Durbar Square, Durbar Square, and, umm, Durbar Square!

It's strange to meet most of your family... on the other side of the world. For one of my sisters, my parents, my husband, and myself, our first trips to Asia included a mini-family reunion! Jennie traveled with us in Bangladesh, West Bengal India, and Nepal. My parents were traveling in China and decided to meet us as well, and Kathmandu seemed like a viable option!

Me, my mom, and my sister in Bhaktapur

Read the rest...
As my parents were flying in one day, Jennie was flying out another, and then my parents were flying out a third, we didn't have a long enough period of time to leave the area, so we instead explored Kathmandu and the Kathmandu valley which holds the highest concentration of UNESCO World Heritage sites in the world (with a strong desire to come back to Nepal to do a long trek, a rafting trip, and some canyoneering someday!).

Everyone at our hotel

Kathmandu itself was a return to the backpackers scene for us. The Thamel neighborhood is full of guest houses, bothersome trekking guides, touristy shops, and, of course, dreadlocked heads. While my parents quickly grew tired of the harassing touts and the dirty streets, we were just glad to be back where we weren't stared at quite so much! One thing we loved about the city itself was the narrow alleys lined with amazing intricately carved wooden and brick houses and temples. Some of them look like they're barely still standing, but the care taken in their construction is obvious.

Some of the amazing buildings in Kathmandu (that looks like it's going to fall over...)

We discovered some interesting stupas and pagodas through narrow alleys and tucked into courtyards

From the 15th to 18th centuries, Nepal was divided into three kingdoms. Although I don't completely understand how it's possible, the capitols of these kingdoms were all in the Kathmandu Valley. Thus, we had the opportunity to visit three Durbar Squares. Durbar indicates a royal area, so each square was the royal center for that kingdom. Our first, Kathmandu, was our least favorite but was fun because traffic still went right through it, making it feel like it was still the center of the city. It had many amazing pagodas (those layered temples I equated with China started here!) and other temples, and we also got a glimpse of the living goddess- a young girl who is declared a deity and lives in the square until puberty when another girl is chosen as a replacement.

The black Kal Bhairav god, in front of which you can only tell the truth, apparently. If you stand with your foot on it and lie, well, you die! (We didn't try it.)

My dad playing Bagh Chal, a checkers-like game with little metal tigers and goats, with a craft seller

More people means more people to navigate...

Patan was our second Durbar Square, which we found even more lovely than the first. Along with the pretty pagodas and palace, we went into a lovely golden Buddhist temple and a popular Hindu temple where women were performing a ceremony asking for their husbands' protection and long life. The temple was filthy, with bits of leftover offerings of rice, flowers, coconut, and other odds and ends laying on the ground, the platforms, the walls... Goats milled about, meant for sacrifice, our guide said, but left to wander for now. The whole things felt very gritty and textured, somehow appropriate for a gritty and textured culture!
Our final and favorite Durbar Square was in Bhaktapur. We wandered around the lovely cobblestone streets of this small city for a few hours, enjoying the peace and quiet. All the buildings were the beautiful brick and wood we'd been seeing, and women were out on the steps knitting hats and mittens to sell to tourists. It was simply a beautiful place. A touristy street in Bhaktapur A spice and dry goods store- the owner had to walk on the dividers between items to move around! Such a beautiful view! A lovely day...
We happened upon dyed yarn of every color drying in the sun

Josh made some friends with these chicks who lost their mother... we have a video of it if we ever get it up!

From Bhaktapur, we drove up to Nagarkot, a mountain from which the views of the Himalayas are meant to be spectacular. With monsoon season and all, we had a lovely few of the valley... and lots of clouds! We also took a nice walk through rice paddies and villages up to Nagarkot later in the week. Despite excessive amounts of travel planning and re-planning (my parents had to cancel their trip to Tibet quite suddenly because the embassy stopped issuing travel permits and we were trying to find cheap flight to the Maldives or Bali for the end of our trip), it was a lovely week with family, although it was hard to say goodbye. We'd gotten so used to it being just the two of us that it was nice to have some company!

Pretty clouds in Nagarkot.

Nagarkot was beautiful, clouds and all.

PS By the way, thanks for the beautiful picture, Ian, Kendra, Lucas, and Gavin!!

(written by megan, posted by josh)

When you see a rhino charging...

Walking in the Chitwan grasslands,
this rhino appeared in our path. If you've never encountered a live rhino, they're very big creatures.
It moved towards us, then stopped to contemplate whether to charge.

