TracyFood

Nepal picture mania, part 2 4 December 2007 6:40 am

Posted by Tracy in : Kathmandu, agriculture, eating, nepal, pictures, travel , trackback

So last time I got a little distracted by the deliciousness of momos thanks to a random fast food place in Kathmandu, but today’s pictures are pretty straight-up travelogue. First, a few notes about flying in Nepal: it’s all about patience. A few days of uncooperative weather can wreak serious havoc, and we were pretty lucky in that regard — only a few hours worth of flights had been cancelled and rescheduled to October 14. Still, this was enough to overload pretty much the entire domestic terminal at Kathmandu airport: ticket counters, security, and above all the seating area where we waited our turn to check in. Behold the awesomeness of Kathmandu airport security theater:

Like I said on my Flickr caption of that picture, posted that same day (when we’d finally gotten checked in and I scored a few more precious minutes of internet in the waiting area for checked passengers only, and barely uploaded the above image), I’m pretty sure the metal detector wasn’t on, because I walked through it wearing my daypack and got nary a blip. I had my doubts about the x-ray machine too, but whatever. What’s really important about the above picture, besides the hugeness of that small fraction of our pile of gear, is that I got a picture of that lady in the beautiful traditional Sherpa dress, on the left. That’s Dawayandu Sherpa, wife of our sirdar (head sherpa), Nawang, and she is one hundred percent superhero. We got wrangled through the jungle of delayed and rescheduled flights with a minimum of stress (though unfortunately with pretty close to a maximum of boredom and sitting around on our duffels for two or more hours before check-in — also, it was hot and we got pretty hungry, whine, whine) because Dawayandu’s brother (or was it cousin?) works at Yeti Airlines. Yay for inside connections! And also, yay for all our gear:

Now is as good a time as any to explain that our gear was in duffel bags because we had hired porters to carry it: about a dozen guys in all, just carrying stuff. (Later on I’ll post pictures of how these guys carried bags: lashed together into bundles of three or four, depending on what other gear got involved.) The weight limit on our duffel bags was 20 kilograms (44 pounds) for airline reasons; different trekking companies have different policies about the maximum loads porters are allowed to carry, but for other portering jobs in Nepal the standard is to pay by weight — more carried equals more earned. I’m told our guys were well-paid by Nepali standards; I hope it’s true. It certainly looked like they were earning it, but that’s getting ahead of myself. Besides the twelve porters, we had four sherpas — guides, whose job it was to walk with us and answer questions, translate when necessary, and generally keep us from falling off the trail. It turns out Sherpa is an ethnic group and sherpa (which I’ll write with a small s, just so I can keep them straight) is a job description, and the two don’t always overlap; not all of our sherpas were Sherpa, but as always, awesomeness transcends ethnicity. And then there were the cooks.

We had a cooking staff of six guys whose job it was not just to feed us, but to feed us astoundingly well, while simultaneously protecting us from our weak Western not-adapted-to-Nepali-microfauna digestive tracts. They did not just wash our dishes before filling them with deliciousness, they poured boiling water on them for a good long time to make sure they were sterilized. The process involved lots of holding hot things with tongs and was sort of terrifying to watch. But I didn’t learn that until later, well after we’d finally gotten checked in and waited in the much less crowded ticketed passenger area, site of my last email check for — gasp! — days and flown to Rumjatar in our little puddle-jumper plane whose windows were a little too worn to yield any good pictures, even though I’d scored a coveted left-hand seat… right behind the enormous pile of cargo.

Plane geeks, it was a Twin Otter, not that I know much about what that means. Everybody (else): there were maybe fourteen or sixteen seats, and the flight attendant brought around a basket with chewy candies and cotton for anybody who hadn’t brought some other kind of earplugs. It was a pretty short flight, maybe half an hour from takeoff to landing:

That’s me in the left-middle of the picture, under the very end of the tail of the plane. The fellow in the blue shirt and beret is asking me to tell Jessie (who took this picture) to stop with the camera already. Apparently Nepal has a long history of being secretive about its infrastructure (they used to carry foreign engineers into the backcountry, blindfolded, so they could work on bridges without ever learning their location) and old habits die hard. Anyway. Our crew (sherpas, porters, and cooks) met us at the airport, and led us down the road between two millet fields to the village, into a side room next door to a little shop, where they had set a table for us, under a poster that Dad and I both thought was the funniest thing we’d seen all day:

