Dangerous Wild Animals

I forgot to mention that the evening before an Australian couple called Michael and Elaine arrived. I was up at 7.30 am and had breakfast with them and although I can remember nothing else, at least I made a note of their names. I don't know what happened to the Canadians.

After breakfast there was a walk to the river. I regret to say that I am a little vague as to which river. It was certainly either the Narayani or Rapti or Reu, or perhaps one of the many tributaries to the Narayani Rapti river system.

The notes say "dodgy, misty canoe ride (Marshmugger?)". Says Wikipedia: "The name "mugger" is a corruption of the Hindi/Urdu word magar which means "water monster" in the Hindi/Urdu language. This is in turn derived from "makara", the Sanskrit word for crocodile." These rivers contained crocodiles.

Check out the pictures. The canoe trip was not an exclusively touristic thing. The only way across the river was on one of these long hollowed out tree trunks. If there is the slightest chance of meeting a crocodile, you have to wonder why the canoes are so overcrowded and so very low in the water.



The risk of being eaten alive by a mugger crocodile is actually nil because if I am correct crocodiles don't eat their kills alive, they just drown their victims and then let them rot for a bit before eating them. All the same, standing up holding a bicycle would certainly cut down your chances of being able to escape a water monster's attack.



The point of the canoe trip was so that we could take a jungle walk on the other bank. The wildlife in the Chitwan National Park is fantastic, if you get lucky enough to see it.

My notes say we encountered three Rhinoceroses, one of which was invisible and thus much more scary than the other two. I remember we were told that should one of them decide to charge we should run off in a zig zag pattern and throw something behind us. Rhinos are notoriously short sighted and can be spooked by anything. I'm sure that someone told me that Rhinos have actually charged at a tree stumps as if the trunks just standing there had threatened the Rhinos. They are like an extremely dangerous Mr Magoo with a "What the f**k are you looking at?" Biffa Bacon mentality.

They do however have a keen sense of smell, hence the advice about the best method for running away from them. I have a vague memory of Al Pacino in the film Serpico talking about running "serpentine" - it was the same advice.



We were also told to watch out for sloth bears. Apparently quite contrary to the expectation their name suggests they are no slouches, they can gallop faster than a human being can run and when cornered will stand up to Tigers that occasionally prey on them while they snuffle in ant hills.

The closest encounter we had with sloth bear related danger on this walk was the risk of treading in its shit. Some sloth bear shit was drawn to our attention. This indicated two things: first, there were sloth bears in the vicinity or there had been recently; and second, that bears do in fact shit in the woods. There it was. Sloth bear shit in the woods. Our guides could have planted it there, I suppose. On the other hand it could have been any old shit, not sloth bear shit at all. We might have been told it was sloth bear shit to heighten the sense of being in an environment inhabited by dangerous wild animals. How can you know?

Sauraha

Where there is a wrong time to visit Devis Falls, there is a also a right time to visit the Terai and the Chitwan National Park. Luckily these times are the same. That's what the book says anyway. Average daytime temperatures of 25°C with the probability of chilly misty mornings. Unfortunately this particular day was wet. I breakfasted with my Canadian companions and spent some time in the Tiger Wildlife Camp writing letters and I went to the Museum.

The picture above is really good. It may not be properly focused but click on it to see it enlarged. I love the convoy of ox carts.



It seems I had a big enough lunch to write "Big Lunch" in the notes. After a big lunch what else but a snooze?

After that there was a bit of a tour including being taken into a village to be shown what we were told were "poor people" and this what they look like. I really don't know what the point of this was. It has stayed with me though. Poverty is a relative thing. The guide who took us there was sufficiently better off to consider these people poor. Here, before too long, the definition of poverty will be not having an iPhone.

The afternoon was scheduled for birdwatching but it was called off because of the rain.

The Terai

New Year's Day 1991. I was up around 9.00am and packed up my stuff and checked out. I caught a bus to Tadi Bazaar and then set off to the Chitwan National Park by Jeep. The notes suggest that I didn't arrive until about 5.00pm. The notes are so sparse that I had to check the length of the journey. It is 7 hours from Pokhara to Tadi Bazaar and quite a lot of it on the Siddhartha Highway.

