Nepal - for dad

Hi dad, 

Hope your trip over to Ireland went well and you had a few nice days with Roy. And, hoping that you have better weather in Wexford than in Cornwall!! 

I was trying to think of a way to send you some photos from here and thought I'd write this post on my blog and ask Pat to show it to you. 

So far I'm loving Nepal. My plane flight over was quite bizarre -- it was me and a few other tourists and then about 200 young Nepalese men. And that was all! I couldn't work out why there were so many men of the same age, because they didn't look like they were wealthy overseas students or tourists. After I saw that a couple of them had bandages on their feet and hands I figured they were all migrant workers. Later I found out they were mostly working in Dubai and Qatar etc, and most of them had been away on two or three year contracts.  When the baggage carousel started there was not much luggage coming out but a lot of boxes with flat-screen TVs! 

This is what Kathmandu looked like from the plane.  Very green, because it is monsoon season. And, not much town planning going on, looks like you can build a four story house anywhere you want.

My hotel is the height of luxury -- hot water AND television! The owner is an interesting guy. He is a Gurkha (I'm not sure how you spell it, but they are the famous Gurkhas that the British used to fight for them). He was born fairly poor, and came to Kathmandu to work as a porter, carrying the supplies for mountain climbers. Now he owns three hotels, a trekking company, has a masters in history and is doing second Masters in psychology! He also bought another building to put a museum in. I don't think he sleeps much. I can see why the British used them as soldiers. 

This is the view from the roof of the hotel over Kathmandu - 

Across the road is a school that was hit by the earthquake. Fortunately the quake was on a Saturday so no children were in school. I met a guy yesterday who has three children, they go to two different schools, both of which collapsed in the quake. So he said everyone here is just so thankful that the quake came when it did.  

Here are some photos of the clean-up. All very OH&S compliant...if you zoom in you can see they are standing around a big hole, loading bricks onto the back on one guy, and for some reason the one up the top is sitting on top of a doorway! 

Well, I just came up for breakfast and I have an update to those photos above. They are now on the third story, and check out the guy who is standing on a piller with a straight drop behind him hacking away at the piller underneath him. WITH NO SHOES ON!! 

(And, you can see the way they carry the bricks...in conical shaped baskets they attach around their foreheads.) 

The earthquake damage is pretty obvious. I go to have lunch in a place about 80 metres from my hotel, and yesterday I counted three buildings plus the school that had gone. And, not small buildings either, they were three stories or more and you can see where they have sheared away from the buildings to the side of them. 

This old part of Kathmandu is really fascinating -- narrow streets, no sidewalks (so everyone just walks in the road), really old buildings made of a kind of brick that looks more like mud-brick, and temples everywhere. There aren't that many cars here, and because the roads are so small people don't have normal-sized cars, just those mini cars and trucks (like that car Brigid used to have).

I actually can't believe that more old buildings didn't fall, they all look like they are about to! I was talking to a guy yesterday who said that you couldn't stand up in the quake; he was on the third floor and said it was impossible to run because you couldn't stand.  He said he grabbed onto a cupboard door and hung on for dear life. 

Here are some more photos of this area... This is what the old buildings look like.  

Pathology lab/butcher! 

Nepalese dental clinics certainly look a bit different than the Thai clinic I went to last week ...(I think the dentist and Saddam Hussein shared an interior decorator!!) Mayeb Peter could get some decorating ideas from this...