Phase II: Transitioning back into the "real" world

View of the Himalayas

Where does time go? One day I’ve written here on the blog and then poof, two weeks have gone by. I find myself digging through my journal and going through photos just so that I can remember all that I have been experiencing. My ashram lifestyle is over as I knew it despite my grandeur plans of waking early and meditating and practicing yoga. I left Rishikesh and traveled to Delhi by jeep with a few other girls from school. Our driver took the scenic route following the Ganga River and sugar cane plantations. I was so thankful that we weren’t weaving through the crazy, chaotic Indian villages and marketplaces. As soon as we immerged from the country side and onto the highway towards New Delhi, we couldn’t breathe. Our scarves became air filters; it’s absolutely foul the pollution there and I will be happy to never go back. The next morning I boarded a plane bound for Kathmandu, Nepal! I was so excited to re-connect with Briee and hear all about her trek and tell her all I had been through as well. The flight was fairly short and it wasn’t long before I was gawking at the sight of the snowy Himalayan Peaks from my window seat. I have never seen anything like it. Here we were flying at least at 20,000 ft and these magnificent peaks are breaking though the clouds just below us. I am blown away by the beauty of this world. This wouldn’t be the first time Nepal took my breath away.

                                                                                                            
Together again and colorful festival powder in the market.

. The streets of Kathmandu resemble that of Delhi but on a much smaller scale which actually makes it sort of bearable. I found Briee at the International Guest House in Thamel, Kathmandu. This is a tourist area so it is filled with shops and restaurants. Our room on the 5th floor and quite cozy and I had my first long HOT shower in a month. We went out for dinner at this place called OR2K. No, I don’t have a clue what it means. It was a cool place with black lights, open windows, low tables and pillows on the floor for seats. I like that vibe. They played western music too and I felt more familiar with my territory than I had in a long time…and because of that we ordered pizza. YUM. We talked ceaselessly of our adventures and life-lessons, shared photos, laughs and hugs. On our walk back to our hotel I stopped mid-stride. “That’s a live drummer playing,” I said. We scanned the area and discovered a bar up stairs from where we were standing. It took us about 2 seconds of silent best-friend eye speak to decide that we were going up. The stairs were like climbing Y2K. “Wouldn’t want to drink too much at this place,” I said as I envisioned people hitting two steps and sliding down the rest. Only to end up in pile at the bottom of the two flights of jagged stairs. Inside were hookas and an ACDC cover band. SWEET. And they sounded great! Better than most I had heard before. We listened to about three songs and headed back to our hotel.

Flying High on Yeti Airlines

Briee booked us two plane tickets and a room at the View Point Hotel in Pokhara, Nepal. I had no clue what was there but I didn’t care. I was glad to be going anywhere. We went to the airport on a very foggy day and found ourselves in line for Yeti Airlines, which I found amusing because one of Eddie’s best friends is fondly called Yeti. So I got a picture for you Jeff =). Because of the fog our plane was delayed. It was great that it was because we ended up meeting a lovely lady named Toria from Manchester, England and her friend Simon from Canada. They were waiting for the same flight and didn’t have a place to stay there or any plans. The view of the Himalayas was even more stunning from this flight. It was a small 25 seater and I didn’t get a window seat but our new friend Simon did so I passed him my camera and he got some pretty good shots. It was all over in less than 45 minutes. Toria and Simon had decided that they were going with us and thus began our little mini vacation in Pokhara with our two new wonderful friends. Simon was on a mission…from God (as I quoted Blues Brother’s, my dad would be proud) to find a motor bike and explore this little mountain town. He set off as Briee, Toria and I wandered in a much safer way, by foot. This little town is beautiful. You can see the Annapurna Himalaya Range with a perfect view of Macchapucchre (means fish-tail) mountain  from nearly everywhere including the picture window in our room!

