So, the Friday before we left to go to Namche, I got pretty sick. There’s was about a ten hour period in which I didn’t do anything except sleep and throw up, but I felt surprisingly good the next day. But, Sunday night, before we were planning on leaving the next morning, I started throwing up again. Going to Namche probably wasn’t the best idea, but it’s not everyday that I get to travel around Nepal. So, Monday morning, I packed my bag and we set off. I felt kind of terrible and I hadn’t eaten anything cause I was afraid I would just throw it up and I was pretty dehydrated and I hadn’t slept very well the night before. And that’s how I started the following journey:
Day 1: We all met up at Shah’s restaurant. By us, I mean myself, Natalie, Shah (local business man/restaurant owner/best English speaker in town who’s thinking about expanding his restaurant to Lukla – long story), Eunice (a Canadian volunteer who’s been working in a little town about 7 hours south of Nayabazaar) and Pharky (Eunice’s porter). I had decided that if I could make it to the Phaplu airport without puking, I was probably good to go. I made it, so we kept going. After about two hours we stopped for some delicious tea and later on we stopped for a really long time to eat lunch. Basically, we were taking our sweet time, not really conscious of how far we were supposed to walk that day. Eventually, the trail started getting really steep and it wasn’t until about 5:00 that we overcame our first major mountain. By this point, I was even more dehydrated and felt all kinds of terrible. But that wasn’t the end of our day. We still had to walk down another really steep trail about 500m (and at this point it’s starting to rain…) before getting to Nuntelah, where we stopped for the night around 7:30. At this point I was about ready to collapse and was extremely disheartened knowing that we were at a lower altitude than Nayabazaar, since Namche is up up up.
Day 2: I’m still not feeling that great, especially considering we start our day by hiking down for 2 hours. By the time we finally stopped for lunch, I was doing my best to convince Natalie and Eunice that we didn’t need to go as far as Bupsa (our planned destination for the day) since we didn’t need to get to Lukla until Thursday (a friend of Eunice was flying into Lukla and they were going to go trekking past Namche to Gokyo and maybe even Everest Base Camp). So we stopped in Kari Khola around 2:00 and I collapsed again.
Day 3: Maybe it was just because I had been sick the first two days, but our third day seemed like a breeze, even though it was by far the hardest day we’d done so far. We climbed up to Bupsa and kept going up to Khari La at around 3000m and then down a little to Puiyon, where we stopped for lunch (at this little place called the “Apple Pie Lodge” where the food was wonderful) and kept going up a really steep rock ridge and then down down down to Surke, where we arrived around 4:00. At the place we stayed I took my first shower of the trip, with a bucket.
Day 4: The sickness returns. It was a two-hour, really steep hike up to Lukla, which felt endless because I felt pretty sick again. Eunice’s friend’s flight ended up being cancelled so we decided to stay in Lukla for the night, even though we’d only traveled two hours that day. Lukla is the last airport on the way to Namche and Everest so a lot of trekkers choose to fly into Lukla instead of doing the seven day walk from Jiri, the last bus stop from Kathmandu. So, Lukla is just a series of overpriced lodges and restaurants and tea-shops and touristy places. We turned a corner on the main strip and paused for a moment, did a double take, and attempted to figure out what we had seen: a Starbucks. We’re pretty sure it was a knockoff (even though it was really really nice on the inside), but it was still pretty scary to find a Starbucks this far into the mountains (remember that we’re about a weeks walk from a paved road…).
Day 5: Natalie and I kept going, Eunice and Pharky stayed in Lukla to wait for Annie, Eunice’s friend flying in, and Shah stayed to do business things. We made it to Monjo by the end of the day. We did our best to try to find a hot-springs that we’d found on a map that supposedly existed between Benkar and Monjo (we both really wanted to say we’d been to a hot springs in Nepal, just like that monkey in “Baraka”….), but everyone we asked said it didn’t exist.
