When life hands you a monsoon…

…Change your travel destination.

September 29, 2011

The two phrases I find myself thinking over and over again are: “Wow, this must be the most amazing place in Nepal” and “Woah, that’s the most rain I’ve ever seen.” In the 24 hours before I was supposed to leave for Janakpur, it poured nonstop. Before I knew it, my host family’s best friend (who conveniently lives in Janakpur) was calling to give us a heads up that the city was basically under shin-deep standing water and the road to get there was now in the river. So much for my trip, but luckily I have lots of other places I still want to visit. My travel planning approach for the week became less “where do I want to go most before dad gets here” and more “where is it not raining.” I ended up doing three pretty cool religious pilgrimages, one Buddhist and two Hindu, and I was dry for almost three full days.

(1) Pharping: Another candidate for “most amazing spot in Nepal,” Pharping is a Buddhist pilgrimage destination about 2 hours south of Kathmandu. Its claims to fame are a large Tibetan population, the biggest set of prayer wheels imaginable and a serene hill top meditation spot. In general, I really like places that have Buddhist religious significance because they tend to involve bright colors and big mountains, two of my favorite things. Pharping specifically was cool because when Buddhists come here to meditate, they put the name of the person who they are sending good thoughts to on prayer flags they hang in the trees before meditating. It is thought that then all the compassionate meditation allows you to shoulder some of that person’s suffering. If they are very advanced Buddhists, they instead put “all the sentient beings” on the flags and meditate for the suffering of all living things. I like that idea. Maybe that’s the story behind all prayer flags, but it’s never been explained to me before. The spot made me think of my good friend William, so I sat for a while and sent him good thoughts for successes in mountain climbing and graduate school.

Huge Prayer Wheels. In the afternoon, old
Tibetan men sit in the chairs to spin the wheels.

Mid-way up Pharping

(2) Dakshinkali: If you go straight down into the valley from Pharping, you get to Dakshinkali, a Hindu sacrificial temple for the goddess Kali. At first I was not sure I wanted to go visit this temple—my first introduction to Kali was the chapter in the book Lamb where the children of untouchables are sacrificed to Kali, which completely freaked me out. But since I was in the area, I thought I might as well check it out. Thankfully it was pretty empty when I was there and I only saw two sacrifices. Though Tuesday is technically a sacrifice day, it was the day before Dashin, a 15-day festival during which every Hindu family in Nepal sacrifices a goat, so I think people were saving their animals. Dakshinkali was not all that memorable, though I did unfortunately get splattered with a small amount of rooster blood. Eww.

(3) Manakamana: On the road to Pokhara, about 3.5 hours outside Kathmandu, you pass a cable car going straight up the side of the mountains. The cable car leads to Manakamana, a temple that Hindu newlyweds visit to pray for male babies. This was my first overnight trip outside the city, and was great fun. It’s now officially in Dashin, so the place was packed. At first glace, the cable car could be any gondola at a Western ski area in the summer. But then you look closer, and notice that instead of ski or bike racks, they have goat racks!! Actually there were goats everywhere. Goats on the bus, goats on the roof of the bus, goats on the cable car, goats for sale in the village by the temple, goats at my hotel, and many many many goats in line to be sacrificed. Some goats seemed completely oblivious, but others I think knew what was going on and they were trying their hardest not to get any closer to the temple. Manakamana was cool because it was like the Disney Land of religious sacrifice spots. You pretty much need to stay overnight to get your sacrifice done, so it becomes a big family trip. The village is crawling with young couples and young kids (maybe the soon-to-be big sisters?). At night the village just had a festive feel, and they even have those guys who take your picture then sell it to you in a commemorative frame!

Just your standard Doppelmayr gondola...

Oh look, there's a goat.

Manakamana Temple

Of course it started raining the second I got off the bus in Kathmandu, and apparently it rained all day yesterday. I need to be in Kathmandu tomorrow to change out my books and take a language lesson, so I’m hoping the rain goes away for just a bit until I leave again on Saturday. On the flip side, a rainy day might be good R&R because I'm also sick again. I think it's the combination of all the road dust and too many people in a small vehicle for too many hours, but the prediction I would get sick every time I returned to the city may unfortunately be true. 

Public Transportation, Part One

September 26, 2011

Before my trip, I thought I might just be taking cabs everywhere. After all, they are so cheap—for less than the cost of the T in Boston I can take a cab pretty much anywhere in the city. But by Nepal standards, cabs are outrageously expensive and about 10 times more expensive than public transportation, so I quickly decided that I should probably figure out the buses. The last time I tried to ride public transportation in a city with a different alphabet was the subway in Russia with my dad in high school and it was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. I think initially I was still a little intimidated from that.

