Arriving in Nepal - Kathmandu

A long but uneventful flight with a stop in the fiery desert of Qatar (34 degrees at 7am) brought us safely to Kathmandu. Alastair could immediately pick out of the crowd one of the widest grins known to mankind – Sandeep come to pick us up from the airport. Driving out through Katmandu is a bit overwhelming; there are cars, bikes and trucks whizzing by on all sides and a chocking dust in the air, but after half an hour we’re on the altogether more pleasant road leading to the hilltop temple of Changu Narayan.

Changu is where Alastair spent 11 weeks in 2008, so it’s strange, but lovely to be back. The village is made of reddish brick and mud houses, either thatched or with tin roofs, and the main street, cobbled with brown stones, winds it’s way up the hill towards the temple.

As we climb, Alastair greets faces he recognizes, especially Kamal; the owner a shop selling traditional paintings. We agree to have tea later and continue to the guest house which is beautifully situated right next door to the world heritage site temple. Here we are greeted by the owner, Sarita, a beautiful lady in her 40’s wrapped in a red sari and Anish, her son. It’s especially wonderful to see Anamika (12) and Isha (9), two little girls from poor families in the south of Nepal, who have been living with the family and getting a good education in the nearby town of Baktapur. We all go for a walk round the temple for old times’ sake and admire the view of the luscious green paddies of the Kathmandu valley. It’s extremely humid and Alastair exhausts himself racing Isha up the steps back to the temple.

 

The following day is for recovering and visiting. We walk down the hill to have tea with Kamal, the painter. He specialises in a particular Nepali art of from the Buddhist tradition; the thanka. These are complex and finely detailed designs, often in bright colours and edged with gold paint, which commonly represent scenes from the life of the Buddha, the cycle of reincarnation or sometimes even the ineffable mysteries of the universe with a never ending temple or a large circle of swirling blue. Tea this time means ‘milk tea’ made of thick buffalo milk, a little tea and a lot of sugar. We’ve brought Kamal a small present from Europe, but this disappears into his draw, unopened and without a word or thanks – funny how cultures differ in these things.

Later that afternoon Sarita’s daughter, Anisha arrives back from college and we spend a couple of hours catching up. She had the misfortune to be in a bus accident 9 months ago which broke her jaw and cut her face up badly, but the Kathmandu surgeons did and incredible job and it’s impossible to tell. After a game or two of UNO when the girls come home from school, we set off for dinner at Sandeep’s house. His mother (gnarled from years working in the fields) looks highly suspicious at the sweet thing’s we’ve brought, but is soon rapturously munching. Before dinner they perform a Pooja to celebrate Sandeep’s recovery from a motorcycle accident and one of his nephew’s success in his college application. The ceremony starts with the preparation of the red paste and the tearing up of flowers before everyone has a Pooja mark plastered to their forehead and a petal placed behind their ear. They’re very matter-of-fact about the whole process, pausing to make a joke or have a belch whenever they feel like it. Next everyone tucks into curried eggs and a sort of lentil dumpling.  Dinner itself is Daal Bhatt (daal, rice and curried vegetables). We eat quickly and make our excuses – it’s an early start tomorrow.

The taxi takes us to Kathmandu at 5 am to meet our bus which belongs to the luxury coach firm: Swiss travel. For about four pounds we get a full day’s journey, a seat each, and a relatively cautious driver. The journey is sticky and bumpy, but we pass through some interesting landscapes mostly traveling along the banks of tumultuous rivers made brown with Himalayan sediment. On arrival in Pokhara we walk 200 yards to the Social Public School and make the acquaintance of one Min Gurung, the principle. He is rather talkative and excited and gives us a tour of the school. Tin-roofed, but well equipped (they have whiteboards!) classrooms line a central dirt courtyard and accommodate the 700 students aged 4 to 16. There are also two hostels for about 40 boarding students. We have dinner and stay the night at the principle’s house, but suffer somewhat from a smell of petrol emanating from a locked metal cabinet in the corner.

The next day we arrange to move to a room at the top of the school hostel so as to avoid the smell. Are new accommodation is literally on the roof, so we step out of the door onto our own spacious balcony, shared only we the lady and her son in the next room. Today is officially a school holiday, but class 7 is being taken to the local rice planting festival, so we tag along too. The bus ride is cacophonous, the boys singing, screaming, shouting and egging on the driver to attempt every more extreme overtaking maneuvers, sending motorbikes scattering into the ditch for shelter. By the end of the journey the driver seems to have entered some heightened, trance like state, eyes transfixed greedily on impossibly small spaces between advancing vehicles and the truck in front, his left hand working the horn as through his life depended on it.

On arrival, we find hoards of people surrounding an area of newly ploughed up paddy fields with a man making announcements using a megaphone. One large muddy field is dedicated to buffalo team racing. Men test their balance to the limit, standing on a plough pulled by a pair of stampeding buffalo which they egg on and attempt to steer with whacks of a rubber tube. A neighboring field is reserved for mud fights, and a number of tourists are having the time of their lives, caked head to toe in sticky goo. We decide to take the plunge, not here, but in the neighboring fields where women are planting out the second rice crop. Alastair is shown the technique – you take two to three seedlings and push them into the mud about a hands width apart, tessellating in the approved manner. At first his attempts are tut-tutted over but, nearly and hour and a whole field later he eventually earns a ‘that is good!’.

 

Sunday is the first day of the school week, and our first day of teaching. After a welcoming ceremony involving some military maneuvers by the students, speeches and the presentation of scarves and flowers, we are given our timetables for the day: six 45 minutes classes for Alastair and five for Wiebke to improvise on spot… go! With class nine, Alastair addresses the question “can plants do maths?” and with class 10 he copies a TEFL lesson he saw once on a video. The younger classes are much harder to work with and keep entertained, but somehow we both make it trough the day. Monday, we just have four classes each; yet more improvisation. Wiebke has a really good interactive class with year 4 and Alastair has a terrible last period class with year 7 – he can’t get them to shut up and his voice is rapidly disappearing. We’re then told that there will be no teaching the next 8 days due to exams, and none for the subsequent 10 days because of holidays – it might have been nice to know this before we arrived! At least it gives us a chance to acclimate to the sticky monsoon climate and the change in diet.

On our first free day, we take a trip down to touristy, lakeside Pokhara. There are lots of colourful rowing boats and people trying to escape the heat by lazing under a tree or swimming in the take. We wonder slowly around, admire the scenery and then find our way back, managing to get less ripped off on the bus than we did on the way there. This is mostly thanks to Wiebke’s expert haggling – flying in the face of reality, refusing to admit we have more than 30 rupees when she’s holding a 50 rupee note

Unfortunately, the next day Wiebke goes down with a fever so the next few days are spent recovering. When she’s better we take a trip to the international mountain museum, which is a very modern building with exhibitions on the Himalayan people as well as the ascents of the mountains. The visit is capped off by our first taste of buff mo-mo of the trip. These are steamed dumplings filled with buffalo meat and herbs and are absolutely delicious. We walk back along the Seti River which at one point races through a canyon only 2 m wide, but at least 50 m deep. We can hear it charging below in the darkness glimpsed through cracks in the rotten boards of the bridge.

So, now holiday’s starting, but the top class, class 10, are staying because they have their important national exams (the school leaving certificate) this year. We’re planning to give them some theatre based English lessons over the next few days and well as getting on with planning for the lessons to come!