Swayambhu Temple and the White Monastry

This past Saturday morning a colleague invited me to drive to two different sights around Kathmandu. He and his daughter picked me up around 8:30am and we went straight to Swayambhunath to beat the crowds. The stupa is located on top of a hill and people climb over 360 stairs to the top (unless they have a car that is...).

Swayambhunath is also sometimes referred to as Monkey Temple, for obvious reasons...

We walked around the stupa in a clockwise circle once before leaving and we looked at all the smaller ancient stupas located there as well.

Next we headed to the White Monastry, which was located high on a hill past Swayambhu. This Buddhist monastry mostly has female Buddhist nuns living on the grounds and it is only open to visitors on Saturdays. I really recommend taking a car if you go, because it is an extremely steep road up a very high hill to get there! 

Inside the building in the above photo, the women were gathered to do their morning prayers. Unfortunately, I was not allowed to take photos inside, but I could enter and watch their prayers - it was one of the most fascinating things I've seen. Before even taking off my shoes and entering the building, I could hear the sound of drumming. Inside, the women were sitting in rows, maybe 12 rows of 10 women each, with the rows split so they faced the center of the room. All the women wore dark maroon robes, had shaved heads and they sang in unison, while other women sitting at the front played drums and bells.

I've visited one other monsastry (Kopan) but I arrived later in the day, missing the morning prayers, so this was a complete surprise to me on Saturday. I would never have known to come here unless I'd been invited to go for a drive, but I would recommend a visit to others.

Lord Shiva and Nepali sweets

This past weekend I went to a town called Sanga, which has the world's tallest Lord Shiva statue at 143 feet. A few friends and I went to check it out and had a relaxing day by picnicking nearby. There actually wasn't very much to do there (unless you visit the 'diet center' or get a massage at the spa near the statue).

As we walked back down through the small town, I noticed some stores selling Nepali sweets called Titaura (a bit like jelly candy) that I hadn't tried before and decided to give them a taste. I see them packaged in stores around Kathmandu, but here the shops were making the sweets by themselves.

I found one group of women who were making a large quantiy of these sweets, by drying out the fruit in the sun and reshaping it by hand.

Almost every surface of their property were covered with trays of these sweets.

They are made from a fruit called 'lapsi', which I had also never eaten before, and the titaura can come naturally sweet or with spicy flavoring. I'd recommended the sweet lapsi titaura if you ever need a sugar kick! Between me and my three friends, the titaura we purchased was eaten really quickly...the only one we didn't eat was the one smothered in sticky chilli sauce.

Bandipur

Bandipur is a small hilltop town that has beautifully preserved it's culture and, more recently, the town has begun to encourage tourism. There are no vehicles of any kind in the main town (essentially one street) and the architecture style makes you feel like you've dropped back in time.

Leaving Pokhara, we took a bus to the town Dumre, where we then hired a jeep to drive us up to Bandipur.

After dropping off our bags at a hotel, we decided to go for a hike to a nearby town called Ramkot. This actually turned out to be one of my highlights of the whole trip, so I'd recommend it to others! Ramkot is very small and there are no shops to buy anything, etc, so we packed a lunch and water and started the 1 1/2 hour walk to the town...seeing a few local women working or herding buffalo and plenty of mountains views along the route.

There was a Buffalo sacrifice happening in Ramkot when we first arrived and many people were out watching and chatting with each other. I just strolled around (honestly, I didn't want to look at the dead buffalo for very long) and observed the small town with traditional thatched round houses, many children playing, men sitting together chatting, flowers, etc, and the mountains were a backdrop to everything.

The walk to and from Ramkot, plus time strolling the village, took us about four hours. Next we walked around the main street of Bandipur and took a rest at a local cafe.

The buildings had the traditional wooden windows and the street felt so peaceful without any motorcycles or cars. We also had some nice dhal baat at a restaurant in the main street and enjoyed people watching.

Our hotel was maybe a 5 minute walk outside of main Bandipur and you have to walk through a few local huts to get there. It was actually fun staying away from other tourists and I had a great sunset view of mountains from my room window.

The next morning we woke up very early again to watch the sun rise. The morning was pretty cloudy and we couldn't see the mountains very clearly, but the landscape looked so beautiful and mysterious, with a sea of clouds below us.

Pokhara cont'd: Flying time!

Every day I spent in Pokhara became better and better: the sky seemed a bit clearer each day and we had even clearer views of the white snowy Himalayan peaks from Pokhara's lake, Phewa Tal.

Monday (the following day after seeing the sunrise in Sarangkot) I decided to give paragliding a try.

I scheduled tandem paragliding with a group called Sunrise Tours, located in Lakeside, and they drove my group of eight people up to Sarangkot, from where we would take off. Once at the top we were partnered with a guide, who in a few seconds explained how we had to run forward down a short slope and (hopefully) have the wind pick us up as we moved forward. Surprisingly it wasn't as scary as I expected - my take off went as planned and I was flying!!

The views from the air were spectacular and I stared out in amazement for the majority of my 30 minute flight. I was also surprised by how powerful the wind felt and couldn't believe that it was the only thing keeping me in the air as I slowly circled my way down.

