The end of India

Taj Mahal

Our trip from Kathmandu back to Delhi was about as boring as a trip from Kathmandu to Delhi could be. Aside from the odd fake policeman looking for bribes and the gang of rowdy street toughs that rampaged through our train car, stealing everything in sight, nothing exceptional took place.

We had a 9 hour bus from Kathmandu, then the usual border crossing festivities. Following that was a 3 hour trip in a stuffed landrover to the tout-ridden, garbage infested city of Gorakhpur, where we spent the night in a hotel overlooking the hundreds of rickshaw drivers fast asleep in their horrible little vehicles. The next morning saw us on a 6 hour train ride back to Varanasi, where for 5 hours we twiddled our thumbs and waited for the 19 hour overnight train from Varanasi to Agra.

The entire reason for going to Agra was to glimpse the Taj Mahal. Described as the ultimate symbol of love, the Taj was fairly impressive, mainly because of the complete lack of salesmen, touts, beggars, bums, scammers and irritating rickshaw drivers, once we were past the entrance gate. It seemed like one of the first times on the entire subcontinent where we've been able to sit in peace without people coming up to pester us (although even that is a little untrue...given the people who wanted "the two white guys" to pose in their pictures with them, a strange, strange phenomenon that still puzzles me). We left Agra that same evening and caught a quick 3 hour train back up to the wonderfully depressing city of Delhi, where we are now.

This afternoon (after the most amazing dog fight I have ever borne witness to) we did a quick tour of the city, visiting the gigantic mosque that's here and the Red Fort. I'm sure not many of you have heard of the Red Fort and that's probably because it's one of the most boring sites on earth, a tour of Lougheed Village would be far more spectacular and much more worth the 100 rupee entrance fee.

All in all India has been...interesting. Out of the best and worst countries I've been to, it somehow occupies high ranking spots on both of those lists, which probably seems strange to anyone who hasn't visited it. It has a lot to offer, but instead of just handing the memorable events/sites to you, it makes you work for them. Once you get past the steady stream of beggars, the rivers of urine and feces running down the roads, the confused traffic cows, the complete chaos, the awful smells, the endless crowds of people and the sheer amount of poverty, there's a place that has its own bizarre appeal. Some people obviously find this appeal much to their liking (the end result being the strange uber-hippies that we often see sprinkled about), but to most westerners, myself included, 2 months in this country was a perfect amount of time to be able to see through the grime, and not come away totally disgusted.

Tonight, I take my last near-death experience of driving down the Delhi streets and jump on a 20 hour plane for the strangest of all places...

Expedition to Solomon's Throne

Runway into Lukla. As scary as it was landing, taking off may have been worse.

Sherpas, heroes of the Himalayas.

A "small" sampling of the horrid bedding conditions the expedition had to endure as they strove for the summit.

So many yaks! I love yaks!

The strange, snow covered ice-hound that intercepted the expedition while wandering through the barren landscape at 5100 metres. The little fellow happily guided us to the nearby town and was never seen again.

Top of the world as seen from Kala Pattar.

Just Protectin' the World's Tallest Mountain.

Mt. Everest (aka Sagarmatha, aka Chomolungma, aka Solomon's Throne), the black peak in the centre of the photograph. Barely visible in this picture is Lhotse (4th highest peak in the world) and in the foreground on the right is Nuptse (28th highest peak in the world).

No celebration is complete without a few rounds of recipe and a token Irishman.

After stashing half of our worldly belongings in a dusty hotel storage room, Jas and I jumped on a little twin otter prop plane for our trip into the Himalayas. The flight was only about 25 minutes long and apparently there was a brief glimpse of Mt. Everest, but I'm not sure if I was looking at the correct mountain given the number of peaks you can see from the air. The landing seemed more like a headfirst dive into the side of a mountain and I was pleasantly surprised when the runway appeared out of the clouds to safely catch us and pull our little plane into safety.

Before I begin on the rest of this tale, a little background. First, the trip to the base of Everest and then up to the best view point of Everest (a small, rocky peak known as Kala Pattar) usually takes about 15 days. We had 9 days. The majority of this time is spent acclimatizing to the altitude. Since we had both had bouts of altitude sickness in the past, we didn't want to play around too much with it, given that, if left unattended it can turn fatal in a very short amount of time. So, we scheduled in two days of just plain sitting around, and tried to adhere to the "sleep no more than 300 metres above your last night" train of thought. We also brought along the wonder drug known as Diamox, which increases acclimatization rates.

