Embassy Search

Being frustrated that I really had to ration my Fuji Velvia slide film, I bought some black and white film on one of my various visits to the photographic shops over the previous few days.

I didn't know what I was buying. It was made in what was then East Germany and I quite like the pictures that it produced. To a certain extent it goes to show what happens if there is less of a restriction on the number of photos one can take. Honestly, there isn't enough film made to capture all the possible photo opportunities in Nepal.



Anyone paying attention will have noticed the very slow rate that I have been posting things recently. This is caused entirely because there are too many pictures and they were uploaded in the wrong order. I made the mistake of scanning all the negatives in one go and quickly uploaded them in bulk. This left me with a problem but I think I am getting there now.

As far as I can tell it is now Sunday 6 January 1991. My W H Smith filofax page says "Epiphany" and I think it is also the Orthodox Christian or Coptic Christmas Eve. It was just another day in Kathmandu.

On this day I was on a mission. My aim was find the Burmese Embassy. I wanted to see whether I could get a visa to visit the country where my dad's mother was born and where his dad met her. The LP Guide said the Embassy was up in Patan so I returned there but my search was fruitless and it seems I just went back to Kathmandu. The notes say "in short, nothing".

I think I was in a kind of rut. I wasn't actually doing anything. It is a bit of a waste to travel to the roof of the world (or within sight of it) and achieve so little that all you can write is "Up to Patan - fruitless search for Burmese Emb. Back to Kathmandu - in short nothing"

The next day, Christmas Day in Egypt is even worse. All it says is that I moved to the Nama Buddha Guest House and shopped for pullovers "etc". I am pretty sure that I did buy a couple of pullovers. Black and white and grey with snowflakes or stars across the shoulders and chest. They looked like they would be cool but in fact they weren't very well knitted and never looked very good on me. I did buy some stuff in Kathmandu. I'll mention it later.



I throw these pictures in not being very sure where they were taken. They could have been taken in Kathmandu or in Patan. An expert on the Temples would be able to tell us which Temple is represented.



Perhaps it is an important temple and perhaps it is not. What it shows is that the closer you look the more there is to see.



Check out the carving above the doorway. Perhaps this is a temple devoted to Kali. She seems to be depicted but then so does Garuda.



The roof struts may be a clue. They are a bit naughty.



I think I just must have wandered around for some time and eventually retired to my hotel. This was aimless.



It is a super chilled out place. Ambling along the street I remember now the feeling of being quite at ease with the place and just enjoying the ambience. I have a memory of walking along the street and somewhere around the corner or just up ahead was someone playing the theme to Maine Pyar Kyar on a wooden flute.



It seems easy to imagine how easily one might become marooned up there. That Italian girl I met on the first day had succumbed to something stronger too but the streets of Kathmandu are like some kind of opiate. Time becomes irrelevant. It might be Christmas Day but who cares? It doesn't seem to have much of a bearing on anything anything there.

Patan & Kathmandu

It is very difficult to know when the photos here were taken. The notes that I have written suggest that I took a bus from Durbar Square to Patan and they say that I explored before returning to my hotel to write a letter to my colleagues from Sutton.



I am not sure if this picture of the rickshaw equivalent of a taxi rank was taken before going to Patan. I think it was.



This picture of the sleeping Rickshaw driver is one of my favourites.



The picture above and the one below were both taken in Patan, or Lalitpur (City of beauty) as it is also known, for sure. They are the images on top of the two columns that stand in Patan's Durbar Square. The one above is King Yoganarendra Malla's Statue depicting him kneeling and facing his palace. He is protected by the hood of a cobra. The picture below is of the statue of Garuda outside the Krishna Mandir.

Saturday Morning in Kathmandu

The long bus journey the day before had taken it out of me and I'd been to bed early. As a result I was up early.

I sorted out laundry that needed doing and my notes say I "sorted out slides". I really can't remember but I think that I must have developed some of the slides. I couldn't wait to see them. I suppose I might have been labeling them.

It was all very domestic. I listened to the BBC World Service and Voice of America (which for the most part I found lacking in important news) and I had a shave.

About 10.00ish I ventured out and strolled down to Thamel.



It was still pretty chilly. The out of focus picture of the traffic policeman above shows how misty it was. The policeman is making quite a performance of controlling and directing what little traffic there was. It must have kept him warm.



I had some breakfast in the Nepalese Kitchen and had my shoes shone. I didn't actually have shoes. I had trainers and I probably had them whitened. The notes say I sold my camera bag. They had better ones for sale and I bought one for the K1000. It was all much more compact.



