Ohmmmm

Fashionable upholstery and no AC. 

Eid ul-Fitr September 9th- 12th
Eid break came at a perfect time this year! I was feeling so zonked and needing a break from the fast pace school life and the environment of Dhaka.  We set out for the airport around 11am on Thursday prepared to face the HOURS of traffic we had been warned about.  Luckily, there was absolutely no traffic- we got there in no time and then had plenty of hours to kill in the OH-SO-EXCITING Dhaka airport! The pluses to getting there early: we all got seats on the right hand side of the plane (this is where you sit when flying to Nepal from Bangladesh because the Himalayas are on the right), and we had plenty of time to peruse the 3 Duty Free stores in the terminals! The downside: sitting in the airport staring wearily at our Biman plane out the window, looking older than I am and a little less than trustworthy.  We got on the plane with no problem and immidately started to sweat.  The plane was completely booked and while there were sockets for AC to flow from, they were simply empty holes in the ceiling.  Everyone whipped out their security pamphlets, but not to brace themselves for what could be a dangerous plane ride, instead- to try and make a some kind of airflow and not pass out from overheating. However rickety and jolty the flight- we made it safely about 50 minutes later in Kathmandu! No sign of the Himalayas, but some sights of thick clouds of pollution (just a precursor of what to expect from the city thousands of feet below).

Camera crew at work in the building

The airport pick up was hilarious.  We got our visas easily enough and hadn't checked our bags, so we walked out to a huge crowd of people with signs of the names of the people they were picking up.  We saw a young man with our names on his paper pressed up against a glass window and shot him a big smile and an over-exaggerated wave (international friendly greeting) and pointed to a place we could meet in the pick-up zone.  Suddenly, we were flanked by men in suits, men carting cameras, and flower necklaces.  Confusing words were exchanged as we thought these people were making a mistake with the star treatment, and they were hustling us along through the crowds and making sure to keep the cameras on us the whole time! Our luggages were whisked out of our hands and we were escorted into the comfort of a large air conditioned van.  Shortly thereafter, we learned that one of suited men was the manager of Hotel Manang (our hotel in Kathmandu) and he was filming a video to advertise his hotel for a upcoming tourism conference and then use to promote "Nepal Year of Tourism: 2011"... still not sure what that is about.  So, we made some detours on the way home in good spirit for the video, and even had a few speaking lines upon returning to the hotel.

Cultural dancers at Nepali Chulo

After freshening up, we came back down to the lobby and met up with one of our guides (the man with the sign at the airport) to head to our Nepalese Cultural Dinner.  This was AWESOME! We arrived at this HUGE building with intricate artwork and decorations, plopped ourselves down on soft floor cushions in front of a table covered in "gold" kitchenware, and were served a shot of homemade liquor.  While it was the worst thing I had ever tasted (a combination of tequila, sake, and vodka) the presentation was entertaining (he poured from about 4 feet above the tiny bowl and didn't miss a drop!), and it was nice to be served alcohol in public (something you take for granted 'til you've lived in Dhaka).  The dinner included a limited edition Everest beer, a few courses of YUMMY Nepalese food (which is kind of like Indian food and Bangladeshi food, but better), and a number of musical and dance performances.  They even had a routine where someone was dressed up as a peacock (a sacred animal in this culture), someone as a yak, and (the best one) A YETI! So hilarious and entertaining! It was a long, but fabulous meal that ended with us getting up and dancing with some of the traditional dancers- how fun :)

Yeti. 

That night, we returned to our hotel for a few more movie-star scenes (but the manager treated us to a drink "The drink will be on my side" he said) at the hotel bar before deciding to venture out into the fun nightlife of Thamel.  We googled some bars to hit up and weaved our way through the dark streets until we found Tom and Jerry's.  We made friends with a group of English guys who had spent the day walking from Tibet to Nepal. We half believed them because they looked exhausted and very sunburned... Tom and Jerry's closed early, but that didn't stop us.  We walked down the street where a man whispered for us to come inside his club, "Fire" and lifted up a gated garage door for us to enter.  Sketch.  There was great music when we got upstairs, a dance floor, and cool lights... so we stayed for a while.  Once the crowd started to get too bizarre, we called it a night and made it back to our hotel safely and felt a bit like Goldilocks as we passed out within seconds on our not-so-soft or oh-too-soft (depending on which one) hotel beds.

