dropping down the himalayas

kathmandu is an amazing city, and as we are figuring out what exactly is happening with duff and lindsey's flights back to china, we have a few days to explore it.

it took us three days to get here from lhasa, and they were three of the most amazing days of traveling ever. from lhasa, we hired a jeep for two days. on our second day of travel we drove through a pass over 16,500 ft. it was amazing. we were driving most of the day through the qomolangma (the tibetan name for mt. everest) nature preserve, but we saw very little wildlife. the land, in large part, is protected for the nomads who depend on it. there were signs asking drivers to stay on the road, and not take shortcuts through the hairpin turns. twice our driver didn't listen to our requests and drove off the road down hills far to steep to attempt walking. we were polite, but made it clear we'd like him to stay on the road.

at the 16,500 ft. pass, we had an amazing view of the snow capped himalayas. the mountains were mostly hidden by clouds from the indian monsoon. we decided to forego an attempt to reach everest base camp because at this time of year, with the monsoon clouds, there would be very little chance that we could see the mountain. that, we will leave for another trip. at the pass, there were millions of prayer flags set up across the road with stupas and prayer wheels. i read that tibetans hold mountains as holy, but they don't believe in walking on the mountain because it disturbs it. instead, they set up religious spots in view of the holy mountains. at our highest pass, i don't know what mountains we were looking at because of the clouds, but the little we could see was amazing.

at the end of the second day in the jeep we started our descent to the kathmandu valley. the driver was taking us as far as the chinese border town of zhangmu, dram in tibetan. zhangmu's elevation is 7550 ft. so, down from 16,000 we went. we pulled into nyalam to check the tires and allow the driver to jump around and revive himself and then we were off on one of the more startling descents ever. all day the climate had been semi-arid, and the road largely flat. the mountains were brown with animals grazing, we saw little vegetation and almost no green. after nyalam, all we saw was green. we descended the himalayas towards the subcontinent and monsoon. we clung to the side of the mountains, driving on a narrow, very wet road. the steepest mountains i have ever seen dropped down to a rushing stream with milky water (full of silt). had we dropped off the road, we would have looked forward to a drop of 500 ft., 1000 ft., or more. the area was really foggy, we drove into a cloud, and often times we couldn't see the tops of the mountains, the stream, or 20 feet ahead of us. our driver was really careful, and other than one near miss with a big blue truck, i felt really safe. he kept himself awake, and us amused, by listening to a tape of english songs he had. they included a number of songs by bryan adams and rod stewart, and other favorites, such as 'i just called to say i love you' and 'last christmas'. he loved it that we sang along.

after a month in the desert and the arid tibetan plateau, the greenery in the valley was amazing. it looked like the olympic peninsula. waterfalls cascaded down the sides of the mountains and swept across the road. we drove through rivers, waterfalls, and over areas where there had been major landslides. our books tell us that the road between lhasa and kathmandu is called the friendship highway and the chinese built it all the way to nepal's capital city. while this may be true, the road wasn't paved, and on the nepal side, all that remained was the idea of a chinese road, as most of it has disappeared since the 1950s when it was built. for the first time in a month we saw trees, not as part of a desert oasis, or planted by the chinese in lhasa. they were beautiful deep green evergreen trees. there were ferns and huge bamboo, too.

zhangmu is the border town and is built high on the side of a mountain on a series of switchbacks. buildings do not last long in this town. we thought the town would be small, so we let the driver take us to a hotel, he must have switched back about 15 times when we got to the bottom (not of the mountain, but of the town, the mountain dropped down thousands of feet more). about 20 feet from chinese customs, he showed us two hotels at over 300 kuai a room. the most we have spent for a room before this was 150 kuai. as duff was checking out the rooms, lindsey and i waited in the jeep. ten people crowded around us trying to get our attention to change money, hire a jeep to nepal, take their hotel and a million other requests. we had been driving all day, and it was already 5:00, but with the super high hotel price, and the demands of the hawkers, we decided just to go on to nepal.