That has a nice ring to it, don't you think? The Siddhartha Highway, so called because if you follow it to where it ends you arrive near Lumbini where the person, the Prince who was to become Buddha was born. My notes don't suggest otherwise than the journey was smooth allowing me to contemplate the Fourfold Noble Truth and the Eightfold Noble Path. On the other hand my notes just say "Bus → to Tadi Bazar". Either the arrow or the word "to" is redundant. I must be the world's worst note taker. I can't remember anything about the journey at all. It was probably bumpy and noisy and uncomfortable.

From Tadi Baazar it was a Jeep ride to the Tiger Wildlife Camp inside the Chitwan National Park. The ticket says I entered the Park at 19.20 which is very precise. I hadn't noticed before. The beauty of clicking on the images is that they are enlarged and you can examine them closely. I wonder why the exact time of entry in to the Park is noted?

The notes then just say "Arr. Bed. Met Canadians" in that order. This can't be right, can it? If it had been in that order I would remember it. As it is I can't remember the Canadians at all, I'm sorry for that. I must apologise to the Canadians too, it's so rude. I hope they forgot me too. It would serve me right.

"The Times They Are A-Changin"

It was New Year's Eve and another day on the bike with my self appointed guide, Bim. I am quite sure that no formal arrangement for this was agreed upon. It didn't actually seem like a business arrangement.

Our first destination was the Post Office. I had been writing reams of letters and they had to be posted. The notes say "to P.O. wi Bim (communists)". They might not have been Communists they could have been Maoists.



I have a vague memory of an assembly at school when someone came to speak to us about inequality. I really can't remember properly but it could have been a man of the cloth. It doesn't matter. He had been to a country where the average wealth of the population was really quite impressive. That country was Nepal when King Birendra was on the throne and the problem was that he and his family had nearly all the wealth and the general population had practically nothing. It is a memory that stayed with me.

These pictures show political protesters gathering (it seems) at Pokhara's airport. On the other hand they might not have been protesters, they could have been supporters of someone who could have been about to arrive by air from Kathmandu.

"Come gather 'round people". Yes, the times they were "a-changin'."



Birendra was still on the throne at the time of my visit and there had not been very much improvement in the conditions for the general populace. There were rebellious stirrings. Perhaps the lady addressing this small assembly was the person who got off the plane, perhaps not. If it was, no-one seems to be paying attention. Looking closely she could have been some kind of effigy. We'll never know.

These may have been the beginnings on of what turned into an insurgency and (I have to admit here that I haven't kept up closely with what has gone on in Nepal since I left there) a civil war and I think it has ended with a complete change of governmental system. The insurgents became terrorists in due course and now are legitimate participants in the government of the country.

I can't be sure but I think the statue is of King Prithivi Narayan Shah, the first King of Nepal. It is the pose with one finger raised that makes me think so. 11 years later his descendant, King Birendra, came to a very sticky end in a massacre in the Royal Palace shot by his son Prince Dipendra in a bizarre wipe-out of most of the Royal family.

Regarding the pictures above, I hadn't really been sure there was an airport. The pictures are my memories and the word is half visible, written on a gatepost in one the pictures. I just checked the net and at present 4 airlines operate in and out of Pokhara - they all (bar one) sound great: Cosmic Airlines, Nepal Airlines (the only boring sounding one), Yeti Airlines and Buddha Air.

Before we left Pokhara I bought a lunghi which was bright red with the yellow hammer and sickle motif. I've still got it.



Next stop Devi Falls. You know, it is quite handy to still have the Lonely Planet Guide. I wish I knew where the Indian one is. The reason I say so is because the LP Guide says Devis falls are 2km south of the Airport. So that is definitely the Airport above.



If there is a time to Devi's Falls, the end of December is not it. I have read that the falls swell considerably after the monsoon but are little more than a trickle in January. December 31 couldn't be much closer to January and here is a trickle disappearing into a hole. However, that is the point of this place. The outflow of Phewa Tal called the Pardi Khola suddenly drops into a hole and disappears to emerge again 200 metres away and joins another tributary to the Seti Gandaki river. This wasn't really worth the trip except this it is a pretty good picture of the hole.