We didn't know why our guides were carrying big sticks when we started out, but now we did! They beat the ground for a slow three minutes until the rhino turned around and headed back into the tall grass. (The man facing us is telling Josh to stop taking photos and get the hell out of there.)

The whole time we weren't too afraid-until we saw the very nervous faces of the cow-herders who came up behind us. After we were told we could move carefully forward, we heard a very distinct and very close-by snort from the grass. Hmmm... I don't know too animals that snort. We just kept moving.

Of rhinos and elephants: Chitwan, Nepal

Our elephant driver taking a bath with the elephant after our safari

Back to the land of elephants! In reality, we are in India. But in blog-post-time, we are just leaving Darjeeling, India by Toy Train which we got to via bus and jeep from Bangladesh. So, since this is a blog post after all, we will pick up the timeline from there. We really are hoping to catch up to our current location this week- so watch for a flurry of posts (including Kathmandu area+family, Varanasi, Delhi/Taj Mahal, Chandigarh, Rajasthan... whew.) soon! But for now, let me tell you about Chitwan National Park (formerly Royal Chitwan, but with the recent end of the Nepalese dynasty, the word "royal" is being taken out of everything!).

Read the rest...

The India-Nepal border at Kakarbitta

The border between India and Nepal was fairly uneventful. We walked across a long bridge with a lovely view, could have kept walking right past immigration (which we kinda did on our way out of Nepal- oops), had to refuse to pay the extra "processing fee" for our Nepalese visas (isn't that what the visa fee is for, sir?!), and then spent the night in a scuzzy border town hotel (both the town and the hotel were scuzzy). The next morning we were up at 3:45am for a 12 hour bus ride to the capitol of Nepal, Kathmandu, that turned into an excrutiating 15 hours.

At least the bus ride into the Kathmandu valley was pretty!

A quick note on Nepalese buses- exhausting. We discovered that there are two companies in the entire country who have some AC buses, but they don't run many routes. It's really not the AC that's the biggest appeal, but simply that these buses tend to fill their seats, take off for the given destination, and leave it at that. The rest of long-distance travel is done by local bus, which means the buses are big, but stop often to stuff more passengers into the aisles or on the top. We had huge bundles on the roof and big sacks of rice in the aisle, along with an extra dozen or so people who liked to try to sit on the edge of my seat or on my arm rest. The door remains open the entire time, so that along with the open windows (if they still operate), it provides a cooling breeze filled with dust and grime. The buses also stop every few hours for bathroom breaks (new winner of the country with the worst "toilets" award), for pee-along-the side-of-the-road-breaks, for food, or just to kill some more time. Let's just say it was a very long bus ride! The view once we got into the Kathmandu Valley was quite impressive, though.

The view from the bus window

Due to time contraints (my parents were flying into Kathmandu in 3 days), we immediately booked a 3-day trip to Chitwan National Park. Nepal is divided lengthwise into three long strips: the Himalayan mountains to the North, the foothills in the middle, and then the flat plains called the Terai that border India. I don't think I really knew that much about Nepal, and I was surprised at how poor the Terai region is. Based on GDP, Nepal is the poorest country we've been to, which I wasn't expecting at all. It's funny how pre-conceptions about certain countries can be completely inaccurate sometimes.

Various items out to dry in a Terai village

After the long trip the day before across the Terai and then north to Kathmandu, we now had to head back south to the Terai where the park is. That meant we had to get back on a bus the next morning... Things seemed to be going just fine until we stopped for breakfast. A twenty minute stop turned into a 4.5 hour one! Apparently, there had been a truck/motorcycle accident on the one road leading out where two people had died. Since the police are usually late in coming, not necesarily on the up-and-up, and hold very little power anyway, crowd justice prevails. This usually means a crowd forms a roadblock, refusing to let traffic through until the driver-at-fault agrees to pay an adaquate sum to the wronged party. Thank goodness we had just stopped for breakfast because we had a pleasant four-hour sit in the shade with food and cold-ish drinks available! Needless to say, we got in late!

Cow/buffalo herders in Chitwan

The biggest attraction of Chitwan is the animals. The park consists of large grasslands and jungles, home to tigers, deer, crocodile, rhinos, and elephants, among other things. We spent our first morning atop an elephant, where we saw three rhinos (two were mother and baby), a number of deer, and no tigers (both regretfully and not regretfully...)

On the elephant!