So, given our short time span, upon touching down in Lukla, we immediately began the long trek up to Namche. After dragging our out-of-shape and totally unacclimatized bodies into this town, we hunkered down for two nights, in an effort to adjust to the altitude. During our full day there, we did a hike up a nearby hill with a fellow from Oregon, who, after hearing us complain that we still hadn't seen Everest, kindly pointed out the triangular, black peak of the world's tallest mountain, far in the distance.

The next trekking day took us to the town of Tengboche, where along the way we passed the now seemingly normal communities full of Sherpas and Yaks. The trails between different villages are just starting to fill with tourists (this is the beginning of the season for it), but are sometimes already clogged with sherpa porters and trains of yaks carrying their massive loads higher up into the mountains. The night at Tengboche was far more unpleasant than any of the other nights we had, as our room was full of these thin little spider creatures along with their brown, wormlike maggot companions (two of which somehow ended up trekking across Jason's face during the night). We were happy to head out of there the next morning and continue our ascent to the village of Dingboche.

We spent another two nights at Dingboche acclimatizing, at this point we were at roughly 4350 metres. This time we didn't do much with our day off except read and try to eavesdrop on these 4 incredibly arrogant yet fantastically interesting English doctors, as they denounced and ridiculed all sorts of different subjects. It was here we decided to cut a day out of our acclimatization schedule and head right up to our last sleeping spot, Lobuche. The decision was made mainly because we had yet to suffer even any mild AMS (Acute Mountain Sickness) and we figured, with enough Diamox (which at this point we were taking 500 mg a day), we could accomplish anything, even if the undesired side effects of the drug were waking us both up several times a night (mainly tingling fingers, feet and lips...along with squishy eyeballs, but we never tested this one). So, after two nights spent in relative comfort and feasting on the ever present potatoes of the region, we jumped up an additional 600 metres to Lobuche for our next night. Lobuche is the last real town (if it can even be called a town...) before reaching Everest Base Camp. As expected it was rather chilly and the altitude made everyone feel a bit off.

After a night there, we awoke just before 5am on the 11th to climb to the top of Kala Pattar. The sun was still asleep and the entire area seemed to be clouded in this thick fog, making us believe that our Everest view day would result in nothing more than seeing a bunch of clouds. Luckily, after a few hours of hiking, as we began the final ascent of our goal, we passed through the fog and were greeted with a perfect, blue-sky morning. Kala Pattar stands at 5554 metres and represents the highest that either of us had been to (outside of a plane...). Given that there is only 50% of the oxygen here that there is at sea level, it made for the strange situation of being constantly out of breath, but not feeling tired...it's sort of hard to explain, but it resulted in everyone moving at a snail pace as they approached the last few hundred metres (even the mighty sherpas). The views of Everest and the surrounding mountains were magnificent, as expected, and even the best photos we've seen of the area really can't do it justice.

After hanging out at the top for a couple hours, then spending a bit more time producing our theme shots and attempting to recreate scenes from Batman Begins, we started off for the long trip back to Lukla. We had decided to use the day that we cut out previously, for our return trip and it was well worth it. Since we had no more AMS worries, we were able to proceed at a much quicker pace down the Khumbu valley towards Lukla, and made it there after 3 long days of trekking. We picked up an Irishman to help keep us company for the final two days, but other than that, it was a fairly quiet return trip. Midway through our last day, we came across a Maoist group, who had apparently taken control of one of the little villages and was demanding a "Permission Tax" from all foreigners. After seeing their complete lack of firearms, we figured arguing with them for a while couldn't be such a dangerous proposition and ended up paying a quarter of what they originally charged us. As we were finishing our dialogues with them, their makeshift "officer" appeared and attempted to get things settled down, shouting out stern orders from behind his 60's style, viet-cong uniform, couldn't help but laugh at the whole situation.

The scariest part of the expedition probably came down to the last few hours this morning as we waited in the Lukla airport. The previous two days of flights had been cancelled due to bad weather and everyone knew that today's flights were on the edge of being called off (which would have started a domino like chain reaction of bad things for the two of us, given how tight our schedule is back to Delhi). Finally when the first and each subsequent plane landed on the freaky little runway, cheers and whistles would erupt from the crowd in the departure room. Finally when it was our turn to sprint across the tarmac, past the gloomy faces of those poor souls left to rot another day in Lukla, it felt more like I was escaping Stalingrad than some small Himalayan village. Alas, our flight did take off and ported us safely back to Kathmandu where we now can rest our blistered feet.