View of Macchapucchre and the lake by the hotel

There is a lake directly across the main road from the hotel. We made a note of the cost to rent boats. We stopped for a lovely lunch at a beautiful restaurant, which I was excited to discover cloth towels is the bathroom with a basket to dispose of them (waste conscious) and a sparkling, stainless steel kitchen in full view behind clean windows! You might think this is no big deal but after being walked through some of the Indian kitchens to get to more seating….I tell ya, I felt like we had died and gone to heaven! Most restaurants here must be run by westerners because we found this to be the case at each place we ate! Cleanliness IS close to Godliness especially when it comes to food! After we were pleasantly stuffed we poked through all the shops on the way back to our hotel. Most of the things here I saw in India too so I wasn’t in a hurry to buy anything. On our way back we found Simon who had abandoned his mission to rent a motor bike, he decided it wasn’t very safe, and instead rented a car. Really, one of the guys running the travel agency let him have his car for a couple days for 6000 Rupees ( a little over $100US). NOT BAD. So we decided to tour around the little town in our little red jelly bean on wheels and see what the place had going on. HAHA! We had so much fun as we took off me shouting from the back, “Left side! Left side!” You know because they drive on the left and we drive on the right (well not Toria, as she is from England). This is easy to forget if you’ve been driving on the right side of the road your entire driving life. I also was enjoying shouting out, “Honk! Honk!” just before coming up on motor bikes, pedestrians, or rounding corners. It is customary, expected even, that you honk your horn if you are passing a bike, car, or person on the right. This is so they know to move over further to the left so there is room for you to pass. From my observations these are the only two road rules I can figure out: staying to the left side and honking your horn constantly. Our little adventure didn’t last long as Simon’s new mission (from God) was to take his little red car up to the mountains and find a place to stay. Briee, Toria and I were as happy as clams (where is this expression from?) to get out of the car and back onto our feet! (No it wasn’t that scary but I sure wouldn’t have the nerve to rent a car, let alone drive in a place like India or Nepal!!)

Briee and I with our new friends Toria and Simon!  Travel Buddies!
We lazed around the next day, drifted to lunch and moseyed around the lake; the latter of which we probably could have done without as we were accosted by an onslaught of Tibetan women slanging their hand-made jewelry. We successfully warded off the first few but finally we (I) had to be nice. I have a soft heart and I thought what the heck, we’ll just look. BOOM! Next thing you know they are unfolding snow white pillowcases onto the ground and laying all these beautiful necklaces and bracelets out. OOPS. It all happened so fast. And of course after that, you (I) feel like you have to buy something. Luckily, we all found a few things we really liked and we felt good about the price we ‘haggled’ for. On the way back to the hotel Briee ran into a few Australian guys that she had met on the trail during her trek. We went and had some snacks and a few beers with them and a few other Australian ladies, all of them very nice people and searching to find their Dharma (life purpose). One lady I was speaking with was traveling around from village to village to figure out where she wanted to set up some fair-trade support businesses. One gentleman from Alaska was trekking as much as possible until winter was over back in the states so that he could finish a trek he started there from the base of New Mexico up to some place in Canada. Interesting the dreams people have and the courage it takes to do them!

Hustlas from Tibet.

Good Times in Pokhara, Nepal to be had by all!

The next morning we awoke before dawn to hike to the top of one of the smaller mountains to watch the sunrise up over the range. About halfway up the rigged, rocky, stair-like, steep trail I whined, “Whose idea was this anyway?” Oh yeah, MINE. Once we finally arrived at the top it was worth it. There wasn’t much of a sunrise as it was quite cloudy that day but the view of the range was awe-inspiring. Walking down wasn’t necessarily easier but because it was light out we could see the beauty of the county village we has walked through in the faint light of the morning. The women gathered around the water well filling their large steel basins with water. The children dressed in uniforms running off to school or reciting English words over breakfast porridge. Hens with their chicks, cows, goats, and roosters roam the land freely and the abundance of endless garden rows of beautiful greens punctuate the back of each humble home. Life here is so much slower, peaceful and honest. Everyone knows what is expected of them and they are happy to do whatever that is. Whether their job is to sweep the dirt floor, tend the garden rows, milk the cows, carry dung to patch the walls, they all do it with a smile. They wake with purpose. Many of them before dawn as this is considered a sacred and auspicious time of day to meditate and pray. To this end, I think this is exactly why they are so much happier than we are in the west. Not necessarily because they wake up earlier, although I think that part is important, but more so that they make time for themselves. QUIET TIME.

Good Morning world! View of Macchapucchre through the merigolds and Briee, Toria and I fully awake now after our LONG hike up.