A mother and baby rhino

After the ride, Josh got to try his hand at "driving" as we headed for the river. We got to "help" with the bath, including sitting on the elephants back while he gave us a shower with his trunk!

Our Chitwan adventure also included a walk through the grasslands to an elephant breeding center (and a close encounter with a rhino- see forthcoming post), a very interesting cultural dance show involving 25 men with long sticks and very good rythmn, and an early morning walk to see some birds (in which I got a huge leech on my chest. Apparently the big ones climb trees and drop onto unsuspecting passers-by. Yuck.). We also took a nice boat ride in a dug-out canoe and saw a crocodile or two hanging out on the side of the river.

A baby elephant at the breeding center

The side-trip was great fun, mostly because of the unusual animals we got to see close-up. The bus ride back to Kathmandu was mostly uneventful, except for the half-hour stop to unload an entire apartment-worth of furniture from the top of our bus. Ah, Nepali buses. We are so glad to be done with them! (And, Graham, Nepal is one of the reasons we have so many hours on buses. That and all those overnight Burmese trips...) Tourism in Chitwan, as in most of Nepal, has dropped significantly in the last few years due to civil unrest primarily due to an insurgency (at least from the government's point of view) instigated by a communist group called the Maoists (who actually have very little to do with Mao). However, the monarchy was just abolished and democracy appears to be gaining ground with free elections planned very soon. We encountered little of this unrest and if there was ever a country who could use some peace and a bit of prosperity (even if it comes at the cost of annoying tourists), this might be it!

Grandma.

This should have been written a while ago but we decided to keep it more or less chronological to the posts in blog. Also, when I should have written it for it to be relevant in real time I couldn't a computer that was built before 1987... and internet was hard to get ahold of.

My Grandma has died. She was the last of my grandparents still alive and so her death comes as a loss... the final connection to people two generations removed from myself (not entirely... but of my direct family) and I will miss her. She was a sweet, caring, and feisty woman, a great friend to my Mom and as stubborn as an ass when she wanted to be. But like all of us, she was born and recently she died. Her death is a loss for me, as she was the closest of all my grandparents. So it was a sad email I received in Kathmandu informing me of her death, funeral, and internment... all of which I missed.
Read the rest...

A more poignant moment about her death is that I have now NOT attended the funerals of all of my grandparents, something I vowed I would not do before she passed away. But I was in Kathmandu, literally the other side of the world and while I might have been able to get back in time for the funeral it would have been the end of this trip and the end of our finances. My family didn't ask me to come, I didn't think I could if I had wanted to... and so I did the thing I was dead set against and missed another funeral. It is not the end of the world and every funeral missed the reasons were quite legitimate but that doesn't take away that I feel mildly guilty that I missed them. That there is something internally that feels inadequate because I was not able to attend those non-repeatable moments.

Aside from missing a moment I had vowed not to there was also something jarring about reading about the end of bodily existence through a monitor. It was a rather surreal experience to know that these pixels were the only way I would have to say goodbye in the next few months... feeling the loss of life in the real world as communicated through the cyber world. I sat and tried to put the right inflection and emotion into my mother's email informing me of her death but it didn't seem to work. A message that should be full of sorrow and pain, felt flat and stoic and in the end I didn't really believe it had happened (and parietally still don't). I know she is dead, I know when I next go to Iowa she won't be there... but I don't really believe it and won't till I see her grave. Intellectually I know it but emotionally there is no real conclusion, no answer. There is something important in the physicality of a funeral, a grave, that is missing when the only information you receive is communicated to you through email.

There was another surreal surreal moment that added to this feeling of (dis)reality. On the day of her funeral I was trying to find a computer that would let me call home. It was about 9:00 at night and I was wandering around the streets of Kathmandu looking for someone with skype and trying to explain (in pigeon English) that it was important because my grandmother had just died. I finally find a place and call home, only to have a conversation with my Mother that was digitized and broken, further the connection from reality via technology. I was glad we had talked, and it was certainly better than nothing, but I missed talking in person and a sense of actually knowing what was happening.

And in the end, it is just death which, like birth, happens everyday (one of the most ordinary and one of the most magical events). She is just one of thousands that died on that day. She died peacefully (so I am told). She had lived a full life and her death is a conclusion to everything that had come before. I think it is silly to hope that she had lived longer or didn't die... after all death is the nature of our life. But that doesn't make dealing with her death any easier or less important.

I end with an excerpt from my journal the day after I found out. It is perhaps less polished but there is something more real in how I felt about it at the time.

