Nepal -Kathmandu and Changu Narayan

Hi all, 

So, three weeks ago I went from this:

To this: 

And after a few hours of disorientation, I can say I vastly prefer Nepal to Thailand. About the only interesting thing that happened in Thailand was learning that cacao has replaced kale as the new superfood of the yoga set. I kept hearing about the amazing, pure, healing energy that you get from this exotic substance (pronounced 'kakao') and wondering what exactly it was. Well, it's cocoa! Just plain ol' chocolate. I guess it does taste better than kale...but I'm not sure it will be curing cancer. 

My Nepal disorientation started on the plane from Kuala Lumpur, where I was about one of five tourists surrounded by around 300 Nepalese country-boys all in their early 20's. I spent the whole flight trying to figure out who they were (and wondering if deodorant had made it to Nepal yet). I found out when I arrived that they were all guest workers who had been on two or three year contracts to countries like Qatar. There were a lot of flat-screen TVs coming out on the luggage carousel and not much luggage! 

This is Kathmandu from the air. It's very green because we are a the end of the monsoon season. 

I was talking to someone last week whose brother is working in Qatar. He told me labourers here get around $10 a day. I asked what they got in Qatar: "Oh, so much more! Twenty dollars a day!"  That didn't seem like so much more to me, especially if you take into account that more than 400 Indian and Nepalese workers have died in Qatar in the past year.

Talking of OH&S compliant workplaces, these are some photos of the school demolition opposite the hotel I stayed in in Karhmandu. Most schools in Nepal are really old and so were disproportionately affected by the earthquake. Here is a guy, with a straight 3-floor drop behind him, hacking at the pillar underneath him WITH NO SHOES ON! 

Check out the guy sitting on the almost-demolished door frame. 

I was staying right near the old part of Kathmandu city and it is just amazing...narrow roads of temples, crumbling old house, and markets. It is absolutely chaotic, but so beautiful. I will let the photos speak for themselves. I can't believe that so many of these old brick buildings (which just have mud as concrete between the bricks) are still standing! I was staying in a more modern area of town, and I counted four buildings that had collapsed within about 100 metres from my hotel. 

I was using a rickshaw to get around the old part of town. I experienced high levels of white-person guilt using them, but I tried to pay well. Anyway, the chain came off the guy's bicycle, so I snapped this photo while we were waiting for the RACV to arrive.

Had bird poo everywhere after taking this photo:

A couple of very hard-working bicycles:

The people here are great, I would say they're a combination of Indonesian friendliness and Afghani toughness.  I quite literally had more conversations within a week of arriving here than I did in 5 months in Cambodia and Thailand. People are really open and friendly, and I think it helps that English is spoken much more here. 

I had my camera with me yesterday in a restaurant I go to, and one of the staff went through every single photo on it --I think there were about 300! He though the farm was "so beautiful" but the photo that had everyone in the cafe transfixed was this one (which I think Henry took) ... 

It's the half-eaten Christmas ham from last year!! Everyone was gathered around the camera just fascinated...they are so into their food here. If I don't order daahl baaht (the national dish) for lunch, the woman who runs the cafe pretty much starts crying with disappointment. 

I went out to the country for a couple of days last week and stayed at a very basic rural homestay. Boy, was it a shock! Electricity cuts for 8 or 9 hours every single day! 

Most people in the village live with no running water, no fridge, and just the local well for a bathroom. I am going back to do some volunteer work for the owner. I'll build a basic website, get his Facebook page functioning etc... just basic marketing. I'll write more about it in the next post. 

Here are a couple of photos from there. 

The owner's wife cooking chapatis for breakfast: 

View from the balcony: 

View back over Kathmandu:

Dhruba (the owner) and moi:

Daal baaht, the national dish. They eat this twice a day in the countryside for lunch and dinner. Every.single.day. 

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...

Cambodia -- a Dental Odyssey

At last I'm feeling better after that crazy month I spent in Phnom Penh going to the dentist. I actually had a good month there, and as well as going to about ten dental appointments and moving hotels seven times in an attempt to find one that was relatively quiet, I  got to do a bit of sightseeing. 

Phnom Penh apartment building

The main tourist attraction in Phnom Penh is a gruesome one. When the Khmer Rouge was in power they used a local school, called S21, as a prison and torture centre, and it has been preserved as a museum. 

It's quite disconcerting, because it looks quite peaceful from the outside and is right in downtown Phnom Penh, so it doesn't look as sinister as it feels once you go inside. They've tried to preserve how the rooms looked when the Vietnamese found them when they invaded and overthrew the Khmer Rouge. There are hundreds of photos of inmates displayed, most of them young men and teenagers. (There were 12,000 inmates and only 9 survived). 

