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.