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!