8/4/07

What is sad is that I can't come home in time to make the funeral, nor am I expected to I was hoping that she would live till the fall so I could make a proper show of a goodbye, but that is no longer possible. So it will be another funeral I will not be attending, leaving a trace a guilt for a situation barely (or not at all) within my control. The person I most want to know I care enough to come is already dead and will miss (at least physically) the event. My family doesn't seem to expect me to come and while it would be good for me I don't NEED to come for my own sense of well being. Also it simply doesn't make sense to spend over $1000 to go to Iowa for a day or two, barely awake, only to return... but not going also feels inappropriate. So, I won't attend and need to deal with my own thoughts on the issue. It will resolve itself as is necessary, I am sure. I will miss her...

We're coming home! Well, soon...

Note on location: we are currently in Jodphur, in the state of Rajasthan, India. In a few days we head South to the Ajanta caves and to our friends Brad and Elizabeth in Bangalore! Also, the posts on my computer aren't showing properly, so if the long version shows on the main page, sorry about that. The Darjeeling post on my computer here looks like the whole thing, but is missing a paragraph and photo you can see if you click on the link "see the rest".

The end is in sight! Two days ago my amazing husband spent a lo-ong time on the phone sweet-talking someone into changing not only our flight date to four days earlier, but also the departure location from Hong Kong to Singapore for the low total price of $100, effectively saving us about $200 in flight costs! Apparently we weren't allowed to change these anymore, something to do with the fact that we used miles not money and the layover for Nate and Milli's wedding in Texas (??), but he got the woman so buttered up that she went and talked to a supervisor when the "go ahead" button didn't work. I guess she was able to plead our case because the changes went through!

Why the change? Well, first of all, the cost of flying from India to Singapore is much cheaper than India to Hong Kong. It also probably saves us another leg on our return trip. Second, we are ready to return to our family and friends! We want to revel in peanut butter, cold cheese, and hamburgers cooked on a grill. We want to share the joys of white coffee (buy yourself some sweetened condensed milk, World, because it goes with everything!) and 2000 digital photos. We want to stay in the same place for more than two days and maybe not sweat for a whole hour in a row. And, we miss you all! So we now expect to make it to Michigan on the 11th or 12th of September (I forget how long this plane thing takes) and then we hope to spend the last weekend of September in New York. If you are in or near either of those places at those times, come, let us bore you with photographs!

Land of fog and tea

After a few days with Jennie in Bangladesh, our little group moved on to our next country: India (none of this hanging around places for months and getting to really know the culture thing... we've got places to see!). An overnight bus ride (complete with a family of FOUR in the TWO seats behind Josh and I) to a rather interesting border to another bus to a jeep crammed with 13 people brought us to the lovely hill town of Darjeeling
Read the rest...

The "cha and bamboo hut" border- our complete information including occupation and sometimes father or husband's names was recorded in big fat log books a total of six times. And that isn't even how many times they checked our passports. We were served cha (bangla tea) once and most of the checkpoints were literally bamboo huts with metal or thatched roofs!

Darjeeling was wonderful. Unfortunately, at the height of monsoon season the weather was misty and foggy the entire time we were there. Fortunately, the mist only added to the mystery of the place and being cold for the first time in over a month was fantastic! The city is set so high on a mountain that we were usually IN the clouds. The winding streets are all connected by stairways, and the population has a large Nepalese and Tibetan contingency making it all seem rather exotic.

Somewhere out there are four of the five tallest peaks in the world! My new favorite food- a samosa broken up into a banana leaf bowl and covered with a chickpea curry and other odds and ends. Cost? 13 cents!Josh on a divided street that shows the steep hill slope the city is set on. He knew he took that hat along for something!More clouds!

After so many months walking, Josh's flipflops needed some help. This man glued them together again (first time was in Hanoi) and then proceeded to sew them all up! Good as new!

Traveling in Bangladesh had been quite taxing, so we definately enjoyed the cool mountain air and the chance to stop moving for a bit. Along with some wonderful eating, reading, and relaxing in our triple hotel room, we ventured out to Happy Valley Tea Plantation. The walk down was lovely, but they weren't yet processing tea as the wet weather had delayed picking. We wandered around the factory, though, and saw some drying of the leaves in ancient ovens. The tea is sent to Twinings, but we got to try a bit of their best brew: Super Fine Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe One along with a nice lesson in tea.

Picking tea
Comparing the different tea leaves and flowers. The super long name stuff contains the tip of the center leave and the golden flower in my hand, all from the first picking of the year.