There are three varieties of public transportation in my Nepalese life: just around the city, around the valley but outside the city and long distance travel. First, just getting around the city: For this, your options are bus, microbus or tempo. Buses and microbuses in Nepal are fun to watch but terrifying to try to ride. There aren’t exactly bus stops; you just get on and off wherever you want. To facilitate this, each bus has a “bus conductor” (I don’t know if they actually have a name) that hangs out of the door of the bus yelling the buses destination and collecting money when people get off. If someone wants on or off, he just bangs on the side and the driver stops. Because I cannot understand a word they are saying, nor can I read the language on the front of the bus, my approach to buses is to stand on the side of the road yelling my destination until a bus conductor waves me on.

Microbus Conductor

It’s been very successful so far, except that I cannot for the life of me pronounce where I live (Marharajganj) so I cannot take microbuses/buses home. Instead, I take the tempos, which have the route labeled on them (not in Roman numbers, but I know the numbers in Nepali now). If I get on the number 5 tempo it will take me to my turnoff and then I get to bang on the ceiling when I want to get off. I love that part. Unfortunately I nearly always hit my head on the way out (I’m tall here!), to the great amusement of the children passengers. To pay for my transportation, I just take all the small bills out of purse and hold them out and the bus conductor (or tempo driver) takes the right ones. Buses so far have never been more than Rs 15, about 21 cents.

Tempo

My favorite part of public transportation within the city is the game, how many people can we fit in this tiny vehicle. My sample size is just vehicles I have been on, which is poor methodology because I do not get on overly crowded buses, limiting the contenders to vehicles that get packed after I get on. But even with that limitation, the current leaders are: 27 people in a microbus (a American 14-passenger van) and 17 people in a tempo (about the size of an old school F-150 truck bed)!

The second variety of public transportation is traveling around the Kathmandu Valley. For this, I get on a microbus near my house and go to the city bus park at Ratna Park. From there, you can get on a bus to anywhere in the valley. The first time I went to Ratna Park, I got excited because it bore some resemblance to a US bus stop, with signs indicating the route number and destination (though not in English, still a promising sign). Well, after 20 minutes of no one in that area having any idea which bus went where I wanted to go, it turns out I wasn’t even in the bus park—all those nicely labeled stops were for buses to drop people off in an orderly manner. The bus park itself is like this gigantic mud pit with no signs whatsoever. After you get over the initial shock and accept the fact that you are not going to find the bus on your own, it’s very easy! You just start telling every single person you see the name of the place you are going, everyone will point you in a direction and you walk in the direction with the most “votes.” It reminds me a bit of using an avalanche beacon, head in the direction with the loudest beeping. And as soon as you get in the general vicinity of the right bus, the bus conductor will make sure you get on his bus, because after all, there are no bus schedules, and the bus wants to fill up before it gets bumped by the next bus arriving. I haven’t yet gotten on the wrong bus. I don’t actually think that has a high chance of happening if I pronounce my destination correctly. Although not overly friendly, everyone here has this attitude of wanting to make Nepal a good place for tourism. The phrase I have heard the most (sometimes from random people who help me onto buses) is “you are a guest of Nepal” and everyone kind of keeps an eye on me. It’s nice.

Ratna Bus Park

The third kind of public transportation is long distance buses which leave from another bus park. I am going to save my bus ticket purchase adventure for another day when I can also write about the long distance bus ride adventure.

Public transportation is fun! If Nepal weren’t so awesome, I would think just riding the buses would be entertainment enough. I love watching the city and the crazy stuff that happens on the bus. I’ve been on buses with goats, ducks, bags and bags of rice, and loads of bricks. It’s also a fun game to see how fast I can find the bus I’m looking for and the satisfaction I get from successfully getting anywhere is great. I have an MIT degree under my belt, but my greatest life accomplishment to date might be successfully buying a bus ticket to Janakpur in less than thirty minutes, heeheehee.

That said, I constantly think about how impossible this trip would have been for me 2 years ago. It’s definitely required a certain level of inner calm, willingness to have no clue what I’m doing and a faith that it will work out just fine. The transportation system exemplifies this requirement well. If I had stumbled upon Ratna Park during the fall of 2009, I probably would have immediately concluded it was impossible to find my bus, assumed that if I tried, I would get on the wrong bus, end up in a random town, get mugged, get stuck in rural Nepal and fail at life. Then I probably would have turned around and gone home. Circumstances like these make me so grateful for all the “A-FOGs” (Another F***ing Opportunity for Growth), as my mom calls them, I’ve had recently. I’ve changed so much and it’s really exciting how this trip is affirming and strengthening characteristics I've worked hard to acquire. I’m so happy life has opened up these adventures for me and can't wait to see what the next few months bring.

UNESCO World Heritage Sites

September 25, 2011

This weekend I rounded out visits to the World Heritage sites in the Kathmandu Valley. I had no idea what a World Heritage site was a few weeks ago, but they are basically like a worldwide protection designation like a US National Park, and they come in two categories, cultural and natural. Nepal is technically categorized as having four, two natural and two cultural, but I think it’s kind of cheating to group all the Kathmandu Valley sites together. The two natural sites are:

• Sagarmatha National Park: Although this is right outside Kathmandu, I am not sure I will make it there—trekking solo is really only high risk activity for females here, and two women were assaulted in 2010 in this area.
• Chitwan National Park: A park in the Terai region famous for the chance to see the rhinos and tigers from on top of an elephant. I’ll be there a week from yesterday!

