leeches, etc.

megan and cody made is safely from china to kathmandu, and sulava, kaka G, and i collected them from the airport on friday night. it's so great to see a familiar face. megan and i were roommates in college, but shortly after graduation i moved to durango and she moved to china to teach english, so we hadn't seen eachother in over two years! i cried a little... ok, a lot... i was excited!! so, since then, the three of us left the gautam family in kathmandu to get out of their way, and we bussed to a town towards the center of Nepal, called Pokhara, which is about 400m lower than Kathmandu, on a lake called Phewa Tal. tal means lake. there are LOTS of tals out here. it's a big hub for the adventure tourism stuff. lots of the really big remote treks start from here, excepting the Everest Base Camp trek, which leaves from Kathmandu.

The bus ride was RIDICULOUS! it took about 7 hours through the mountains on a dangerously narrow and curvy road. Drivers tempt fate and pass eachother around sharp corners, beeping their horn as a warning to oncoming traffic. Their honking has a sort of language all its own. One honk means, "Hey, man, what's up?" Two honks mean, "I'm coming!" Lots of honks mean, "GET OUT OF MY WAY!" We saw an overturned bus on our way down, luckily on the inside of the road... I'd be a fibber if i said i wasn't a little nervous, but we made it safely to this lovely lakeside town.

we're staying in sulava's uncle's friends hotel. it's a little nicer than we would've chosen for ourselves, but it's nice to have a fan and a western style toilet! we had beautiful weather the day we arrived, so we just explored and got acquainted with the town. day two we visited Devi's Falls, on the other side of the lake and hill to the southeast of the main part of the city. this is a powerful waterfall! i've never seen anything like it. it's small, but the whole river narrows to just a few feet wide, then drops. it goes straight underground for who knows how long, completely disappearing into the earth. apparently the name comes from a swiss visiter, called David, who was too curious about where the fall ended. he leaned to far over the edge and fell in, taking his ladyfriend with him. she must've been pissed!

from devi's falls, you can do a hike through a town and up a ridge to the World Peace Pagoda that sits on a ridge overlooking Pokhara and Phewa Tal. the hike is technically the long way up, but we thought it'd be fun... i'm not sure i would do it again! it was really hard to find the trail head. nobody seemed quite to know what we were talking about. we ended up taking a wrong turn somewhere, found a little village in the woods, and after a good laugh at our misfortune, two boys guided us straight up the mountain to the trail. they were SO CUTE! they must've been around 6 years old. they both were in rubber sandals, and stomped through the wet forest up the mountains without even breaking a sweat. we never would've found it without them. we were WAY off. but once we had the trail, it was pretty easy to follow.

it isn't advised to hike in the woods in nepal during the monsoon. not because of the rain or the mud or the heat. it's because of the leeches. YUCK!!!!!!! about two thirds of the way to the pagoda we stopped at a fork in the trail to discuss which direction to take. i turned to cody and pointed northeast and up the mountain with my right hand... and he made this face... it looked like he was about to tell me my goldfish had just died...

"JoJo, I'm really sorry," he said, walking towards me, shaking his head. "I'm really sorry..."
"Cody, don't joke about that!" megan scolded. she could see the terror in my eyes, but she couldn't see what cody saw.
"I'm not joking. I wouldn't joke about that," cody assured.

I wish he had been joking. I HAD A LEECH IN MY ARMPIT!!!!!! so of course i squealed like a little girl, jumped up and down like somehow that would help. it took cody four or five yanks to finally get it off me, and i bled all down the side of my shirt. (now, two days later, it looks like a really small, dark hicky. blegh.) after we found that first one it was like we couldn't get away from them. there must've been 15 or 20 all over our shoes, trying to get through our shoelace holes. and these things aren't slow either. it's not easy to get them off! the hop around and latch on with considerable determination. poor megan took her shoe of and watched one make his way all the way to the toe of her shoe. she couldn't stop him!

we finally got all of them off our shoes and decided the faster we moved the better, so we hauled ass up the rest of the mountain to the pagoda. a really nice nepali man gave me a bandaid for my bleeding armpit when we reached the top. his name was Hom, and he was born and raised in a home a stone's throw from the Pagoda. He now runs a store and guesthouse up there. before we walked up to the Pagoda, we all stripped our boots and socks off to rid ourselves of the bloodsucking hitch hikers. blegh. cody had gotten one on his ankle through his sock. megan escaped without a bite.

we climbed the stairs to the World Peace Pagoda. it's beautiful, bright white and gold. it was built by japanese monks, and a group of them still live there. they chant every day and play those enormous drums, but we missed it, unfortunately. the view of Phewa Tal, Pokhara, and the mountains beyond was truly unbelievable. it's too cloudy to really see Macchapucchare, the 26,000ft peak beyond Pokhara, but we did see just the very tip peaking through the clouds for a few seconds. that's a big friggin' mountain! Macchapucchare means fishtail. From the right angle with the right weather, you can see that there are actually two peaks, so the mountain looks like a... you guessed it... fishtail! It's the only peak that the Nepali government will not allow people to climb.

there's still plenty to tell about the end of the day and the following day... maybe you're tired of reading... i'm kinda tired of typing. i'll finish up in my next post! please email me and tell me what's going on or if you're reading, or if there's anything you want to know about! miss you all!

music i'm listening to: fleet foxes, pheonix, discovery, regina spektor, deer tick, and jackson browne. thanks bullet rogers!