In front of the Monkey Temple

Friday morning was rough.  We were up and at 'em at 8am and downstairs to have our free breakfast buffet.  They advertised yak cheese and "live eggs" (Don't be alarmed, this meant a man was cooking your eggs by order- not that they were about to hatch.).  The potatoes and nepalese tea were my elixir and I felt refreshed enough to meet our new tour guide and embark on our LONG day.  We were going to 4 different temples/sites and then driving up to Nagarkot (about 25 km from the city) to stay in the mountains for the night.  We piled into our car (driver and guide in the front seats and Melissa, Savanna and I in the back) and headed to the Monkey Temple.  When we arrived, we saw a statue of Buddha in a fountain.  If you throw a coin into the bucket in front of him, you have good luck for a whole year! After a half a dozen tosses and only hitting the rim twice, we figured that was all the luck Buddha wanted to give out. After seeing a few small stupas, we walked up 365 stairs to reach the main attraction: Swayambhunath Stupa!

Baby monkey- we were so close!

Home to hundreds of wild monkeys, this temple is a fusion of Hindu and Buddhist religion with a combination of ancient pagodas and a large stupa.  Surrounding the stupa are hundreds of prayer wheels.  The prayer wheels have inside them paper with Buddhist mantras.  When you spin the wheel, the mantra is uttered for you in your name and your prayers are done over and over again without having to say them yourselves.  We walked around the stupa, alternating between taking turns spinning the wheels and sucking our arms back towards our body when a monkey leapt into position to make sure his prayers were heard through the wheels, as well.

The next stop on our tour was a Hindu religious site.  The first thing I noticed was a lack of prayer flags. They seem to be adorning every sculpture and building we go to in Nepal, but not here where the focus is on a different aspect of the religions in Nepal: cremations of Hindu people.  On the edges of the river in Pashunpatinath, Hindus bring the bodies of their loved ones to be burned. The area gets it's name from Pashupati (one of the names for Lord Shiva) and it is a pilgrimage destination for Hindus.

Overlooking the cremation ritual

They come there not only to release their loved one's ashes, but also to bathe in the same holy waters.  I am glad that I was able to witness this ritual, but it was very shocking.  I felt unnerved that only a few dozen yards below where I was overlooking the river there was a person wrapped up in fabric, adorned in marigolds and about to be cremated in public.  Seeing the smoking mounds on other sections of the river juxtaposed with the family washing themselves around the body of the loved one, and a group of children splashing and playing in the same waters was an intense sight to take in.

We walked out of Pashunpatinath and back to the car and were very ready for a break from the heat, pollution and traffic of Kathmandu.  Rickshaws:Dhaka::Motercycles:Kathmandu. I am very thankful that Dhaka has outlawed the engines that cause HUGE puffs of black smoke to emit from all vehicles and flood the interior of your car (windows have to be down since there wasn't any AC) leaving you with a sore throat for days to follow... *cough cough*

View of the stupa and the circular shopping area around
it from our rooftop cafe!

We arrived at my favorite part of our tour: Little Tibet.  You can't take cars inside, so we parked and walked into the quite, calm and clean circle of Boudhanath.  We went straight upstairs to a rooftop cafe for much need hydration and nourishment.  Our view of the stupa was incredible.  Boudhanath is one of the holiest sites in Kathmandu (next to the Monkey Temple) and it's grandeur is breathtaking.  On top of every stupa is a large cube with a face painted on it.  The eyes are a symbol of Buddha's all-seeing eyes. No matter what you are doing or where you are- he can see if you are doing good or bad.  The dot between the eyes represents the mystical third eye, while the question mark looking symbol (where the nose would be) stands for the number 1 or unity.

Prayer flags on the stupa

In a large circle surrounding the stupa there are Tibetan stores selling every handicraft you can imagine.  Our guide took us to his favorite place to buy prayer flags, and we also got to explore a school for making mandalas.  The time and dedication it takes to paint one of these is seriously impressive.  But, apparently it is good for the soul- so power to the artists for taking on such a daunting task!

After Boudanath, we piled back into our packed, hot car and I fell asleep instantly.  When I woke up, we were outside of Kathmandu at Bhaktapur- an ancient village built around a palace.  Again, a place we could not take our car into, so we parked and walked up a long path to the main square.  I went from being quite grumpy and hot to once again in awe of what I saw.

Huge pagoda! 

Massive pagodas with huge statues of animals were scattered across the square opposing the palace.  We were able to go peak in the palace grounds, but could not snap photos :( and even saw the place where the king used to take his daily bath (in a very creepy basin decorated with huge stone snakes).  After getting a short tour with our guide of the different sections in Bhaktapur, we were set off on our own for shopping! The handicrafts were beautiful! It was so cool to go into a store where the salesman was also the craftsman.  They are very knowledgable about their craft which made negotiating prices much more difficult.  We met some cool people though, and were sad to say goodbye, but looking forward to our journey up into the mountains to relax in Nagarkot.