And the “two” cultural heritage sites are:

• Lumini: The birthplace of Buddha. I’ll be there a week from Tuesday!
• The Kathmandu Valley:
• All three Durbar Squares
• Changu Narayan
• Swayambhunath
• Boudha
• Pashupatinath

Pashupatinath is a pretty cool place. It’s right off Kathmandu’s main Ring Road, but it somehow manages a peaceful and quiet atmosphere. The main use of Pashupatinath is for cremation ceremonies (historically and currently). In Nepal, the family takes care of cremation itself and the ceremony is attended like we attend funeral/memorial services. Right in front of the temple, there is a ramp down to the river where family members place the body to wash its feet. This apparently cleanses the body, and then it is tightly wrapped in white and yellow cloth because if the body becomes unclean after the feet washing, it will be taken over by evil spirits and that’s how ghosts are born in Hindu culture. From the ramp, the body is taken to the platform designated for whichever caste the deceased was a member of, blessed by ceremony attendees, and burned. Members of the royal family are cremated right in front of the temple, then the higher castes are close to the temple and lower castes further away. When I arrived, there was a body burning on a kind of mid-level caste platform and several higher caste platforms being prepared. Then, the bodies showed up and I got to watch a ceremony. I think Pashupatinath actually has this tourism thing worked out. The temple itself is only accessible to Hindus, and its convenient river front location provides some segregation between the religious/cremation ceremonies and the tourists. Directly across the river from the temple (in the midst of a bunch of Shiva shirnes and other temples) they have placed a whole bunch of benches for tourists. A little weird I guess, to watch a stranger’s cremation ceremony in a similar setup to how you watch birds fly over the Grand Canyon, but a neat experience nonetheless.

Cremation ceremony

Cremation platform

From Pashupatinath it’s an easy walk over to Boudha/Bodhnath. Boudha and one of the corner stupas in Patan both claim to be the biggest stupa in Nepal. Which is actually biggest depends on how you measure it. The based circumference of Patan’s platform is bigger, but Boudha is taller and the dome is larger. Regardless, Boudha is an amazing place. (I haven’t done the four corner stupas in Patan yet; I’m saving them as a special treat.) I love Buddhist stupas because they are simple but powerful and there are lots of colors. The rain decided to clear out for just a few hours today (we are still in the midst of the never-ended monsoon season) so it was a perfect time to visit. I keep having these experiences of going somewhere and thinking, wow, this is the most magical place in Nepal and then two days later I go somewhere else and it gets bumped. Boudha is my current “most magical place” but I have a lot of traveling coming up in the next two weeks, so no promises it will stay on top…

There’s only so much stupa watching you can do in a day, but like Swayambhunath, this is a place I’m excited to re-visit. It’s perfect that my dad is coming to visit in November, because I can do all these awesome things and then put together a perfect three days of Kathmandu greatest hits for us to do together.

I have a bonus four days off work this week, in addition to next week (which was already scheduled off) because my office decided to close for all of Dashain instead of just part of it. I already had a trip to Chitwan National Park, Lumini and Bardia National Park planned for my official Dashain holiday. So for this bonus pre-holiday holiday, I’m heading down to Janakpur, near the India border, first thing Tuesday morning and I’ll come back to Kathmandu Thursday or Friday. It’ll be my first long distance trip on a local bus, which I’m both excited and nervous for. Maybe a little silly to take an 8-10 hour bus ride for 1-2 days there, but the bus is half the adventure! Plus my host family got really excited when I told them I was thinking of heading to Janakpur which I think means it’s a worthwhile. That said, the monsoons will not let up and there is a good chance the road will be washed out. Wish me luck!

Durbar Square Cubed

(I've been having some internet issues, so this is overdue. But now I'm caught up!)

September 18, 2011

In 1482, after the death of a Malla king, the three kingdoms of Patan, Bhaktapur and Kathmandu were divided up and given to his three sons. During the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the three brothers competed for dominance in the Kathamandu valley. This rivalry extended beyond warfare to culture, arts and architecture, resulting in the creation of three complexes of temples and shrines, each know as Durbar Square. Each brother sought to “one-up” the others by ensuring that his Durbar Square was the most magnificent and the best testament to the gods.

From an architectural standpoint, the three Durbar Squares are quite similar. All three have many multi-tiered temples, some stone temples, some gold plating, lots of wood carved windows and some colorfully painted Ganesh shrines. Yet the preservation and modern functions of the three Durbar Squares could not be more different. I’m not much of a history buff; I think my brother and dad would probably appreciate the squares from an artistic point of view more than I do. I seem to gravitate towards the brightly colored shrines that the guidebooks call “gaudy.” Ha. So the “feel” of the Squares was much more interesting to me than the architecture, and after almost three weeks here, I actually think the three squares approach to tourism is pretty telling of the different attitudes towards tourists in Nepal.

