Nepali Odyssey

By the time we had reached the Nepalese border town of Sunauli, riding 9 hours to Pokhara on the roof of a bus actually sounded like a sane idea. So my brave and exhausted travel companions and I climbed up the shaky ladder onto the roof of the bus where we made our selves comfortable and "safe" by burying ourselves with luggage. We were eventually joined by around 10 Nepalese guys who would leap on and off the roof at random villages and police stops. We stayed buried beneath the luggage for the majority of the trip.

Perhaps our rash decision would make more sense if I explained a bit more about our journey thus far:

Estathea, Cecilia and I left Hyderabad on Wednesday, Sept 23rd, on luxurious plane ride to Delhi. We spent the night and next morning in Delhi, and in the afternoon we boarded a train to Gorakpur. When we first hopped up onto the train, I thought it was a joke. There were probably more people in our car than there were in my graduating class. We managed to find our seats without too much trouble, but we were met by around 12 Indian men in our compartment (that seats 6) who looked like they had neither tickets nor any intention of moving. After an animated discussion in Hindi, around 5 of them left. The aisles were still so pregnant with bodies that a trip to the bathroom was a futile effort.

When we decided to fold the beds out and get some sleep, we had to kick 4 boys off of the very top bunk, where they had been awkwardly perched for the last 5 hours or so. Every time I woke up during the night (about every half hour or so), the scene enfolding in the surrounding bunks and aisles became more and more absurd. There were literally people everywhere! Grown men and women and little children were sleeping on every surface the train had to offer, and then some. There were women in the aisles with newborn babies next to them, and every bunk had at least 3 people on it, who I'm guessing didn't know each other. When I woke up to get ready to get off the train, there was some random guy perched on the very end of my bunk. And the craziest thing was, nobody was getting stressed out or frustrated by the insanity of our train car! I kept thinking that if that train was in America, it would be a train full of stressed out, pissed off, disgruntled people about to suffer from an anxiety attack from having to touch so many strangers.

But this is India, and that scene was not so strange. People here have no sense of personal space, partly because there's just so many damn people that it would be impractical, but partly because the individual is not important here. Here, unlike America, the sense of human unity (physical as well as spiritual!) is so great that people will happily suffer through a sleepless night on a train so that their neighbor has a place to lie down. Bizarre, but incredible.

As soon as we arrived in Gorakpur, 3 hours late at 7 am, we jumped into a jeep that would take us to the Nepalese border. Our jeep was full of 2 Nepalese families, and 3 Nepalese guys we had met on the train. I thought they must be joking when 3 more army guys knocked on the window, but no, of course there was enough space for them. One of the army guys was literally hugging the driver the whole 3 hours to the border.

So by the time we got to Sunauli, and bought our Nepalese visas, we were feeling pretty crazy. And the roof of the bus seemed like an incredibly good idea, considering the amount of people crowded into the inside of the bus. It turns out we got on the bus that makes a stop at every house from Sunauli to Pokhara, because it ended up taking us 11 hours instead of the anticipated 5....

......but we were finally in NEPAL!!!!!

Nepal was like a dreamland. We played all week long, going kayaking and rowing, visiting an island temple in the middle of the lake in Pokhara, climbing a mountain to a peace stupa, watching paragliders soaring above us like lazy insects, eating delicious food and strolling the streets filled with craft stores, cafes and hotels.

We went on a mini "trek," hiking up a mountain on an old trail to the tiny mountain-top village of Sarangkot. We took a guide with us from this women-run trekking company called "3 Sisters"--dedicated to "empowering the women of Nepal." We felt empowered. It was our guide, Saraswathi, who suggested we go paragliding, after noticing us staring longingly at all the tiny parachutes in the sky. We said: "Yes, why the bleep not?!?"

And so the next day, instead of trekking to another mountain top village like we had planned, I found myself being strapped into an enormous backpack by a strapping young Nepalese man in flowerly board shorts. And then, without more than a couple sentences of instruction, I was attached to the Nepalese guy and running as hard as I could towards the edge of the cliff! And then I was flying! Actually flying! It was the most incredible feeling ever and quite honestly no words will ever be able to describe it. So I will leave you to try to imagine soaring over village huts, rice paddies, and the lake surrounding by the most magnificent mountains in the world at your leisure.

Our week in Nepal completely jumpstarted me both mentally and physically. It felt so amazing to use my muscles again, hiking and rowing every day, and the clean, cool air was incredibly refreshing after 2.5 months in smoggy India. Surprisingly, I think being away from India actually made me understand it more. I've decided that this country is so wonderful and insane that you only realize what it's about until you've removed yourself from it.