Because the traffic has been so bad earlier in the day, we were running a little behind schedule and didn't make it to Hotel Country Villa before sunset.  So, we had to pull over along the way to catch glimpses of the gorgeous sunset through the valleys.  While we had lost our guide (he didn't make the trip to Nagarkot with us), our little sedan was seriously struggling up the mountain.  On a number of occasions I jerked around to look behind the car as I was sure we had lost a wheel, or the entire trunk of the car.  I imagined my luggage full of handicrafts tumbling down the Himalayan mountainside and into yeti-inhabited territory. We wondered why they predicted it would take us 1 hr and 30 minutes to reach our destination when it was only 20something km away, but after seeing our car was doing more intense trekking than we had even planned for ourself, we understood.  I imagined getting out of my car and rolling my luggage up the mountain to our destination like Cameron Diaz in The Holiday and had a chuckle to myself.

Sunset in the valley before Nagarkot

Eventually we made it.  The Hotel Country Villa did more to earn it's 3 star status than Hotel Manang.  Nestled into the edges of the mountain, the view was outstanding.  There weren't any clouds when we first arrived, so we had a clear view of all the stars in the sky.  I wished I had Catherine's droid and could point at the sky to make note of the constellations I could see, but my fancy banglaphone is not that special.  We hopped in the shower in our personal cottage and basked in the feeling of a hot shower in the cool night.  I forgot how comforting it is to slip on a pair of jeans and a big sweater and cuddle up.  We made our way to the hotel terrace for a late dinner and a glass of wine.  Many times throughout our dinner (and then card game) we were fully immersed in a cloud.  I have said my whole life that I wanted to hold a cloud! Now, it isn't as I always imagined (grasping a section of a big fluffy cloud and ripping it off to hold as my own as if it were a piece of cotton candy), but it was pretty awesome anyway.

Sunrise over Himalayan Mountains and
Nepalese Tea

The next morning, we woke up to our alarm at 5:15 am and pulled ourselves together to go watch the sunrise over the Himalayas.  Everything outside was grey, white and blue.  Grey clouds surrounding us, white clouds below us in the valley, and tips of blue mountains in the distance.  I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.  After sunrise, we embarked on a bit of a "trek" and found our way to the top of another nearby hotel for an even higher view.  Breakfast buffet at the hotel didn't have "live" eggs, which was a disappointment, but the Nepalese tea made up for it.  We collected our belongings and wished we had bungie chords to ensure our luggage and ourselves weren't going to tumble out of the car on our journey back down the mountain to Kathmandu.

On the way home, every woman we passed in the street was wearing the most beautiful and ornate red saris.  This weekend in Nepal the women were celebrating Teej- a 3 day fasting festival for Hindu women.  We asked our travel agent at Hotel Manang about it (the wife of the manager) and she said that it is a time where women pray for marital bliss, well being of their husbands and sons or future husbands and sons.  When we asked her if there was a similar day for the men to pray for the woman, she laughed a HUGE laugh as if it was the funniest thing she'd ever been asked.  I guess the answer is no. The women have a huge feast the first night, then fast all the following day- they don't even swallow their saliva! They wear their red wedding saris and special Teej jewelry (really glittery in green, gold and red). On the last day, they celebrate with lots of dancing and festivity.

Buddha overlooking clouds at Hotel Country Villa

When we got back to Manang, we rested up and then went out for more handicraft exploring. Thamel (the touristy section of town we stayed in) is a bustling area where you are constantly diving out of the way of cars, trucks, motorcycles and even rickshaws (they aren't pretty like they are here, though)! We made many friends along our journeys and were invited to meet back up for tea a few times.  It is a significant offer of friendship to be invited to have tea with a Nepalese local, so we were quite pleased! We shopped 'til we dropped and lounged back at the hotel for a while before dinner.  We had several recommendations to eat a pizza and ice cream parlor called Fire and Ice- so we navigated our ways through the dark streets and finally wound up at the right location.  That pizza was SOOO good. We found some live music on our way home and stopped in at the bar to have a beer- and what song did he play? WAGON WHEEL! I could have closed my eyes and imagined I was on the back porch of Coupes with all my bests...

Himalayans! Mt. Everest is here somewhere...

The last morning, we had our live eggs and Nepalese tea before embarking on our final walk through Thamel for a few last minute goods.  Our stay was wonderful and nearly everything I had imagined.  The only thing lacking was a view of Himalayan Mountains.  The clouds were too thick in Nagarkot for us to see to range.  Our luck changed when the plane was just taking off and breaking through the layer of thick clouds, I looked through the scratched-hasn't-been-washed-since-before-I-was-born window and saw the most massive snow-topped mountain peaks I could have imagined reflecting the sunlight. A perfect ending to a fabulous getaway.

Next vacay ETD 1 month... Bali?