On one hand, you have Bhaktapur Durbar Square, which is by far the best preserved of the three. The buildings and woodwork seem almost fixed in time, showing minimal wear and minimal vandalism. Ironically, the majority of the temples are not the originals, rather the restored versions after a 1934 earthquake damaged many of the buildings. I suspect that the better upkeep of Bhaktapur Durbar Square is largely due to greater financial resources than the other two squares: admission to Bhaktapur Durbar Square was 15 USD, compared to 4 USD for Kathmandu and 3 USD for Patan. The things you see in Bhaktapur Durbar Square are the same as in the other squares, for example Bhaktapur Durbar Square is famous for the peacock window carving, but there are actually peacock window carvings in all three squares. What is unique about Bhaktapur Durbar Square is that there is really nothing in Bhaktapur except for historically preserved buildings and alleyways: most Nepalis live in nearby Suryabinayak or somewhere else along the highway. The square has a ton of tourists wandering around and next to no Nepalis. After you walk in the gate, I had maybe five “guide” offers. All claiming they were history students just wanting to practice their English. (I can honestly tell them that I prefer to walk aimless and alone, though sometimes I think it would be easier to just pay one of them to walk silently with me so that others would leave me alone.) Eventually, they kind of figured out I was not going to budge and left me in peace.

Some wood carved windows in Bhaktapur Durbar Square

Peacock window in Bhaktapur Durbar Square

Next up, Kathmandu Durbar Square is like a feeding frenzy for beggars and trinket peddlers. It’s neck in neck with Thamel for least pleasant place in Kathmandu. I really hate the constant flow of people trying to sell me things, guide me around or just generally get money from me. Confronted with such poverty, I want to help, yet all the guidance from guidebooks, my host family and my office is to never give into the offers. Apparently there’s a bad chain of events as a result of tourists “encouraging” this behavior: folks migrate to the city from the country for jobs, but the jobs they can get without a good education are hard work and don’t pay well, so they start selling things on the streets to tourists from wealthy countries, then they notice that beggars make more than trinket peddlers and they give up selling things and just ask for money. Slowly, there is a proliferation of beggars and further deterioration of the workforce and economy in Nepal. Gut wrenching. I have great empathy for folks who make a “living” on the street, but I do think giving them money is probably not the solution. I think Kathmandu Durbar Square is also the least preserved of the three squares, with lots of wear and vandalism. This may be related to the higher volume of traffic the square gets or the higher number of unemployed Nepalis hanging out there.

Wood carved windows in Kathmandu Durbar Square

If you look closely, you may see the ring of
trinket peddlers surrounding the tour group...

Finally, Patan Durbar Square takes a slightly more laissez-faire attitude towards tourism. Patan is closer to Kathmandu than Bhaktapur, and has basically been eaten up by the growing metropolis of Kathmandu and is now kind of like a suburb. The zoo and the UN complex are the economic highlights of Patan. Folks in Patan pretty much completely ignore the tourists. I received zero guide offers, I saw maybe one or two beggars, and the shop owners are not aggressive. There is a fabulous museum in Patan Durbar Square about the art and architecture in Nepal and while I was in the museum, there were two festivals going on. Inside the courtyard, there was a literary festival in English that seemed primarily attended by expats and outside in the main part of Durbar Square there was a Newari Gunla Bajan celebration. My travel agent had sent me a flyer for the celebration a few days ago and when I saw the line “Experience a rare show featuring the beating of 100 drums at simultaneously,” my first reaction was: “Why would anyone want to do that? It sounds like a ruckus.” Ha. It was definitely a ruckus. The 100 drums were not all beating the same song, rather there were all these little drum groups, each with some dancers and some drums and some ladies just hanging out. I had a good laugh walking around the museum able to hear literary debates in English on one side and drums and Nepali singing on the other, both completely apathetic about the other.

Patan Durbar Square

Museum/Bathing Facility. Why not?

Happy man dancing in the drum festival

I guess in summary, although all the temples blend together, I really liked the way the different Durbar Squares have reacted to tourism and their changing roles in Nepali culture. None are the centerpieces of society that they used to be. Kathmandu won the battle to become the economic center of Nepal, but now the tourist areas and the local areas are almost completely separate, so Nepalis only come to Durbar Square to try to make money off tourists and it has this horrible “predator-prey” feel to it. Bhaktapur lost the race for dominance and has completely given in tourism. The city is a living museum and definitely the place to go to see fancy woodwork and such. And then there is Patan, which kind of seems to have this attitude of “who cares if we aren’t the economic hub, who cares if tourists come around (or not), we’re just going to live our lives.”