Day 6: After about an hour leisurely hike from Monjo and a brutal two hour hike straight up, we finally made it to Namche. We stopped at a really sketchy restaurant where the tea was really cheap and then walked around trying to find the cheapest lodge, since we were planning on being there two nights. We ended up staying at the illustrious “Buddha Lodge and Restaurant” which were very pleased to discover had a tv with one English channel: Aljazeera News. I had never watched Aljazeera before, I’m not even sure if you can find it in the States. But it’s basically the antithesis of Fox News, equally biased reporting except anti-US, anti-Iraq War, anti-Israel, pro-the underdog. I hadn’t really seen or read any foreign news since arriving in Nepal so I spent many hours in front of the tv. There was a ton of coverage related to all the protests surrounding the recent Iranian elections.
Day 7: We were planning on hiking up to “the Everest Hotel,” about an hour up from Namche where apparently you can get a pretty amazing view of Everest and the Himalayas. But, we woke up to find Namche drenched in really thick fog. There would have been no way we would have seen anything from the look-out, so we just hung out at the Buddha Lodge with Eunice and Annie who had made it up from Lukla, ate a lot, and watched more Aljazeera News. I was a little bummed that we’d come all that way and not seen Everest, but I couldn’t really complain since the entire way up had been gorgeous.
Day 8: We hike back to Lukla.
Day 9: We make it to Puiyan and stay at a really sketchy lodge. We wake up in the night to the sounds of mice, but we’re too tired to really care.
Day 10: Back to Kari Khola.
Day 11: We left a little after 6:30 and planned to make it to Ringmo, which is just over this huge mountain we knew would probably take four or five hours of crazy uphill to cross, plus a couple hours just to get to the base. We stopped half way up, played a couple games of Estimation (the card game that Natalie and I take very seriously), ate big plates of fried rice, and kept going. When we got to Ringmo around 3:30, most of the lodges were closed because there aren’t many travelers in the monsoon-season, and the ones that were open were kind of expensive. So, we decided to try to make it all the way back to Nayabazaar (we were told in Ringmo that Phaplu was four hours away). We made it to Shah’s restaurant in three hours (which is probably pretty impressive even by Nepali standards…) and collapsed. After a big plate of chow mein and two big cups of cardamom tea, we made it back to Nayabazaar around 8:30. We’d probably hiked around 10 hours that day.
And now I’m back in Nayabazaar and have today to rest. Tomorrow, I get back to work. Natalie leaves Sunday to fly back to Kathmandu and, assuming no other volunteers show up by surprise, I’ll be here alone for the next six or seven weeks.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Friday, June 12, 2009
On Monday, I hiked up to "Mt. Everest Secondary School" and taught my first 8th grade math class. When I walked in, the 25 or so students all stood up and shouted "GOOD MORNING TO YOU SIR," very slowly and very creepily. When class was over, I waited a second for them to leave but nobody moved. And when I started walking towards the door, they all stood up and shouted "THANK YOU FOR TEACHING US SIR" equally creepily. But besides awkward entrances and exits, classes are going really well. I teach the 8th grade class, break for lunch and then teach the 7th grade class. From what I've observed so far at the school, and from what I've been told by Natalie, most of the teachers don't really teach, they just kind of have the students repeat stuff from their books. I don't know if other math classes are like that, but the English classes definitely are. So, the 7th and 8th graders seem pretty pumped when I get volunteers to come up and answer problems on the board.
I've also sorta started teaching English at Chialsa Monastery, a little over an hour's hike from Nayabazaar. Natalie has been teaching this one monk for the last couple weeks, and seeing that there's now two of us, he's having me teach a couple of the younger monks (I don't know how old they are, probably 15-20). So, I just sit around with them for like 30 minutes and we talk.
So, my daily schedule looks something like this: I wake up, read a little (Natalie has lent me this book which is apparently the "yoga bible," so I've been doing yoga in the mornings too. Don't laugh), eat daalbhat, hike an hour to the monastery, teach some monks, hike back down, teach 8th grade math, drink some tea, teach 7th grade math and then have the rest of the day to do whatever.
