Poking arounding Pokhara

While planning this trip, I was hoping to visit Chitwan which is a national animal reserve in the Terai region. The Terai is about 200 km south of Kathmandu and runs east to west along the border of India. This monsoon season has brought so much rain, that the area flooded in many places. Flooding and the Maoist threat have steered me away a bit to travel without a buddy. Candace and Doug had gone to Chitwan and Pokhara before our Tibet tour. Although Candace enjoyed Chitwan, as she is a huge animal lover, Doug convinced me to go Pokhara with his pictures.

Pokhara is a little bit of a resort town; plenty of things to do by or on the lake with exorbitant prices. While the beautiful hotel I stayed in cost only $7 a night since it wasn’t tourist season yet, however the internet cost 99 rupees ($1.52) per hour whereas in Kathmandu, I was able to find an internet café that charged 20 ($0.31) rupees per hour. Luckily, I found one place in Pokhara for 90 rupees an hour, so I didn’t feel completely ripped off. It probably seems strange that I was feeling taken advantage of at a difference between 31 cents and a dollar and a half. Please remember that although our currency is much stronger, the comparison is all relative. Traveling in Nepal and Tibet makes up for spending $1660 on my flight and officially being a poor student.

After seeing yogis on a Hindi channel on TV, I have wanted to try it in Asia after studying it on and off for 8 years in the states. I ended up going to a random place on the street since the place LP recommended that I could find was closed for that weekend. The man that I went to had studied yoga in India and he taught in a room at the back of his house. I met his wife and his two daughters, one of which is named Annapurna, after one of the biggest mountains of the Himalaya. The class was just what I needed to help me transition back from not working out hard since the accident except for the physical therapy I had been doing on my shoulder and other exercises. There was a large focus on breathing, including exercises such as closing one nostril and breathing in or out of the other in a pattern, which I rarely had in the States.

That afternoon I walked along the road following the lake and took pictures. Kids in Nepal are so used to tourists that they ask to have their pictures taken just to see themselves on the LCD screen of digital cameras. Because many kids love to pose, I was able to get some fun shots while in Pokhara and also of the projects. On my way around the lake, I came across a beautiful girl and I asked to take her picture. She then asked me to look at her brother’s tailor shop across the street. Since I could barely fit in the seats on the Chinese made tour bus in Tibet that we rode the last two days of the tour, I knew that I wouldn’t fit into the ready-to-wear shirts that I wanted to buy so I needed to have them made. To have a shirt tailor made for so cheap was a worthwhile investment, and I decided to have two made. The family was so excited that they invited me over for dinner the following evening.

It felt great to eat Japanese food since most of it falls well into the nutritional experiment I was on, so I found myself at the Pokhara branch of Koto, a Japanese restaurant. When I was there on the Friday night of that weekend, I was reading my LP and a guy at another table started a conversation with me. Michael, a plastic surgery resident from Columbia, and I started talking and we continued late into the evening. He was in Pokhara to trek before he went on a medical trip to a remote portion of Nepal to conduct cleft lip and palate surgeries.

The next morning I met him in the middle of the small town to watch the sunrise and catch the nearby mountains their peaks come out from under their cloud cover early in the morning. It was great way to start the day while we enjoyed the silence and the sky.

I decided to return to the same guy for yoga, since I couldn’t find another recommended place by LP during my walking tour the day before, since I was looking for more of a challenge. The class was the same exact class as the day before which is what I wanted to avoid and try something different. But having a class with just one other girl and the teacher wasn’t too bad. When we were sitting cross legged, he looked at us and said, “Come to a comfortable seated position” as if he had pressed the play button to his recording that he received from India. We already were in a comfortable seated position! The humidity was dramatically higher in Pokhara as compared to Kathmandu because of the decrease in altitude. After class was over, I noticed that every hair, piece of lint and dirt from the rug on his floor was stuck to my skin because of the humidity. I guess by then my slight germaphobia had slowly dwindled so that I would allow myself to do such a thing.

Not being able to turn down a good deal, I signed up for an hour long Ayurvedic massage that cost around $15. Laying naked face down behind a thin sheet for a curtain that was short on both ends was a modesty tester. Repeating to myself, “I’m never going to see these people again” in my mind seemed to work as the table I was lying on was in a room with other tables only separated by curtains. The masseuse used a small towel to cover my behind and then used the same small towel when I turned over to cover my front. She then massaged my chest and my first exposure to Mexico popped in my head. During our venture to Tijuana in high school when my team was rowing at the San Diego Crew Classic, I was offered a free chest massage by many men on the street for free. Although it was tempting, I held out and paid for one eleven years later. Apparently, this is the norm in Ayurvedic massages that I found out later from a student of Ayurvedic medicine. (Ladies, you have been warned.)

For dinner, I was served Daal Bhat with chicken at the tailor’s house. Daal Bhat is a traditional Nepali dish eaten twice a day. Daal means lentil and bhat means rice. Most Nepalis eat this dish, with possibly a few other side vegetable dishes, everyday. Imagine eating the same exact meal twice a day for your entire life. As a Westerner, this can get old fast, but it’s a staple in Nepal, so going out to eat at restaurants is a rare treat, that most can't afford. It was a rather big deal that the family served me chicken, as they only splurge on meat for guests.

The tailor, his sister, his wife and his five kids all lived in a two room shack on a side street off of the main road. They told me that I was their first customer in months. During our conversation, they quickly opened up about their troubles paying rent and paying for food. The two eldest sons spoke English fairly well and made it a point to tell me, “It’s more important to be kind to people than to have money.” When I said that line to ex-Pats, volunteers and others that I met, they rolled their eyes and identified that line as the beginning of free money begging with a twinge of dignity. Talking to more people about their situation made the picture clear that they invited me over with the hope to benefit monetarily.

After leaving Pokhara, I asked the family more questions over e-mail and found out that the two eldest sons had a sponsor sending them to private school. I believe in supporting education not supporting bad business habits, and the family only really wanted to pay their four month rent debt. I even offered a small loan to get the tailor’s sister, who is 20 with a 5th grade education, some training so she could support the family, but they wrote back with "you must be intelligent and rich" to participate in the women's skills development progams. Although they may have been trying to communicate with me, it seemed far fetched to need to be smart and have money to join a women's skills development program. She is waiting to marry a foreigner as she doesn’t want to marry a Nepali and she can barely speak English.

This is where our cultures are so different. The idea of women becoming independent and self-sustainable is slowly growing in Nepal. I am my grandmother’s granddaughter and my mother’s daughter. My grandmother has survived three husbands and my mother, one. I had learned to be extremely independent when young that the thought of waiting to get married for financial stability made me cringe. Listening to this girl talk about getting married as a way out of being a burden to her brother was heart wrenching. Many Nepali girls get married in arranged marriages starting at 16 and divorce isn’t an option.

On the bus home, I sat across from Gillian, a nursing student from Canada. She volunteered for Base Camp International Centres which has its main offices in Toronto and Kathmandu. Base Camp organizes people who want to volunteer and help projects for the long term that need human resources. For example, if you were a nurse or into construction, you could go to Costa Rica or many other countries around the world to help out for a minimum of two months. AHF receives requests all the time from our donors or random people that call in who want to volunteer at the projects and they are consistently turned away. The amount of work, time and money that is needed to organize volunteers is extremely draining. Over the seven hour bus ride, in between naps, we talked about our experiences working for NGOs is Nepal and made plans for the week.