Holland! The Kinderdijk, on a wall in a random village in Nepal! I have no idea what it was doing there, but it sure made me feel welcome. And so did lunch:

That’s some kind of squash (steamed), French toast, canned tuna, and a little bit of coleslaw, with a clear and sour dressing (not at all mayonnaise). Lessons learned: like Hobbes the tiger, I am a sucker for a tuna sandwich. And a tuna sandwich on French toast? Boo-yah. The meal began with lemon squash (think hot Tang, only lemon flavored, a clever way to raise our blood sugar and get us rehydrated with safe water while persuading us to drink something still hot from being boiled for our safety) and ended with tea and Asian pears for dessert, the latter carefully peeled for our sensitive Western stomachs.

Thus refreshed and rejuvenated, we set out to hike… a few hundred meters up the road to a school, in whose yard we would be camping. (Schools were our favorite places to camp early in the trip, when lodges were still fairly few and far between. Their level playing fields were good places for the sherpas to pitch everybody’s tents, we’d make a donation, and everybody won, especially since the Dasani holiday was on and nobody was using their schoolyards anyway.) The sherpas had arranged to camp in Rumjatar on account of our flight being so very delayed — the original plan for that Sunday and the following day was to hike towards Chitre by way of Okhaldunga, where there’s a local bazaar, but since our flight was so delayed and no one knew when we’d be arriving in Rumjatar, they decided to play it safe and camp very nearby. We could easily make up for the later start by cutting the little detour past Okhaldunga, which was what we did. But meanwhile, we had a few hours to kill while our crew readied what looked to me like luxury suites at the Rumjatar Hilton, so we went for a little walk:

We walked along the road out of the village, past the houses and one or two more little shops on the left, and trees and bamboo on the right, beyond which we could see a lovely little valley.

I cannot stress enough how lovely it is in these Himalayan foothills. They don’t make picture postcards of this scenery:

or I would have sent lots of them. (By the way, readers, it’s now one month to the day since I sent my last batch of postcards from Kathmandu, including one that still hasn’t reached me here in Eugene, so let me know when your cards arrive because I’m super-curious!) I hadn’t really considered that Nepal, for all its famous mountains and accompanying high altitudes, is a country in the tropics, but Rumjatar might actually be a bit lower than Kathmandu, which as I’ve previously mentioned, was lush enough for monkeys. So sure, we saw millet growing around Rumjatar:

but also rice:

I really like the above picture of my aunt Beth, by the way, and you can bet that I was feeling the love when I took it, because I still can hardly believe I’m lucky enough to know someone awesome enough to invite my family on this kind of adventure. But I digress. After these rice fields, we turned back towards town, where we said hello to the local math homework:

megafauna:

and signs that the corn harvest, at least, was in progress:

As always, clicking through to the Flickr page will get you closer looks at any of these pictures and more. When we got back to camp, we were the center of all kinds of attention, mostly if not entirely from the local young boy sort. (Where were the girls, I wondered into my paper journal, and why did the boys seem so much more obnoxious for being a single sex mass of stupid staring?) I did my best to be boring, but even lying in my tent reading made me a fascinating freak show (Mike wisely pointed out that most of our onlookers probably didn’t read recreationally, even if they were literate enough to do so). Eventually our sherpas started taking turns shooing the kids away from our tents, bless them a thousand times. And then we had dinner. As I wrote in my paper journal,

Holy crap! There’s a whole eating tent set up, complete with tables, chairs, tablecloth, place settings, and candlelight. I shit you not. Then there’s food, several courses:

tomato egg drop soup with the tasty crisp bread whose name I’ve forgotten [papadums maybe?]

rice and dal (of course)

veggie curry (mostly tomato + cauliflower)

veggie momos with tomato sauce!

hot tea and hot cocoa! with hot milk

canned pears for dessert

It was a glorious meal, one that gave us an even better introduction to our staff’s complete and utter amazingness. We made the acquaintance of the most beautiful men in Nepal: Lakshman, whom I have not mentioned yet, and Mingma, whose praises I will sing until the end of time for the bed tea alone. But I’ll have more to say about both of those extremely fine fellows, and the rest of their kitchen crew colleagues, in a later post.