Interestingly, the majority of Nepalis I’ve met also seem to fall into one of these three categories. The folks I know through language school and my favorite English language bookstore are very Bhaktapur-ian about tourism, catering exclusively to tourists and seemingly making a decent living off of it. Most of the folks in the constant flow of extended family members who eat and stay with my host family have a Patan-ian attitude towards me, basically ignoring my presence except to laugh at my attempts at speaking Nepali. And then, unfortunately, the majority of people who talk to me into the street have a Kathmandu-ian attitude. You learn quickly that once you cross into the tourist zone of Kathamandu, anyone who talks to you wants money. There is no such thing as someone just helping you for kicks; they invariably want a tip. Very sad, but so far very true.

With the exception of some Buddhist stupas I still want to hit, I’ve now done the main tourist things in the city and can spend the rest of my time exploring more undiscovered local sights. Plus, I’ll be out of the city most of October, first to see some National Parks and then to do field work for my internship.

Bhaktapur

(I've been having some internet issues, so this is long overdue.)
September 15, 2011

This past weekend I got out of Kathmandu for the first time and went to Bhaktapur for two days. Historically, the three cities in the Kathmandu Valley (Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur) competed for dominance in Nepal. Eventually Kathmandu won out, and Patan is now more like a suburb of Kathmandu, but Bhaktapur is this wonderfully preserved historical site about an hour southeast of Kathmandu. The only industry there is tourism, but because you actually have to pay a steep admission fee (or steep compared to other things here) to enter the town center, there are less beggars etc than in the tourist parts of Kathmandu.

The first day I was there with my host family for Indra Jatra. It’s a Newari festival celebrating the end of monsoon season and my host family is not Newari so it was not an elaborate event, but just like everyone in the US gets Christmas off, everyone here gets Indra Jatra off. The family belongs to a cooperative society, which is basically a 200 member group that pays into a pool and the elected board awards loans to members as needed, and the interest on the loans goes back to everyone else in dividends each year. It’s kind of cool example of how the community here steps in to fill needs that the government and private sector has not. Banks haven't traditionally had an efficient or effective loan system, so your neighbors step in. Every year, they have an annual meeting in Bhaktapur and I was invited to join. On the surface, it was a lot like a Labor Day BBQ. But there were some key differences, including the fact that our main course was killed and chopped up right next to the picnic tables. Can you imagine sitting in Wash Park and having an old man with a machete pull up a tree stump and chop up a (formerly) live goat for you to eat? No one else seemed at all distributed by this. But then again, they all got a great laugh last week when I asked why the neighbors had so many roosters on their roof. Clearly the answer is to eat them in a month or two.

When the cooperative society had to attend to annual meeting type business, Radhakrishna sent me off with his son Manish to see Bhaktapur. I still have a pretty visceral reaction to the constant wave of commands I get in Nepal. The idea of an independent child (or woman at any age) is a foreign concept here. But I am getting better at just doing as I am told, and then doing what I want later (thus the two days in Bhaktapur). So off I went on the back of Manish’s motorcycle into central Bhaktapur.

Just like in Kathamndu, I had the opportunity to see two Bhaktapurs. Manish first took me to the historical parts of Bhaktapur, but these aren’t places that really mean much to the modern day Nepalese, so the tour consisted of about 45 minutes of “this is very famous statue, take picture,” “this is very old temple, take picture,” and then we were off again to see his favorite places.

"Very famous statue, take picture."

We met up with his “sister” (I still have no idea how they are actually related. I know he only has one sister and she is in India (which is why I have a room with them) but they call everyone here “sister” and “brother.”) and we took a hike up to one of the four goddess temples located just outside Bhaktapur. I would never have gone to this place on my own, but it was so cool to see a functioning temple that has not become completely commandeered by the tourism industry. The temples here function more as community spaces than purely religious spaces (the cooperative society picnic was actually at a temple, I found out later). I guess if I grew up in a religious household this might not be strange to me, maybe a church would be my community space, but here everyone coexists so peacefully. The different castes all practice slightly different variations of Hinduism and then there are Buddhists mixed in, but everyone just goes and prays at the nearest temple, regardless of which god it honors. I like that a lot.

One of the goddess temples outside Bhaktapur

After coming down from the temple, we went to Siddha Pokhari, which is basically a gigantic man-made koi pond. It’s evidently a popular date spot and a good place to watch the sunset. People also come here and buy these various sized food things to feed to the fish. Some are small and easily gobbled up by the fish, but others are big and the fish have a really hard time getting the food in their mouth, so while they are fighting to get the food (it looks like a seal pushing a beach ball with its nose), teenage boys try to reach in and grab the fish. A little cruel, I know, but oh so much fun to watch. After that it was back to the cooperative society picnic for meals three and four of the day (still trying to adjust to the quantity and frequency of food consumption here).

FISHIES!!!!!