The grounds of S21 (with graves of the last victims). 

I was telling the receptionist at my dentists about my visit and she said that she'd only been for the first time last year, but only because her university was hosting some overseas students and she went with them.  She said that until she saw the centre she really didn't believe that what the Khmer Rouge had done was real.  (There are former members of the Khmer Rouge, including the Prime Minister, who are currently in government, so there are many powerful people in Cambodia who would prefer if people just forgotthe genocide ever happened).  So, I realised that it is really important to keep this evidence of the Khmer Rouge alive (just like they do in places like Auschwitz), so that people can't just brush history under the carpet and pretend it never happened. 

I was staying outside the tourist district and had my normal problems finding food to eat. I eventually came across a place with an English menu and then wished I hadn't.  I'm was praying I hadn't already eaten "Fried cow's dict with ants". 

Pig shopping for Chinese New Year

I took this photo in the meat section of a market. All the meat here seems to be sold like this -- it hangs out in the sun for hours (and it is really hot here) with flies all over it. In the photo you can see that the sun is directly on the meat. What I can't understand is how no-one gets sick.  Maybe the heat cooks it?!

I left Phnom Penh and headed 3 hours south to a coastal town called Kep. It used to be a tourist resort for wealthy locals French colonialists and they built a housing development of modernist, concrete, 1960's houses.  When the Khmer Rouge arrived they just torched them all. The town today is just guesthouses, a market, and the burnt out shells of houses. It's quite eerie. 

Burnt-out house in Kep

They have a big crab market at Kep where you can buy crab and have it cooked on-the-spot over an open fire. I took some photos of the women who spend all day in this incredible heat, stoking fires and cooking crab. The whole scene looked like something out of Dickensian England.

The day before yesterday I finally started feeling a bit better so, to celebrate, I rented a motorbike and went about 10 kms out into the countyside and stayed by the river for a night.  Here are a few photos I took on the way.  (I love Cambodian kids because they are the only people who talk to me! They can only say "hello!!!" but it's a lot more than the taciturn adults will say).  

Typical countryside, flat and scrubby. 

This is where I stayed... very peaceful! 

Travelling knife salesmen...I imagine he gets a wide berth on the roads.

Bar or petrol station?? 

Playing Food Lotto in Phnom Penh

Hi all,

I landed in Phnom Penh and had organised a pickup from the house I was going to stay at. I was envisioning being one of those business travelers who arrive at Tullamarine ans get whisked away to their limosine. Here was my limo: 

This looks like something Tone and Aidan created using stolen work-supplies and  rope. 

A few minutes later this family passed us. Four people on a motorbike is no bigy, but the mum is holding a saline drip attached to a wooden pole which is going down into her daughter's arm!  The next time I hear some talkback caller complaining to Jon Faine about Australia's third-world standards of health-care I will email in this photo. 

I stayed for a week in a house completely outside the tourist area. No-one spoke English, it was chaotic and dusty, and I played food lotto all week because I had no idea how to order food or what the dishes were. I do know that they eat an an awful lot of offal here -- as depicted here in this delicious intestine and cubed congelated blood curry. 

To make things just a tiny bit more difficult, they use two currencies here, the US$ and the Cambodian riel. How it works it that you pay in dollars and get riel back. But, you don't just pay, for example $2 and get 1 riel back... You pay $2 and get 12,000 riel back. Siobhan and Brett probably would have worked out a way to make money from this exchange, but I think I ended up paying $10 for a deep-fried banana.

Ate these every night and have no idea what they are.

As well as losing about a million riel in fried-banana and intestine curry  transactions, I went to the dentist three times in a week. For some reason, they have a lot of good dentists here, and Cambodia is starting to build up an international reputation for dental tourism. I absolutely earnt back my airfare just through the one filling I had (compared to what it would have cost in Australia). 

One thing I noticed straight away in Cambodia is how young the population is. The Khmer Rouge came into power about 40 years ago and killed anyone who was a professional, educated, artistic, or even wore glasses. Essentially, anyone who had skills beyond farming was lucky to survive. So you see a lot of people under 35 here, but not so many people over the age of 50. 

  

The dentist I went to was in his 30's and his father, who is a doctor, survived the Khmer Rouge. He talked to me a bit about it and said that though it was 40 years ago, you can still see the impact of those five years the Khmer Rouge was in power. They basically cut the country off at the knees, because they killed people with a whole range of skills in a very short time, and then left the country with hardly any teachers, artists or university professors who could pass on their skills to the next generation. 

Now I am off down south, to the coast. Hopefully it will be little less dusty! 

Bye-bye Phnom Penh!