and school. His wife shows me her kids' straight-A report cards and his father-- a six foot six beanpole of a man wearing shorts! weird for a Nepali-- ambles by and beams at us. Women in brilliant red thresh wheat and wash clothes. Men sit under pipal trees and smoke.
I meet a Nepali human rights worker in a restaurant and he says he's happy that the King has taken over the government.
"Why?" I ask him
"Because people here don't understand democracy. They think that democracy means, "hey, I can break things, steal things, blow things up." We need a strong arm!"
He holds a glass of water over the stone floor.
He says "If I drop this and break it, oen of my countrymen would say "hey, it's democracy, I can do whatever I want" and then shakes his head.
Finally, three days later, we leave-- Macke for more kayaking, the Dutchman for eastern nepal, and me to Kathmandu.
Next-- Kathmandu Valley's religious sites, the Dutch lady rolling stone, and preparations for my next destination-- TIBET!
posted by Butch at 2:52 PM
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