The next day I decided to go back to Bhaktapur and do all the actual touristy things. All the temples are already starting to blend together, but in Bhaktapur, there are these amazing woodcarvings in all the temples. I was shocked at how well they had held up, since the heyday of Bhaktapur was in the 17^th century. But, you know, even with a changed mindset of temples as vehicles for art, there is only so much I can absorb in one day, so instead of doing the full Lonely Planet walking tour, I headed up into the hills to a temple Radhakrishna had pointed out the previous day, Changu Narayan. So much for my tourist day.

Changu Narayan is the oldest temple in the Kathmandu valley, built back when the rest of the valley was under water, and it’s now a world heritage site. It’s the first temple (or religious structure, period) that I’ve been to that just felt special. You take this bus up 6 km outside Bhaktapur up on top of a hill, then walk through a village until you arrive at the very very top, where there is this big temple. It’s not even the prettiest temple I saw that day, but it just feels magically, I can’t quite describe it. Changu Narayan felt like a place that you would go to find some peace.

Changu Narayan

Apparently the village surrounding the temple used to be the biggest village in Nepal, but now it is this sad little village that desperately wants to be on the tourist circuit but is not. The whole village sits outside their shops waiting for tourists—I only saw maybe five other foreigners—but they are not aggressive about it, which was a nice change. I bought some souvenirs and had lunch at this little tree top restaurant/guest house and talked to the owner and her son for a bit. He’s studying tourism in Kathmandu and makes the 1.5-hour commute each day, three hours in a bus for four hours of class!! He told me they have probably 10 patrons a week for food and 4 for overnight stays. At about 250 rupees ($3.50) per meal and 500 ($7) rupees per room, that’s not much income. Apparently the US has committed $270,000 over 3 years to build a museum and refurbish some of the temple and the family seemed really hopeful that this will help drive tourists there. Part of me hopes it will, because the family was so nice and it is such a wonderful place, but I would hate to see this place turned into what Durbar Square in Kathmandu has become.

I was already a little bit sick with a common cold (too many new germs and pollutants and pollens here) but after Monday I got much, much sicker. My host family thinks something I ate in Bhaktapur must have had some unclean water in it or something. It’s been hard to explain that my usual approach to illness is to ignore it until it gets so bad that I can’t get out of bed and then eat a lot of chocolate and watch Sex and the City reruns until I get better. Here, the approach has been to “take rest full day,” eat rice mush instead of rice at every meal, and sample all sorts of WHO recommended treatments. I’m glad I live next door to a doctor, who can assure my host family that I am not very ill, I just haven’t had a lifetime to develop an immune system against Kathamandu grossness. I think I'll be back up and about tomorrow, but the consensus around here is that I’ll likely get sick every time I come back into the city. I’m hoping the wisdom of the group is wrong. Come on immune system…

My doctor ordered Kathmandu look. Cute, I know.
It's giving me what I like to call my "inverse goggle tan."

Gap Year Strategic Plan

(I've been having some internet issues, so this is a few days overdue. It's also now going to be out of chronological order, but the pictures for the other two forthcoming posts have been slow to upload.)

September 19, 2011

When I decided to take a year off, I didn’t really have any goals or plans in mind, it just felt like the right thing to do now. Over the summer, as I finalized plans and person after person asked me why I was going to Nepal, I thought maybe I should figure out exactly what I was hoping to get out of the trip. Fast forward to a few days before I left the US, I still had not quite settled on anything, mostly because I was too busy enjoying the Colorado summer to give it much time and energy. But thanks to some gentle prodding from Cole and a lot of thought in my first few weeks here, I have arrived at some goals for this year. I share them here because in addition to the typical travel blog reports on my trip experiences, I’m likely to do some writing about how my experiences contribute to changes in my outlook on life.

1. I want to embrace life outside my comfort zone.

For the last 24 years, I’ve lived a very comfortable, consistent and relatively insular life. It’s time to shake up my exterior surroundings. My goal is not only to be uncomfortable and out of my bubble, but to revel in being out of my bubble. My hope is two-fold: First, that if I become comfortable with a major shift of environment, I will be more resilient when more minor environmental shifts occur in my ongoing life. Second, that if I really open up to different lifestyles, cultures and attitudes, I may find some that fit me better than those I was brought up with (or perhaps it will reaffirm those that I was brought up with) and I may come home with a more solidified idea of the kind of life I want to build for myself. A good example of this that is already starting to percolate is how different cultures define community and family and what commitments family/community members have to one another.

2. I want to do some good in the world.

Over the years, I’ve struggled with balancing a desire for a public sector/nonprofit career with a desire to have a job that I love. I’ve had some experiences volunteering for my favorite nonprofits that I have just been miserable, despite my allegiance with their mission. I hope to sort out how I can be most effective in my contributions to the greater good, both this year and in perpetuity. Maybe some folks are best cut out to donate money, some to advocate, some to teach, some to build and innovate, some to heal, etc. Maybe if we all dedicated some fraction of our special skill sets to making the world a better place, instead of going down the most accessible volunteering path, we’d actually jointly get somewhere. (Not an easy task I suppose, since this requires both identifying your skill sets and seeking out ways to apply them to the public good.)