So after gazing into a hole in the ground we had a quick cup of tea before the ride back. In the pictures above you can see Bim posing where some months earlier there would have been a torrent flowing. He has taken his flip flops off which reminds me that he did the 40km ride yesterday in them.



The tea was lovely and the lady who made it was nice enough to agree to have her photograph taken. It's a shame I didn't do a better job. This could have been a tea stall in the Tibetan village settlement near Devi's Falls but then again it might not have been. The problem with having a guide who doesn't speak any English is that you cannot be quite sure where you are being taken.



So we cycled back. It was New Year's Eve. It didn't feel much like it but it was. It meant more to some of the visitors to the Lakeside. I had been away for nearly 4 months and somehow it didn't mean very much to me. It never did before and it never really has since. It is the mere effluxion of time. One set of 12 calendar months comes to a natural end and at midnight another begins. So what? I have to admit that for some unknown reason I am feeling a bit down as I write this so it might all sound a bit negative.

The last three and a half months of my journey had been populated by mostly cool travelers. Here, sadly, there were rather too many uncool visitors and some poor advertisements of the British variety. I recall there was one in particular. He was a lad from northern England and I'm sure he meant no harm but somehow whatever he had to say (and though he had a lot to say I can't remember what he may have said) seemed to grate with me. He might have been bumptious and embarrassing. I am digging deep into the recesses of memory now but it could have been that there were only two of us from Britain: me and him; and everything he said made me cringe and I felt embarrassed to be associated with him by reason of our both being from the UK.

The occupants of the Butterfly Lodge seemed intent on making some kind of big deal about the turn of the year. They got some wood from somewhere and made a fire. This was (to my mind) a stupidly crass thing to do. Firewood is scarce and I tend to remember that it was also expensive. Here were a bunch of decadent westerners burning it for fun.

I stuck it out for as long as I could. The "Norman Whitebread" character, who said what he liked and liked what he said, mentioned that the next day he was off into the mountains trekking with Bruno! Just the two of them in a tent! I thought about telling him. I then adopted the Dr Hunter S Thompson philosophy. I decided not to tell him, he'd find out himself soon enough. I still have terrible pangs of guilt that this lad might have been out there in a "Deliverance" style situation with the bouffant Bruno whispering sweet nothings into his ear. Argh!

I was on the move again myself the next day. I made my excuses and tried to banish the gruesome images of what Bruno had in mind for my fellow countryman before I went to sleep.

Scenery on Wheels

Next morning, actually another Sunday, not just a day that felt like one, was not a day for lounging around. I don't know how this had been arranged but Bim turned up and we went for a bike ride, a very long bike ride. I suppose it is possible but it seems incredible that my notes say "40km Bike ride with Bim from lakeside to Begnas Tal".
Looking at the Google Map scale it could easily have been that kind of distance. The Lonely Planet Guide says Begnas Tal is 15km east of the town and that not many travelers visit. This wasn't simply a bike ride. It was a triathlon because the notes go on "boat to hill - Rupa Tal & back in rain".



That must be 40km return. The roads might have been reasonably flat but there must have been a hill or two. The bikes were not fancy mountain bikes. They were ordinary sit up and beg honest to goodness solid bicycles. If there were gears they couldn't have been much more sophisticated than Sturmey-Archer style 3 gears.

There are a couple of very poor slides of Bim rowing the boat across Begnas Tal. The weather really didn't look very good at all. A bit like a shit day round here. It's a pity because the countryside would have been great to photograph if the sun had been shining. Some really good pictures can be found here. Looking at those pictures it seems a terrible shame that the weather was dreich.



So the photos shown here were taken at Phewa Tal the day before. The Temple pictured is on a small island and is dedicated to Varaha an incarnation of Vishnu the Preserver. The Barahi Temple is the most important monument in Pokhara. "Built almost in the center of Pehwa Lake, this two-storied pagoda is dedicated to the boar manifestation of Ajima, the protector’s [Vishnu's] deity representing the female force Shakti" See NepalTourism.net. I suppose you have to be on your best behaviour all of the time if there is a chance that almost any living creature could be an avatar of your God. That small mammal over there could be ....