Later that afternoon “Team Left!” as I creatively named us, made our way across the lake in a little canoe. Simon being of Canadian blood was very familiar with the system of rowing and was happy to school all of us ladies in the ‘proper’ rowing techniques. It was a lovely afternoon on the water. Once we had made it around a temple in the middle of the lake and over to the other side, we parked our boat (parked doesn’t seem like the right word, but to a land-locked lady I’m lacking in ‘boating’ vocabulary) and began what we thought was a quick hike up to the World Peace Stupa. The land here is amazingly green and fertile. Poinsettias are native in this area and grow as big as some of the trees. Their big red flowers fanned the blue sky as we ascended the rocky trail. We had really no idea what a World Peace Stupa was but we were certainly stupa-fied when we crested the top of the trail and saw it’s sparkling dome and the gigantic golden Buddha smiling down at us. We walked around in sort of an awe-struck trance, meditated a bit and rushed back down the trail and rowed as fast as we could back to the hotel because Simon was leaving on a jet plane back to Kathmandu. He barely made it, but he did!

Rowing to the side where the World Peace Stupa was.  Poinsettia TREES! The World Peace Stupa and Briee and I doing Lord of the Dance for Buddha.

Briee, Toria, and I took the bus back to Kathmandu the next day. It defiantly wasn’t as bad as one could imagine it to be. We stopped about 3 times in the first 2 hours of the trip. We were starting to wonder if the entire journey was going to be that way. First we stopped for breakfast, then for oranges, then for lunch. “Jeeeewizzz,” we thought “no wonder it takes 6 + hours to get back to Kathmandu.” So, here I have to detour a bit from my main story to tell you about Earnest. We met Earnest at the first stop. The three of girls were complaining about the stench of cigarette smoke and speculating as to why people smoke after an experimental phase in their teenage years. Just then a large (smoking) man approached us asking us where we were from. We replied and asked him the same. Earnest was from Nederland and claimed that he had just walked from there to Tibet. “WOW!” we exclaimed! He had been walking for a year and eight months and he spoke to us about his travels across Europe, Syria, Egypt, Arabia, etc. He claimed that he was walking to raise awareness from human rights, justice and dignity. We listened amazed that someone would walk that far for that long. “Was he nuts?” I kept thinking to myself. He told us of all the friends he had made along the way and spoke of acceptance of all people exactly where they were at that very moment. He said that the Dali Lama was expecting him in India next week. He spoke so passionately and clearly about his mission that we had no reason to believe that he might be making it all up. I have heard of people walking great distances before and so it didn’t seem toooo off the wall. However, upon our arrival in Kathmandu, Earnest realized that the bus would not be dropping him off where it had picked him up three days ago and promptly flipped his lid. The man who we will now remember as Earnestly Psycho, began to yell at the driver, yell at the gentleman helping with baggage, he was swearing and to be perfectly honest was totally rude and out of line. I said through his shouts, “Earnest, Earnest, we are going to Thamel too. Would you like to share a cab with us? The driver said the buses cannot go any further because of the transportation ban.” Earnest said that was bull shit and that if he didn’t complain about this then we would just have to accept this injustice. WAIT. WHAT? I walked away. Briee and I quickly commissioned a taxi for only 200 rupees and sped away laughing at how gullible we were and how FULL OF SHIT Earnestly Psycho was!! We felt bad for the poor men that had to deal with him. What was all that talk of human rights and treating all with dignity? Whether or not the guy walked what he claimed he had walked he clearly had not put the mission into action in his own life. What a tool box.  (My pictures of the bus ride are stuck on my camera so those will have to be shown later....maybe at a coming home PARTY!?)