Tomorrow morning we have the pleasure of the 10-12 hour bus ride back to the Indian border and then onto Agra, through a series of buses and trains that we have lined up, all in an effort to see the Taj Mahal before flying away, which we probably should have just done when we were in Delhi previously. Oh well!

North to Nepal

River outside our safari lodge, just before sunrise.

Elephant bath time. We'll see how long my vow of, never bathing again unless elephants are involved, lasts.

So far Nepal is fantastic. The terrain and people seemed to instantly change after crossing the Indian border. There isn't nearly as much garbage or people here and that right there produces a winning combination. We arrived at the Nepalese border after a train, then a short bus ride up from Varanasi. My previous concerns about no free passport space were solved when I convinced the Nepalese border official to paste the visa on the instruction page, by telling him it's what we all do in Canada. From there we caught an absolutely horrid 12 hour bus north to Kathmandu. Leg room was non-existent as usual, there were more people on top of the bus than there were in the bus and the "chair-back" wars with the fellow in front of me almost turned violent on several occasions.

Arrival into Kathmandu was just past 5 in the morning and at that point the only thing we could see were hundreds of little fires and lights spread throughout the mountains, making the entire city look like some Mongol war camp. After catching up on sleep at a nearby hotel we wandered around the city a bit and discovered it much to our liking. There are far fewer people here than pretty much anywhere in India and the tourist section of the city, Thamel, is like a really cheap version of Whistler village, with trekking gear and nice little restaurants tucked away everywhere. Our time is limited in Nepal so we quickly booked a jungle safari and began planning our Everest expedition.

After another full day of seeing the Kathmandu sights, we grabbed an early bus to Chitiwan (spelling on that may be off), where we hoped to ride elephants and track down the evasive Bengal Tiger. After two buses, a long rickshaw ride then finally a canoe trip we made it to the lodge in the middle of the park. Our first day there was short and comprised of the typical, "go to the local village and let the kids look at white people" tour, to which we're pretty accustomed to now. The next day Jas and I headed off atop an elephant into the jungle to try to spot some animals. Riding the massive guys is quite something. The elephants seem to eat their way through the jungle as much as follow any particular path and when the handler finally gets fed up with their appetites he begins crashing down this iron, spiked rod upon the thing's skull. Given the sound this thing would make (similar to a bat and a ball) and the effort the guy seemed to be putting into smacking it down, we were both surprised to see that the elephants barely took notice of it all. We eventually did another safari (after coming up empty the first time) and managed to see a female and male One-horned rhinos munching on some plants. This was cool and I can now cross that one off my list after missing them in Africa, but I was a little disappointed not to track down a tiger, especially after years of training during my childhood up at Canim lake.

By far the most exciting part of the tour was the elephant bathing session. Didn't know what to expect from this, but I'll say this, if you ever get a chance to bathe with elephants, do not pass it up. Basically we walked down to the river and bathed with the elephants. During that time we would ride them and stand on their trunks or heads, we would splash them and they would splash us back, they would lie down sideways in the river with only a single eye and using their trunks as snorkels (trunks, by the way, are quite spectacular in almost every aspect), would let us walk on their stomachs and then roll over and we'd go tumbling off. At one point the guy took Jas and I over to the deeper section of the river, where, holding onto the elephant's ears, we would go under water with the beast and they would try to shake us off by violently twisting their head back and forth (they were successful each time it was tried). All in all, something that I thought may be kind of lame, watching elephants get washed, turned into a fantastic adventure that made us both feel like we were at some kind of elementary school camp.

This morning we awoke after a tough sleep (I was up for several hours seeing rats eating our Snickers stash...or at least, malaria-induced hallucinations that looked like rats), and grabbed a bus back to Kathmandu where we now sit. As mentioned in previous entries, my health has been rapidly deteriorating for whatever reason (and I do NOT blame the elephant bathing...nothing bad can come of that event, even if we were swimming in elephant urine for parts of it). The pills that the doctor in Varanasi gave me seemed to do absolutely nothing, so today I visited another doctor here in Kathmandu, and after collecting a hard-earned stool sample, he was able to diagnosis me with something called E. Histolytica. I just noticed that it's grouped with E. Coli in the little form I have here, that can't be good. Regardless, it appears that it's a form of Amoebas, which Jason suffered from in Central America.

Tomorrow we catch a little plane over to Lukla, where we begin our 9 day trek towards the Everest Base Camp area. We'll be watching for altitude symptoms pretty closely given our previous experiences with it and that we're going higher than ever before, so who knows how it will turn out, but it should be spectacular nonetheless.