But, even though everything has just started, I'm not going to be around for the next week or so. Natalie and a friend of hers from Canada and I are going to trek to Luklu and Namche in the North. Luklu is the furthest destination you can fly to before reaching Everest Base Camp (which is still probably a two weeks walk away) and apparently it's a pretty cool place. And supposedly there's a lookout near Namche where, if it's a clear day, you get a pretty spectacular view of the Himalayas. It's probably going to take us 3 days walking to get to Namche and 3 days back, assuming it doesn't rain too much (monsoon season has started even though there hasn't been all that much rain lately).
I've also sorta started teaching English at Chialsa Monastery, a little over an hour's hike from Nayabazaar. Natalie has been teaching this one monk for the last couple weeks, and seeing that there's now two of us, he's having me teach a couple of the younger monks (I don't know how old they are, probably 15-20). So, I just sit around with them for like 30 minutes and we talk.
So, my daily schedule looks something like this: I wake up, read a little (Natalie has lent me this book which is apparently the "yoga bible," so I've been doing yoga in the mornings too. Don't laugh), eat daalbhat, hike an hour to the monastery, teach some monks, hike back down, teach 8th grade math, drink some tea, teach 7th grade math and then have the rest of the day to do whatever.
But, even though everything has just started, I'm not going to be around for the next week or so. Natalie and a friend of hers from Canada and I are going to trek to Luklu and Namche in the North. Luklu is the furthest destination you can fly to before reaching Everest Base Camp (which is still probably a two weeks walk away) and apparently it's a pretty cool place. And supposedly there's a lookout near Namche where, if it's a clear day, you get a pretty spectacular view of the Himalayas. It's probably going to take us 3 days walking to get to Namche and 3 days back, assuming it doesn't rain too much (monsoon season has started even though there hasn't been all that much rain lately).
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Nayabazaar, Solukhumbu
On Thursday morning, I finally made it out of Kathmandu in a little propeller plane headed northeast towards Phaplu. I had never ridden in a propeller plane before, so it was pretty sweet. We flew up to 10,000 ft and didn't come back down. The landscape rose up to meet us. After 45 minutes in the air, the plane headed straight towards a mountain, did a 180 and landed on a really short strip on a mountainside. The guy next to me gave a thumbs up and I gathered that landings weren't usually that smooth. I was told later that a plane crashes on this strip every three years or so, which I was glad I hadn't know beforehand.
Tej had given me some basic directions of where to go once I got there but luckily I met Natalie, the other VSN volunteer working in the area, on the way and she took me to the house I'll be staying at while I'm here (which turns out is where Tej's mom, sister, two nieces and nephew-in-law (?) live). She then took me around to the different places she's been working at. She gives English lessons to a monk that lives about an hours hike away, but also helps out at a nearby monastery and teaches English to 2nd, 3rd and 7th graders the local "Mt. Everest" school.
On Friday, which is the final day of a six-day school week, classes at the school had been cancelled for a girl's volleyball tournament (Volleyball is huge here. Everywhere I go I see people dirt courts and people playing. Even the monks play.) but I got to meet some people around the school and see a little more of the area.
On Saturday, we hiked up past the monastery Natalie works at (stopping briefly because of the rain and eating bananas and green mango we'd bought at the market that morning) and walked around a Tibetan "refugee camp" (people have been living there for over fifty years so I'm not sure what to call it). Everyone spoke Tibetan which made communication really difficult, not that my Nepali is exactly stellar, but we managed to inquire about a "Tibetan cave" we'd heard about. We never actually found "the cave" even though we hiked another couple hours up into the mountains, but it was still a pretty amazing hike. The clouds had disappeared after the rain earlier and we could see for miles, even glimpsing the Himalayas at one point, but now the clouds swept over us making everything really creepy and mysterious. We managed to find our way back to Nayabazaar, where we're staying, just before nightfall and were served huge heaping plates of daalbhat, which I eat two meals a day (basically rice, veggies, lentils, sometimes meat all mixed together).