Briee and I arrived back in Kathmandu the day before a city wide transportation ban established by the Maoist government went into effect. I don’t know who, what, why, or whatever and I didn’t really want to ask too many questions. Too complicated. All I know is that if you were caught driving during the ban that “they” would burn your car. Who “they” are I’m not really sure. In the meantime our flight was leaving early Monday afternoon and there was apparently going to be one and only one tourist bus allowed to go back and forth from the airport. This bus happened to be about ¼ of a mile away. No big deal right? Yeah right. You should have seen the size of our packs! HAHAHAHA! If the wind was blowing even a little bit we would have been on the ground in seconds! BUT we made it no problems and the bus was arriving just as we did! “GOD IS GOOD!” I kept saying. Because the last thing that I had wanted to do was wait for the bus with my 25kg pack on a street that smelled like urine while being hassled by hustlers trying to slang their CDs, necklaces, and bullshit trinkets. YAY! Well the Nepali airport was an adventure in and of itself. I think they searched out carry-on luggage three times from the time we went through security and boarded the plane. Weird. In fact they searched us on our way into the waiting area, before boarding the bus to take us to the plane and on the stairs that led up to the door of the plane. Really people? Seriously? How are we going to get anything in our shit between the bus and the plane? Mmmm, after opening my yahoo account this morning though, maybe checking people’s stuff and patting them down 10 times is the only way. SO SAD. When it took forever to deplane in Mumbai, we joked that they were searching us again. Haha. Funny thing about traveling here is that even though they translate everything into English from Hindi you still can’t really understand a damn thing anybody says. Apparently Briee and I should have informed our flight attendants that we were catching a connecting domestic flight from Mumbai to Goa. By the time we had been through customs, got our luggage, waited for the bus to take us from the international airport to the domestic airport, loaded our baggage onto a cart, winded around from the back of the domestic airport to the front to the check in counters wouldn’t you know it our flight had been closed. Thanks guys. Obviously your English needs a bit of improvement. I don’t usually miss instructions that important. What a nightmare. “What do we do?” I asked the check-in lady. She informed us that there was a flight at 6:30 the next morning and that we had to go over there (pointing at the other end of the airport) and purchase tickets for it. She was able to refund our tickets for the flight we had missed and gave me two numbers to hotels in the area. I must have looked really upset and scared because she helped us as much as she could. All I kept thinking was, “Fuck! Where are we going to stay? You don’t just land in Mumbai and expect to find a hotel. That’s just idiotic. Hustlers will be all over us like flies on shit. This is not good. This is not good.” The queue for the tickets was long and slow (surprise) so I had a bit of time to move up and down through my emotions. By my turn I was calm appearing but internally I was worked up. The guy said all the flights to Goa were full. Maybe that was a sign. Maybe we should have picked someplace else at that moment. But I said, “What? No? We have to be there for Christmas. What can we do then?” Again I think they took pity on me because after a few moments he returned and said that we were on the flight at 6:30 the next morning and to go to the cashier. We did and he gave us an e-ticket print-out. “This is our ticket?” I clarified. “Yes,” he said. I stood there. He wasn’t asking us for money. “That’s all?” I said. “Yes yes done.” Briee and I looked at each other even more confused than before. Was this even a ticket man? I called the two numbers the lady had given me. One hotel was full the other was 7000+ rupees for a club room. Um yeah right. That’s almost $200US. I don’t think so, we didn’t budget for that. There was nowhere to go at that moment. My Lonely Planet Bible was buried in my over-stuffed pack. We couldn’t go back into the airport without showing the guard with a big gun out tickets. FUCK. That meant we had to go outside. We took a deep breath, walked out and were immediately asked if we needed a hotel. Was it that obvious? I said no. As it is rule number one not to accept tax’s or hotels from total strangers. I asked the guy at the STD counter (oh just to let you know, STD and SID counters or shops is where you can make local and long distance phone calls) if he know of a good hotel nearby. This lovely Indian man not only had one lazy eye but two, a creepy fact I didn’t notice until after I had asked my question. The other man approached again handing me a card with a hotel name on it. Double-Lazy-Eye-Guy was on his phone with a hotel. He handed the phone to me. They said they would pick us up. Ok I said. The other man asked how much they were charging me. 3500 I said. He said that was more than he had said. I know, I said, I don’t know what to do. The hotel man went and got a guard. The guard came over and ripped Double-Lazy-Eye-Guy a new one and he indicated that we should go with hotel man. “How do I know this is all good I said?” Hotel man showed me is official airport tourist hotel like badge thing. Ok here we go I thought. While waiting for the car I felt a surge of hot burning tears. Briee rubbed my arm, “It will be ok” she said. I nodded. At that moment I was scared. I was imagining us getting into this car and being taken off to God knows where and no one would ever know that we were even there because we were supposed to be on a plane to GOA. Breathe. Trust. Faith. We winded through the streets of Mumbai, similar to Delhi but hotter and breathable. Our hotel was eh, ok. And by comparison to the hotel we’re in right now, it was nice. NOT $100 nice though. We ordered up food, watched The Fast and the Furious and settled into a restless night of not-so-great sleep. At 4:30am we were up and making moves to the airport. We landed in GOA at 8am with our taxi man waiting at the door. Ah beach vacation at last. (or so we thought....)  TO BE CONTINUED....=)

Sunrise yoga 2nd day in Goa.  So far so good....