I am hoping that I can use evaluation (and more broadly, organization capacity building and empowerment) as a platform to make the world a better place. Regardless of your personal viewpoint on dedicating resources to evaluation versus direct services, the powers that be worldwide, from governments to funders to individual donors, have decided that assessing the impact of nonprofit work is important. So maybe I can help equip nonprofits with the necessary skills and considerations to function in this new world.

3. I want to dedicate bandwidth to historically neglected pursuits.

I have had a highly intellectual and physically active upbringing and my greatest passions in life have been academic or athletic. I’m grateful for the intellectual curiosity and physical health this life has bestowed upon me; however, I’ve had a sense these last few years that I’ve left portions of myself under developed. I think up to this point, I’ve only tackled things outside my passions when there’s been a pressing need to. For example, in the last year, it’s become clear that I never learned how to treat my body with kindness and my injury year of 2010 has forced me to focus on this area. This year, I want to dedicate some time and energy to portions of myself that I’ve always thought could use some work but which I never actually had the motivation to work on.

I will start with perhaps the biggest gap area of all: religion and spirituality. I’ve had a curiosity about religion for as long as I can remember and I frequently toy with the idea of trying to educate myself. This is the year to actually get it done. I’ve bought all the religious scriptures for the major world religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism) and I plan to read the uninterpreted texts and then so some reading on how people apply these religious principles. Though I doubt I’ll come away a devoutly religious person, I have two hopes: First, that some bits and pieces of the faiths will resonate with me and I can develop a kind of “Elena faith” to help me grow and develop as a person. Growing some strong ethical roots now, while in a very stable mental state, will hopefully position me to better weather physiological challenges in the future. Second, I hope that I’ll come away more educated about world religions. There is no avoiding that we live in a faith-based society, and I think I suffer from a major lack of understanding of religion and how it influences behavior. This may be an area that I can only partially develop through reading, but maybe after I’m a little more educated, I can have better conversations with others and learn from my peers.

A little terrifying that my goals are now well-documented and online for friends and family to hold me accountable to… but I guess I should practice what I preach...

Kathmandu Wanderings

I’ve been in Nepal for over a week now, and though I haven’t gotten out of the city yet, I have been vigorously exploring Kathmandu. Business hours here are 10-5 six days a week, though work is frequently interrupted by traffic jams, rain, the electricity going down, and random holidays (like yesterday and this Sunday) so I’ve had lots of time to wander around. It’s amazing what a difference seven days makes—I can’t imagine being able to see anything of interest with only 2-3 days in Kathmandu. I think I’d spend the whole time dazed and lost.

On my third day here, I set out towards central Kathmandu, armed with the maps I ripped out of my Lonely Planet book. I quickly learned a couple of very important things. First, maps do very little good when there are not corresponding road signs. Second, Lonely Planet only covers the tourist areas, which are some of the least pleasant parts of Kathmandu. And third, ditching the map and trying to head in the general direction you are trying to go (by thinking that if you go down a road then turn right then turn left you’ll get to the correct neighborhood) only works if the roads are sort of straight lines. In Kathmandu, there are no straight roads and it’s hard to tell what’s a road, what’s an alley and what’s a driveway. Someone told me that the infrastructure of the city has basically stood completely still for the last 15 years during the Maoist conflict. So now, there are tons and tons more people and more vehicles than before and the infrastructure has not caught up. “The population keeps increasing but the width of the road is constant.” I guess that’s kind of obvious looking around, but in my first days here it helped me understand why the city seems so poorly laid out and poorly maintained. City planning and public health are just starting to pop up but they’re fighting an uphill battle because the city has already developed without their input. How do you plan roads when everywhere there is not already a road, there are buildings? How do you do construction on a road when there is nowhere to divert traffic? 

Answer: Do construction with the road open! This week they are painting lanes.
By hand (with this little push paint thing). While cars drive on it. 

Kathmandu traffic light

One of the more organized roads in town, medians are not the norm

Anyways, my goal that first day was to try to find some of the tourist spots, like Thamel, but mostly I was just wandering. I, of course, got hopelessly lost but eventually found my way back to a main road and back home. When I got home, my "family" asked where I walked and when I could not tell them, Gita decided I needed to be shown around town the next day. We took a tempo (or tuk-tuk) to Durbar Square, where there are a bunch of temples and the living goddess and things. She was basically just trying to help me get my bearings, so we cruised through pretty quickly. I’ll go back on my own sometime and be a picture-taking tourist for a bit. Then we walked up to Thamel, which is a complete and utter nightmare. The majority of the Kathmandu section of Lonely Planet is about Thamel and Durbar Square—a huge bummer because there are so many other interesting places in the city. Coming to Kathmandu and just seeing those spots would be kind of like going to Denver just to visit those Wild West Shops on 16^th Street Mall.