After standing at the top of a ridge the other side of Begnas Tal to look down on Rupa Tal it was clear we had to go home. It was raining.

When we got back it seems all I did, probably all I could do, was eat and sleep.

Lake View

The weather really wasn't that great. You needed to wrap up. On Saturday 29 December 1990 I spent the last few rupees to my name on breakfast on the shore of the Lake and did some more letter writing. I was trying to keep a fair number of people informed as to my travels and may have been writing that heartfelt letter to Liz. I can't remember now. I was getting bogged down by the correspondence. Story of my life.

This was yet another "nothing day". I changed some money somewhere later and retired early to listen to the radio, write and smoke. Once more I was visited by Bruno.

We had a chat about I don't know what. I was a bit stoned and he didn't seem to want to leave. In the end I had to resort to theatrical yawning and I went to usher him out. As I was doing so something quite disturbing happened.

My notes say: "Bruno lunges". I had got up to usher Bruno out of the room and as I was doing so Bruno moved towards me in a way that could not have been mistaken for anything other than he was going to snog me! I recoiled and it was all very embarrassing.

After Bruno had left I began to put 2 and 2 together. Come to think of it Bruno's hair was a tad bouffant and he wore earrings in both ears. After a while on the road you become inured to things. People who would stick out like a sore thumb begin to blend in. There are a lot of strange looking people out there. There were other signs too but I hadn't realised. The letter he had needed help with the night before was from a Japanese boy and thinking about it now it was a bit gushing.

Although I was on a journey to broaden my horizons and gain new and exciting experiences, I was quite certain that getting snogged by a bloke wasn't something I wanted to try.

A Good Place To Get Some Thinking Done

To a certain extent I do wonder why I visited Pokhara. I am not a trekker. It is a base for walkers and trekkers. That wasn't my scene. So why was I there?

The answer might just be that I thought I might as well visit. I had been reasonably familiar with traveling in Turkey so I had an idea of where I might go, why and how I'd get there. I had researched India (by reading the Lonely Planet Guide on the train, practically cover to cover). However I hadn't done enough research on Nepal. It was a bit like the reason a lot of visitors go to Nepal. They go simply because the mountains, in particular Mt Everest, are there. I was touring India and it seemed that given Nepal was where it was it might as well be visited. "Kathmandu or bust". That was the clarion call in a time gone by. For me it was just a stop on the way.

As I said Pokhara has some of Nepal's most popular trekking. The draw is its position below the Annapurna range, Mt Annapurna itself overlooks the place. The place was mostly full of people who had just come back or were just about to go on the various famous routes. I'm sorry, it's not for me. I have scrambled up a couple of Welsh mountains in Snowdonia. It is jolly good exercise and exhilarating to gaze around from the various tops. Most of the time, however, you seem to be staring at your feet as you walk or climb. You have to be careful not to slip over. The idea of days on end of that doesn't attract me at all. Anyway I didn't have the necessary kit.

I spent my first whole day, after breakfasting at "The Hungry Eye", chilling on the shore of Phewa Tal (Phewa Lake), Nepal's second largest lake, writing letters. At some point or other a young man called Bim introduced himself. I didn't mind. I was getting a bit isolated and welcomed some interaction. Somehow or other we got on to the topic of ganja and before I knew it Bim went off and came back with some fairly raw grass. It was a bit like homegrown but at least it was something.

After a day of doing next to nothing I retired to the Butterfly Lodge. It was probably getting chilly and I continued my writing at the little desk in front of the window rolling up pungent cheroots the while.

At some point there was a knock at the door and I let in a French guy who wanted some help translating a letter he had received from a Japanese traveler he had clearly been traveling with. I tried my best to decipher the letter. I can't remember very much of it but it was polite and was just thanking the fellow, who was called Bruno, for his company and saying how much he had enjoyed their time together. I didn't mind the distraction but did eventually have to indicate to Bruno that I wanted to get on with what I had been doing.