After attending to these errands I strolled to Durbar Square. As the following pages of this blog reveal it is probably just as well that I needed to ration film. Every time you turn your head you are presented with something worthy of photographing. I like the two shops shown above. The vegetables look really wholesome and the bakery (which I suppose it is) is interesting, especially with those great big logs of wood poking into the stoves. I also like the pose of the chef waiting in front of the shop.



This picture of Durbar Square may not be the best picture ever taken but it does somehow capture the totally unrushed and hassle free atmosphere in Kathmandu. The more I look at it the more peaceful it seems.

Of course it would be easy to get carried away. The existence seems idyllic. So let's not forget that for some, especially the chickens being sold below, life is short and brutal.

Return to Kathmandu

I was up at 7.00am the next morning and breakfasted with the Australians. The notes say "Early a.m. Starter". Prefixed by the fact that I was up at 7.00am and had breakfast with the Australians, I have no idea what the note means.

So add yet another mode of transport to the list: the Ox Cart! No picture!? Honestly, I could kick myself! I took a ride on an Ox Cart from the Tiger Wildlife Camp to Tadi Bazar to catch the bus back to Katmandhu. Tadi Bazaar does exist. There is a mention of it in the Lonely Planet Guide but try as I might I couldn't locate it when I searched the net. It is described as nothing more than a junction town for Sauraha. There was time for a cup of tea.



The bus journey was quite fast to Mugling and very slow from there to Kathmandu. That is exactly how it was and exactly how it was supposed to be. The guide book said it would be like that. I arrived at about 6.00pm at dusk and checked into The Maha Laxmi. The picture below must be the view. There's quite a bit to take in.



Once I was established in the hotel I wandered down to Thamel, went to My Place, ate something and retired back to hotel and bed.

Jumbo Safari

So after the early morning near "death by crocodile attack" experience of the misty canoe ride and the deadly dangerous foray into the jungle braving being trampled by an invisible rhino and mauled by less conspicuous sloth bears, we reached a clearing in time for lunch. Derring-do gives you an appetite.



The notes say "LUNCH - smoke". I'm not entirely sure why smoking was significant unless it was. I suppose that I may have had a little of Bim's stuff left.





After that in much bigger capitals "ELEPHANT RIDE". Lunch had capital letters too so it must have been big. Elephants are big, in fact they are so big that they are difficult to photograph. They are also very peaceful and graceful.



Add elephants to the modes of transport on this trip. If I was high before I climbed up into the basket affair on one side of the elephant's back, sitting atop that majestic animal I was much higher. It was quite something. Once we had all mounted the giant beasts strolled into the forest where we saw monkeys and deer. The abiding memory that I have is of how smoothly the elephants seemed to move. They weren't in any hurry and seemed to be very careful about every step they took. They didn't crash through the undergrowth so much as tiptoe through it. I made a good tape recording of this elephant safari. The noise that the elephants didn't make was almost the point.

At one stage the "phanit", Nepali for "mahout" (which is not an English word, is it? "Driver" doesn't seem to express enough but that's what a "phanit" is) gave some instructions to our elephant and the elephant reached down and uprooted a small sapling with his trunk and handed/trunked it up to the phanit who trimmed it with a large knife before using the resultant stick to wallop the elephant on the head!. The noise was quite amazing and echoed all around the forest. I have no idea why the phanit did it nor why the elephant allowed him to. Elephants are reputedly quite intelligent, perhaps very intelligent. They are famous for not forgetting things. The phanit must have done this before. The elephant must have known what was coming. It didn't seem to phase him. He just went along with it. I suppose they are quite thick skinned.



On top of an elephant is probably the safest vantage point from which to observe the rhinoceros and somehow we were able to get relatively close to one. Despite the fact that I wanted to conserve my slide film I also wanted to get a good picture of a rhino so I took four. Three of them weren't too bad.



At ground level the elephant grass would have made it difficult to get a good shot. I'd like to say that this specimen seemed more content than the one I photographed at London Zoo but it also looked pretty grumpy despite being in its natural environment. The difference (apart from the fact that they are different kinds of rhino) is that the one in London seemed to have given up and was resigned to its concrete surroundings. This one had more attitude and I'm glad I was high up on an elephant.



After a full day in the great outdoors it was back to the Tiger Wildlife camp for dinner, another smoke, packing my rucksack and a shower before bed. This was my last night at the edge of the jungle.

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.