At some point we walked around the New Street area, the local’s version of Thamel. They refer to it as a “mall” but it’s actually a bunch of people selling things off tarps in the street. In Thamel, you can get pray flags, books, DVDs, knock-off mountaineering gear, a pashmina and a pizza. Around New Street, you can get clothing, cell phone parts, all varieties of veggies, personal grooming items and a box full of baby chicks!

Thamel shopping

New St area shopping

After Thamel, we walked to Swayambhunath. I think most people have seen pictures of Swayambhunath (aka “the monkey temple”) at some point, it’s a gigantic Buddhist temple on the top of a hill overlooking Kathmandu with a ton of prayer flags all over the place. Pictures do not do it justice. Other than the annoying staircase up, loaded with people trying to sell you things and monkeys trying to steal food from unsuspecting tourists, it is an amazing place. I very much want to go back and spend a whole day up there. Behind Swayambhuanth, you can walk to some other temples, and then down a back way past a really cool Buddhist monument and then back to Ring Road, where we caught a bus home.

Swayambhunath

Makes me want a backyard just to have a prayer flag tree

After Gita took me around, I also had the advantage of driving all the way across town with my boss, Jeevan, for a meeting. He kept pointing out interesting things that you will never ever read about in a travel book and now I have a whole list of fun things to do here in the upcoming months. I feel no hurry to do everything at once, since I have plenty of time, so I’ve just been walking around by myself with no destination in mind these last few days. I’m much more competent at getting myself around town (by foot at least, public transportation is another story for another day) and I’ve ditched the worthless Lonely Planet book except to look up how to spell places. I understand better now why Asian tourists at MIT take pictures of the squirrels. I feel like that every day when I see a group of cows walking in the road, or a bicycle loaded down with more things than I can fit in my Subaru, or construction workers in flip flops carrying bricks in a basket hanging from their heads. I’ll get used to all the sights around me (I’ve already started to get used to the noises) and until then I am comforted by the fact that everyone else is as unaccustomed to me as I am to them. The only places I’ve seen other white people are Thamel and Swayambhunath. I get lots of stares, adults mostly ignore me and school children love to practice their English on me. The two little kids in a house across the road from me constantly yell “Hello! Good morning!” at my balcony (even in the evening). And at least once a day, a group of teenage boys walking home in their uniforms announces, “Hello, we love you!” as I pass by.

New Digs

I’m more or less settled in Kathmandu now. I couldn’t have wished for a better place to stay. I am living in a very nice area, in the Northern part of town right between the Ring Road (the main road going around Kathmandu) and the Tribuvan Teaching Hospital. Definitely not a typically tourist spot. Excluding the plane ride here, I have yet to see another white person. I have a nice room on the top floor of the house with a nice balcony. Actually, you have to go outside to get to my room, which is kind of cool. I’m staying in the extra room of the landlord and his family, on the same floor as the woman who arranged my housing. The landlord speaks English (though of course heavily-accented) but the landlady does not.

My house. My room is off the top visible balcony.

My room!

Southern view from my balcony. The rest of Kathmandu is that direction.

Northwest view from my balcony.

I spent the first day resting and looking out from the balcony (I love that everyone hangs out on their roofs, so many things for me to watch) and only ventured out for about two hours. (Though a very successful two hours—I quickly found a supermarket, a bank and the US Embassy.) I still have to get used to the constant ruckus of people, vehicles and animals, but I love that the whole city seems to wake up simultaneously at 5:30 am. The food was something I was more or less prepared for, yet it’s still going to be a learning curve. First, I’m going to have to start saying no to food—even though there are really only two meals a day (9 am and 8ish pm) with snacks throughout the day, I feel like I am eating constantly. My pre-dinner snack yesterday was more food than I eat for dinner back home. The family I am living with seems to find eating with me quite amusing. You would have thought I would have learned to eat with my hand when I was a baby, but apparently it’s harder than it looks. Something about not turning my hand enough. Luckily I have four months to practice.

Yesterday was the first day I went into the office where I will be working. It was pretty overwhelming with many old Nepalese men telling me everything they think about development work and evaluation in very rapid heavily-accented English. I think that this experience will be more than I could have ever wished for too. I have already learned a ton and I probably only absorbed 1/50^th of what was said today. This really is going to be a great way to balance my theoretical understanding of international evaluation with how it actually works. I’m excited because it looks like a good mix of work in the city and travel outside Kathmandu. Pretty much all of October I will be in more remote areas of Nepal. The first part of October is a huge festival and most folks leave town, so I probably will too (destination undecided). And then the later part of October will be lots of work site visits to the far west part of Nepal. And then my Dad is here in early November and I’ll spend a week in Pokhara with him.

Today I will walk further into Kathmandu and explore some of the typical tourist areas. I also need to get a better phrasebook. The book and language CD I have contain next to no useful words and though my host family tries to teach me words constantly, I’m not absorbing much without being about to go look it up later. Maybe it will be easier to learn the language after I have my bearings. Ok more later, just wanted folks to know I am here and safe and happy! 

Elena