One of our favorite parts of Darjeeling was the way we left it. We took the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway or "toy train", a narrow gage railway originally built to take advantage of the cheap potatoes grown up the mountain and now a World Heritage Site. The three cars on our train were tiny and each had its own brakeman who would screw down a brake to slow us down. We crossed the road over a hundred times, made a full loop and went back over our own tracks on a bridge, and made a number of "z-" where the train would stop, reverse down a ways, stop and then continue down forwards again. Sometimes we were so close to the shops on the side of the street that we could reach out and grab ourselves a snack! It took about 7 hours- 4 longer than the jeep trip, but what fun!

The toy trainOne of many road crossings- we kept zig-zagging from one side to the other!

The train went so close to the road and shops!


And because we are still fascinated by it, here are a few Darjeeling close-ups that kinda capture the place:

Celebrity

What's the excitement? Oh, that's us they're taking a photo of!

We knew after that first loud belch (from a middle-aged woman) on our plane to Dhaka, Bangladesh that we'd be experiencing yet another new and different culture. We'd read that the Bangladeshis might also think we were new and a little, well, different, but we didn't realize just how interesting we are. The phrases listed in Bangla in the front of our Lonely Planet guide included the usual "Hello", "Thank you", "How much", but then, curiously, there was also "Stop staring at me." Hmm.

Bet you didn't realize how interesting we are...I might as well start with some typical Bangladeshi experiences. Our second day in Dhaka, we thought we'd buy some fruit for our long Rocket steamer boat trip. This apparently was a full-out event for the Bangladeshis, as crowds of twenty to thirty gathered to watch us try to buy mangoes. We'd stop to check the map, and two to three people would stop to watch us check the map. We'd look at a mosque, and two to three people would stop to watch us looking at the mosque.

Once in Khulna we started walking from the bus station towards our hotel and ended up with anywhere from 12 to 15 kids trailing behind. We stopped to ask an adult if we were going in the right direction (we weren't and ended up taking a rickshaw- price decided on by the handy "people's court"), and a crowd of no less than 40 people not including the children eventually gathered around. Busy looking at the map with the one English-speaking fellow, I glanced up to find a sea of dark faces and eyes just staring blankly at me. This photo is blurry and doesn't do the crowd justice, but after our rickshaw pulled away, Josh quick snapped this photo of the crowd disbanding.The crowds can help, as invariably someone speaks some English and they form a sort of impromptu judge for setting mildly fair foreigner prices, but it is certainly a bit disconcerting to be the focus of that much attention. And the attention is always the same blank stare. We rarely detected emotion in the faces/eyes, positive or negative. There was little "sexual" attention, as is often the case with male Indian stares. Even curiosity didn't seem present. Just, well, blankness. It was frustrating to wave and smile at a child and get not a blink back. I think this was the first time I've ever encountered something like that from children.

Every now and then the blank stares showed intense fascination. We literally stopped people in their tracks. It's an odd feeling to see a woman, child, man walking along the street towards you, notice you, and completely stop to stare as you pass by. We even stopped a bus! A big coach was pulling out of a station, someone yelled something, the bus slammed to a halt, and then a person leaned out the bus window to snap a photo of us with his camera phone. We were also asked by a complete stranger at a hotel if his sister could take our photo (we were the only guests there besides them) . Sure, we said. Well, what she really wanted was half a dozen photos with us in a number of different settings and poses. Ironically, she looked stunning in her bright colored saree and we looked, well, like backpackers- a bit tired, sweaty, and dirty! (The photo below is not this woman. This is another new "friend" from the Rocket steamer, but the beautiful saree + tired-looking American still holds true!)


On the boat, the other people on our deck discovered we had a camera and insisted on taking photos with us. One man sat down, finger combed his hair, buttoned up his shirt, and then asked for a snapshot. This guard at the airport (since we spent 7 hours waiting for my sister Jennie's flight which never came that day, we made good friends with a couple different police battalions!) gave us his address, and this hotel manager had his picture taken with each of us and with the hotel sign and then asked us to mail the photos to him!

Needless to say, if you want your 15 minutes of fame, visit Bangladesh. You will be stalked by your own personal camera-phone paparazzi, encounter unending stares, cause a commotion whenever you try to do anything (walk, eat, stop walking, breath). It's exciting, but, good grief, is it both annoying and incredibly tiring!

(just stopping to look at a mosque on this side street...)