Would You Adam 'n Eve It?

went to brooklyn. played piano in park with tanya at 4am. got stuck behind mermaid parade at 4pm. amazing :)

went to GB. went to wimbledon. saw roger federer, nikolay davydenko, andy roddick, and venus williams. went to london. saw EVERYTHING! amazing :)

got to kathmandu! i don't really know where to start... i've already done and seen and learned sooooo much. learned my first nepali word: pani. means water. it's really, really hot! sulava's family has been so incredibly generous. their home is lovely and her family is wonderful. the food is AMAZING! last night we went to this friend of the family's hotel/restaurant to eat. there had to have been at least 5 courses. we ate and watched the world cup. can you believe italy lost?!

i officially love "momos" or dumplings. everything is so flavorful here -- and not just the food. there is sooo much to stimulate your senses. i love that i don't understand anything. i love that i can't read anything. i love listening to sulava's family talk to/over each other. just a quick exchange about tea sounds like an intense debate. today we went to thamel, the backpackers' district. i'm glad to not be staying there. it's not unpleasant, it's just not as nice as it is to be with a family -- all the cousins and grandparents and aunts and uncles... i'm trying to learn all the words for everyone. mom's relatives and dad's relatives are called different things, etc., etc., so it's pretty confusing!

Kaji's family came to collect the things I brought for them from durango. they were incredibly sweet, and i'll go spend a day at their home after the wedding.

sulava's aunt took me to a fabric store today to get a kurta outfit made! sulava kinda picked it out for me. it should be ready in 5 days. i'm stoked! and sulava got me a blue sari to wear to the wedding ceremony :) bought a little cloth mask to wear over my mouth and nose because the polution is so bad here. not stoked.

tonight i sat on the second level porch of sulava's father's parent's house and watched the sunset. the "hills" around kathmandu are the size of the biggest mountains in the east. i'll see mountains day after tomorrow! a red and white kite were flying way over the buildings, and sulava explained about the kite flying competition they hold in the city, just like the one described in the book, kite runner. it's so busy during the day, but the evenings are very peaceful.

i already love nepal, and i haven't even left kathmandu yet...

Hasta la VISA.

Be advised, getting an Indian visa is a bit more complicated than they make it seem on the website. Visas are no longer processed in the Indian Embassy. They've contracted a private company to do all the processing, and this company (Travisa India Outsourcing) is awful. I was unable to walk into the Travisa Center in DC to do a same-day visa because I am a Colorado resident. Residents of Colorado may only use the Travisa Center in San Francisco. So, since I'm in DC, I had to do my visa by mail. Your passport is apparently not sufficient identification for an Indian visa... They also require a copy of your birth certificate, a copy of your drivers license with your official address OR a utility bill, two passport photos, reasons for going to India, address in India, the names and birthplaces of your parents, and a list of every country you've travelled to in the past 10 years. (They must've dug up my parents' countless criminal charges when they ran the background checks, and discovered my secret past as an international spy, because, without getting too much into detail, I had a heck of a time getting my visa.) So, I ended up having to push my flight to London back a few days. I can't leave the country HASTA LA VISA comes through!!

A delay in Virginia has not been all bad! While San Francisco held my passport hostage, I got to see my good buddies from past lives; hang with the fam; go to a posh horse show; contract Lyme disease; and figure out how to haul 5 leather jackets, a fuzzy purse, a football jersey, and two Jonas Brother's Waterbottles to Nepal for Kaji's family. Best of all, I packed my backpack for five months of traveling from funky new york city, to classy tennis tournaments in London, to a fancy wedding in Kathmandu, to elephant rides in the jungle, to monsoons in crowded cities, to volunteer in the desert, to yoga in a cloudy forest, to a 3 week trek in the highest mountains in the world!

Tomorrow afternoon I'll finally get back on the road, slightly delayed but still very excited.

Contact

In case of emergency, or incase you want to Google Earth it, or incase I forget something really important, Sulava's Family's address in Nepal:

200 Milap Marg
Bishalnagar, Kathmandu
Nepal