the border crossing is the first i have ever crossed on foot. last year, when kellee, duff and i were crossing into china from mongolia, we hired a jeep, although we now know it would have been faster to walk. to get to nepal from china, you pass through chinese customs and walk 9 km to the nepalese customs. having sat in a jeep for two days, a walk sounded great, especially since hiring a jeep to take us that far would have been as expensive as getting a hotel in zhangmu. we were some of the last people to pass through chinese customs (now i am out of china for a while, i wonder when i will get to go back), and we started the walk to nepal. it was cool and raining and felt like hiking in washington in the fall. most of the trail was unpaved, and very rocky, but it was mostly downhill through switchbacks. we had a great walk, gradually descending through the clouds towards the friendship bridge that marks the border. we walked from 7550 ft. to 5800 ft. in kodari, the nepalese border town. we needed a visa to enter nepal which we were supposed to be able to get at the border. however, when we got there, the border was closed and no one had the key to the immigration building. one of the agents told us to come buy our visa in the morning and took us to a great riverside hotel for the night. the room was 250 nepalese rupees per night, which is about $3. the room was clean and the food was excellent, and there was no hot water. ah, yes, now we are in the subcontinent. goodbye, hot showers.

in the morning we got our visas and got on a bus heading towards kathmandu. we had to change busses once in another town barabise(?) 90 km from kathmandu. the bus from kodari was the most terrifying of my life. we started out from town, and having not gone 5 feet, hit a child. i have no idea what happened to the kid, or how they resolved it, but we drove on. the road was narrow and mostly washed out, unpaved, rocky, or so muddy we left tracks more than a foot deep. the bus lilted dangerously from side to side. i spent almost the whole ride wondering how i should best brace myself when we fell off the cliff, or if i had time to try and jump out the window. that was more adventure than i needed. luckily, on both busses there were amazing people to watch and great music to keep me calm. if i had asthma, i would have had an attack, i haven't ever been so scared. katie told me that people say the bus ride to india is one of the worst in asia, it can be nothing compared to the terror from the chinese border.

we switched in barabise and it took us 6 hours to do under 90 kilometers. mostly this is because the bus was so overloaded and the roads so bad, but we stopped a lot too. we also experienced a lot of rip off the foreigner. we had to pay 30 kuai baggage fees in addition to our tickets that we know they just made up. it bothered duff, but we were passing through such poor areas that giving away 4 dollars, even under a ruse, didn't matter.

nepal is a beautiful country, and not at all what i expected. it is humid, and cool, and very hilly. houses and shacks cling to the hillside. there is a lot of terracing here as well, and we saw men and women working in the fields growing rice. in china, when i see people bent over in the fields working methodically they never straighten up and stretch. the people we saw yesterday were all stretching. i wonder why, for 2 years, i have never seen that in china? people in the countryside are very poor, children haven't clothing and even the adults looked pretty rough. most houses were made of wood and on the roofs people were drying chilly peppers and corn. higher in the mountains the roads were lined with the scraggliest corn i have ever seen. duff commented that it was tall, but not particularly well-yielding.

on all of the busses that we passed there were boys sitting on the roof with goats and luggage. they offered us a seat of the roof, but we opted to sit inside the bus. when the sun was out, umbrellas popped up to protect the guys on the roof, and when it started to rain, they all scurried under tarps. on our bus, the whole back was taken up by a motocycle owned by a chinese guy who is from beijing but going to school in sweeden. for his holiday, he wanted to bike across nepal, but his motorcycle broke down three km from the border and he had to load it on to various busses to get it kathmandu to get it fixed. luckily, he had already ridden across china and tibet and spent a number of weeks in amdo. we also had a terrified goat back by us, and a chicken stuffed into the upper luggage rack in the front of the bus.

that's all for now. i am off to try and find a bus to varanasi to meet sean and start phase two of my summer trip.