We've arrived
Wed 10th Jun 2009 — drew
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We finally made it!
A fairly long journey left us a little brain-dead. The transfer in Delhi was a bit of a palaver; an official from Air India took the travel documents from the passengers on our flight who were booked through to Delhi and then disappeared. It seemed like the staff were playing a game of top trumps with our boarding cars for quite a while, then when they got bored of that they asked us all to follow them across the terminal building and seemed determined to try and lose us along the way. We were left contemplating how many Air India officials it would take to change a light bulb. Eventually, after being passed between more than 6 desks and more than two hours, they sorted everything out with minutes to spare and we were on our way to Nepal.
On the flight from Delhi to Nepal, you see a big bank of clouds formed as air is pushed up over the Himalayas; looking closely, we spotted our first view of the snow-capped mountains peeking through. The descent into the Kathmandu basin is quite spectacular and the land was noticeably greener than over Delhi.
We had pre-booked a guest house which gave us the great advantage of an airport pick-up – so we happily sailed through immigration and out to our waiting lift. The guesthouse owner Raj greeted us with a card bearing our names, and a beaming smile.
We couldn't work out what time our bodies thought it was when we finally got to our room, but we were both shattered. We were able to send an e-mail to family to say we'd arrived safely (Drew had to bite on his tongue and use Internet Explorer 6 on Windows to send this e-mail, which was a joy). We then had what we expect to be our first of many dinners of Nepali curry (quite a mild veggie curry with dhal and rice, very tasty). We were both like zombies by now, and enjoyed an early night.
Our guest house is just outside the main tourist area – Thamel - in Kathmandu; it has a lovely roof terrace overlooking the hills to the north and is not as noisy as the main drag. Refreshed from a good night's sleep, we headed into the Thamel area to have a look around and pick up a few essentials. We had breakfast on the highest roof-top terrace in the area which gave us an even better view of the city than our hotel. Most of the guest houses and hotels have very heath-robinson style solar hot water set ups which seem to be doing well as we have not had a cold shower yet!
In the evening, we met up with Marianne from Rural Assistance Nepal (RAN) who we are going to be working for and found out a few more details (more than the very little to none we had known previously!). For the first 4-5weeks we are going to be heading up to teach in a school in a Sherpa village in the Helambu district, north of Kathmandu. The village is only 5 hours trek from the main road, at around 2500m (about twice as high as Ben Nevis), and can be reached in one day's travel from Kathmandu – very accessible in Nepal terms we are learning.
We're settling in okay – body clocks and stomachs adjusting, and we're looking forward to getting on with some of what we came here to do. We're sure by the time we've done several weeks in a relatively remote (albeit apparently relatively affluent) village, the home comforts available in Kathmandu will be very welcome – but for now, we're feeling ready to get going. At the minute, Kathmandu is very hot, humid and polluted; apparently there has been rain for a few days before we arrived but none since, the monsoon is due to settle in properly towards the end of the month. The streets are crammed with cars, motorbikes and tuk tuks all juggling for space and hooting horns so we are quite liking the thought of being at least 5 hours from the nearest road!
We are leaving Kathmandu this afternoon to head to Boudha nearby for two nights as this is closer to the bus towards Helambu. Boudha is the home to one of the largest Buddhist stupas in the world and has a big Tibetan Buddhist population, so should be an interesting stop. We are meeting Purna, the headmaster of the school in Malemchigaon, at 6am on Friday morning to make sure we make the trip in one day. So this is likely to be it for 4 weeks... we'll catch up with the blog and e-mail when we get back in mid-July.
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