Today I went to the school and watched Natalie (try to) teach a class of 2nd graders. Since teachers here beat kids with sticks whenever they act up, and the kids know Natalie doesn't, they go completely crazy. They were screaming, throwing stuff, spitting, wiping their snotty noses all over the place. It was painful to watch. All the English classes at the school consist of repetition and memorization of lessons from a textbook, so there's really no focus on comprehension. Most of the teachers themselves have pretty horrible English and sometimes they just have the class read aloud in unison from the book instead of actually giving a lesson. So, after hearing about how hard it was to teach English and sitting in on the 2nd grade classroom from hell, I wasn't that excited about teaching English. But, luckily, I found a way out: Math! I talked to the main math teacher (I was going to talk to the principal but he's away with typhoid at the moment) and he said he would love for me to help out. Right now he has a class every single period so he was pretty excited to dump a couple on me. So, starting tomorrow, I will be teaching 7th and 8th grade math. We'll see how that goes.
I've taken a bunch of really epic photos, and for some reason the internet is pretty fast today, but my camera has just died. Sorry.
Tej had given me some basic directions of where to go once I got there but luckily I met Natalie, the other VSN volunteer working in the area, on the way and she took me to the house I'll be staying at while I'm here (which turns out is where Tej's mom, sister, two nieces and nephew-in-law (?) live). She then took me around to the different places she's been working at. She gives English lessons to a monk that lives about an hours hike away, but also helps out at a nearby monastery and teaches English to 2nd, 3rd and 7th graders the local "Mt. Everest" school.
On Friday, which is the final day of a six-day school week, classes at the school had been cancelled for a girl's volleyball tournament (Volleyball is huge here. Everywhere I go I see people dirt courts and people playing. Even the monks play.) but I got to meet some people around the school and see a little more of the area.
On Saturday, we hiked up past the monastery Natalie works at (stopping briefly because of the rain and eating bananas and green mango we'd bought at the market that morning) and walked around a Tibetan "refugee camp" (people have been living there for over fifty years so I'm not sure what to call it). Everyone spoke Tibetan which made communication really difficult, not that my Nepali is exactly stellar, but we managed to inquire about a "Tibetan cave" we'd heard about. We never actually found "the cave" even though we hiked another couple hours up into the mountains, but it was still a pretty amazing hike. The clouds had disappeared after the rain earlier and we could see for miles, even glimpsing the Himalayas at one point, but now the clouds swept over us making everything really creepy and mysterious. We managed to find our way back to Nayabazaar, where we're staying, just before nightfall and were served huge heaping plates of daalbhat, which I eat two meals a day (basically rice, veggies, lentils, sometimes meat all mixed together).
Today I went to the school and watched Natalie (try to) teach a class of 2nd graders. Since teachers here beat kids with sticks whenever they act up, and the kids know Natalie doesn't, they go completely crazy. They were screaming, throwing stuff, spitting, wiping their snotty noses all over the place. It was painful to watch. All the English classes at the school consist of repetition and memorization of lessons from a textbook, so there's really no focus on comprehension. Most of the teachers themselves have pretty horrible English and sometimes they just have the class read aloud in unison from the book instead of actually giving a lesson. So, after hearing about how hard it was to teach English and sitting in on the 2nd grade classroom from hell, I wasn't that excited about teaching English. But, luckily, I found a way out: Math! I talked to the main math teacher (I was going to talk to the principal but he's away with typhoid at the moment) and he said he would love for me to help out. Right now he has a class every single period so he was pretty excited to dump a couple on me. So, starting tomorrow, I will be teaching 7th and 8th grade math. We'll see how that goes.
I've taken a bunch of really epic photos, and for some reason the internet is pretty fast today, but my camera has just died. Sorry.
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