It’s turning out to take a bit longer between each time I post, now that I’m not moving around. This is for several reasons. I already mentioned that I don’t have internet access at home, but I’m now at the Higher Ground café, which is the only café I’ve found that offers free WiFi for the customers. Also I’m a bit more busy, and my activities are a bit more commonplace and thus a little less interesting to write about. 🙂 I’ll relate a little from the past week that has been memorable, though.
Early Saturday morning, I took a bus out to Suriya Binayak, which is the place Milan lives, just south of Bhaktapur. I met up with Milan there, and we walked south into the hills. Milan was telling me how he’d been thinking of buying a plot of land up there, and building a small cottage to go to in weekends, and maybe renting out to tourists. We stopped in little villages on the way, for refreshments in the form of small cups of milk tea and barley or rice beer. The “beer” tastes nothing like western beer, it is a cloudy, milky white, and the taste is slightly reminiscent of lemonade with just a hint of sugar… Milan spoke to the locals, asking them about distances between villages, directions for where we were going as well as other villages in the area. At one point we met a local school teacher, who knew actual distances in kilometers, instead of in the time it would take them to walk… 😉 At one point a group of mountain bikers zipped past us down the hill at break-neck speed, and I made a mental note that I’m going to HAVE to do that before I leave!
As we went on hiking, we came up through a pass, and as we were heading down into the next valley, a small suzuki 4wd stops on the shoulder of the little road we were walking down. As always, Milan makes a little smalltalk, and quickly realizes that the driver is a friend of a friend, and we’re invited up to their cottage just up the hill next to the parked car. It was a gorgeous place, with a marvellous view of the Himalayas from the Lang Tang to Kangchenjunga and if the weather was clearer we would’ve even seen the Everest. The guy had recently finished building it, and was planning to hire a couple of people to run it as a guest house in the tourist season, and then use it as a private cottage in the off season. He and Milan really hit it off, and even discussed possible furnishing options, publicity, and the like, and before we left, after having been treated to a traditional lunch, they’d exchanged phone numbers and planned to meet up again to continue the talk!
The views of Kathmandu Valley had been gorgeous along the way, and we both agreed it’s weird that not more people come out there for walking! You can get out there on a local bus, for the neat sum of 15 Nepali rupees, and it’s completely quiet, the air is fresh, and the atmosphere is the exact opposite of the busy, traffic-clogged streets of Kathmandu! It was an almost religious experience to walk along the forested ridges and up and down hillsides, here dry and warm in the sun, and there moist, lush and green in the shade. After a while we reached another pass, and from there it was all down hill. It fogged up as we descended, and by the time we reached the floor of the valley at Lamatar, it was dark. The goal for the day was Milan’s cousin’s house, but with the horrible cell phone coverage in Nepal, he’d been unable to get through, so we showed up unannounced. Milan told me that over four years ago he’d been acting as stand-in for his cousin’s parents when her marriage to a christian Nepali man was arranged, but he hadn’t had an opportunity to visit her since then, even though it’s not really that far away!
When we’d finally managed to ask our way to the house, it was completely dark, and it turned out the the cousin and her husband weren’t home. Their two children were there, however, with the cousin’s mother in law. We stopped in for a cup of tea, but when we said we’d be taking the bus (about fourty-five minutes) back to Kathmandu, the old lady looked hurt, (I’m not too old to cook, you know!) We were treated to a wonderful baal bhaat, and I played with the children, a two year old boy and a four year old girl.
The next morning we got up at seven, had a cup of tea, and left for Kathmandu. While we were waiting for the bus, a rather wealthy looking couple in a big SUV picked us up, and I was home at eight already, in time to have breakfast and a shower, and prepare a sign-up list for the youth social the following Saturday, which I brought with me to church at eleven. After the service I was invited to lunch at a restaurant by some Norwegians, and then I tagged along to a youth group meeting they have every Sunday afternoon, called “Sparks.” I had dinner with the host and some of the older youths after Sparks, and then headed off back to church, because they were having an evening “contemporary worship service” that Sunday.
Monday and most of Tuesday I was basically locked up at home with a stomach ache, and I don’t think I’ll be going too far today either, at least not to anywhere with no proper toilet… Yesterday I got a phone call from Mikhel, the Dutch buddhist guy I met in Irkutsk, and then spent time with in Mongolia. He’d just arrived in Kathmandu, and I went to meet him. He’s staying with me for a few days, while he’s here. 🙂
Now, you might be wondering about the heading of this post… When we were in Lamatar, and were sitting around having supper, Milan suddenly started laughing so hard he almost fell over. When he got himself together enough to answer my inquiries, he explained that the four year old girl had just asked him if he could make her father contact my parents, and arrange for our marriage! Milan proceeded to patiently explain to her that she would have to be grown up before she could marry anyone, to which the answer was clear: “I’ll make sure I grow up by Wednesday, when Daddy comes back!”
(EDIT: Pictures from my trek in Panchase outside Pokhara are finally up – captions to come later)