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