While it was amazing to be flying through the air, I must admit that I was really happy once back on land. Something about the way we moved in the wind and spun in circles made me quite nauseous.  Instead of taking the jeep from our landing place back to the town, a few of my friends and I chose to walk back and just enjoy being on the ground. We strolled slowly along the lake and shared stories of our flights.

The rest of our day was very relaxed. We simply enjoyed the good weather and sitting lakeside.

Next up: our trip to the city of Bandipur!

Pokhara trip

This past week has been a big holiday in Nepal, called Dashain, and many Nepalis travel back to their family homes and villages. Kathmandu becomes extremely quiet, so two friends and I decided to travel to Pokhara and Bandipur to take a break. We returned to Kathmandu yesterday to discover a ghost town - empty streets with few vehicles and all the shops closed!

We started our five day trip this past Friday, October 19th. Since the minibuses can get so crowded over Dashain, we took a 'tourist bus' which cost 600 NRs (7 USD) and made two stops along the way for food breaks.

Saturday morning we visited Devi Falls, which is where a stream begins to go underground through a canyon. The sound of the water was pretty loud and the air around the falls was misty and humid.

From here, we walked up to the World Peace Pagoda by taking the two hour 'scenic route' described in Lonely Planet. I would recommend it as an interesting route and, as we later discovered while leaving the Peace Pagoda, this seems easier to walk this way than to climb the steep stairs from the Lake entrance that Lonely Planet describes as a short route. That route is very steep and took us at least 30 minutes to climb down. The World Peace Pagoda is located high on a hill with a beautiful view above the lake, Phewa Tal.

After catching a relaxing lunch at the top to soak in the view, we took the direct route down through a forested path to the lake, where we took a boat across the lake to the main town. I was so happy to be on the water!

The rest of the afternoon we relaxed at a restaurant right on the water and watched other boaters. This day was somewhat cloudy, but we decided that the next morning we would take a chance on the weather and go to Sarankot to watch the sunrise and try to see mountains.

So we woke up early Sunday and left our hotel by 4:45am by taxi to Sarankot. When the taxi dropped us off, we walked about 40 minutes up a steep path to a viewing point to look for the mountains as the sun rose. We were in luck and I was so excited to see the Annapurna Himalaya range in clear sight.

The clouds covered the valley below us and it looked as if we were in a plane looking down.

The view made me so happy and I took a ridiculous number of photos. The longer we stood at our lookout place, it seemed to get colder and windier, so that my fingers were completely freezing. But we stayed until the sun was completely up.

When we finally left the mountain view to walk back down to meet our taxi, we realized how many little stores and houses there were along the path, which we just couldn't see on our dark walk at dawn. There were some pretty blankets that a women had hand woven in a shop and I couldn't resist buying one to take home.  The store in the photo below is where I bought my Nepali blanket - you can see the mountain range in the background.

It was such an exhilarating morning and I felt like we'd accomplished so much by 8:30am, since we had already been active for four hours!

This post is getting a bit to long, so I am going to force myself to stop adding more here and save the rest of my Pokhara experience for my next post. Paragliding photos coming up next...

Road widening project

This summer the Nepali government managed to push forward a new project to widen the roads throughout Kathmandu. There is a lot of traffic in the city and it probably is good that they are doing something to plan for it, but the road construction is causing a bit of a mess. This project is also a serious challenge because it means that stores and homes along the roads need to be partially destroyed in order to widen the roads.

Everywhere throughout the city (not section by section, as one might imagine), teams of workers have been tearing down walls or the facades of buildings - sometimes even leaving part of a room half exposed after taking down a front wall.

The photo above shows a typical street in my area. Both sides of the street are being worked on simultaneously and brick walls are being taken down and replaced with a new wall just a few feet behind it. It causes a lot of traffic issues and so far it's taking ages to get the rubble removed! The property owners in this area are lucky that it is only their walls that need to be moved and not the actually building/house structure.

Hattiban

This past Saturday I got roped into going on a very spontaneous trip to Hattiban. My friends wanted to go there to find a good natural rock climbing wall and I mainly went for the bit of hiking and picnicking...Once I learned that my friends were also bringing a hammock and guitar, how could I resist the day out??

Since this weekend I've learned that we should have also sought out the Hattiban Resort, which is well known for it's views of Kathmandu valley. Instead we just did a roughly 30-40 minute hike up to the climbing rocks and then found a place to relax.

The whole day turned out to be a lot of fun and it was great to have some outdoors time. The only down-side was that there were a lot of leeches! They were very quick to jump onto our feet or legs in search of blood. One of my friends had a lot of leeches crawl into her sneakers, which was pretty creepy, to say the least.

Hattiban is 20 km from Kathmandu and situated on a hill looking over the valley. We were able to take a taxi out there for 800 NRs. On our way home we were a little late in walking back down and public transit had already stopped. But we found two Buddhist monks that were willing to drive us back to Kathmandu in the back of their truck. We were some very lucky hitchhikers!