The orphanage etc...

Internet here is very expensive. By Nepali terms. Unless you walk about half a mile out of town. So here I am :D.

I apologise for the condensed and somewhat rushed nature of this post, but a lot has happened in a very short time and I only have a limited time to write in, so here goes:

There have been riots and strikes in Pokhara since we have been here. On the day we arrived we ended up in the middle of one: two stories going round...1. a little girl got killed by a truck, causing the town to charge out in uproar, throwing stones at the police, who retaliated with riot gear etc. 2. The university campus political party groups started throwing stones at each other, causing the police to surge into the town to prevent it spreading. Either way, there were stones being thrown somewhere along the line and there were definitely a LOT of police. There was a large motorbike protest the other day, about 40 bikes driving down the road with flags and placards (all in Nepali, so I unfortunately have no idea what this was about). Every so often you can't phone out of Pokhara so you know the police have panicked about something or other. I think the people have a right to complain though; with 18 hour powercuts and very limited water supply I think we'd all get a bit cranky. The toilets in the orphanage sometimes do not get flushed for 12+ hours at a time because there's no water available...as you can imagine, with 33 kids and 8 adults this can get pretty smelly. It's amazing how quickly we would be reduced to third world country status with no electricity or water (if we didn't have the money or technology to import water, which they don't have here). I'd give them 48 hours.

The kids here only bathe once a week (owing to lack of water), and share beds (4 to a single bed). As such, we currently have a massive breakout of impetigo...it's spreading like wildfire...additionally, lots of headlice! We had a mass de-lousing session the other day, some of them were as big as my little toenail, big fat buggers who'd obviously been there a while. Most of the girls have had their heads shaved to help prevent this happening. We had one nit comb between 42 of us...slow going.

The walls are mouldy (although now painted and looking much better), we have a mice infestation and I have had cockroaches crawling over my toothbrush for the past week (finally managed to kill them yesterday, having perfected the art in India). So much for magnamity where diseases on my toothbrush are concerned. The kids have one set of clothes each (plus some well-worn school uniforms). We eat dal bhat twice a day (lentil stew and rice), with meat on Saturdays if the kids are lucky. Lots and lots and LOTS of rice and tea.

So, at the moment, we're trying to contain the outbreaks and improve the hygiene and health education of the place. Ann used to be a nurse and has been an invaluable asset to this exercise.

We teach English for an hour each morning - John and I have the 6-7 year olds. At school their learning revolves around rote recital, chanting the words to tunes without having any real understanding of the words they are saying. So our teaching has revolved around trying to get them to use the language in a practical sense, using role play and lots of games! They love games, hehe. There is a lot of equipment here for games, badminton rackets and such, brought by other volunteers. Nobody brought nit combs, nit lotion, bleach, scrubbing brushes...well not anymore. Super Ann is at it again, generously splashing out on new clothing and practical items that will actually be incredibly helpful. The 'fun' equipment creates a lot of rivalry between the local kids and the orphanage kids - a lot of jealousy and fighting. The locals decided to kick down the bamboo goal posts at the park, probably to spite us. I decided we should stop taking equipment to the park to help prevent this.

Two of the staff members are incredibly dedicated and helpful. The others are pretty useless and more interested in chatting to one another than doing any cleaning or supervision...we came to the orphanage one day to find that the girl who had been left in charge had buggered off and the kids were completely alone (one of them running around with a machete). The kids are very independent and responsible here...they have to be. They are holding candles to go up to bed by the time they can walk (already had a girl set her hair on fire...she was fine, thankfully - short hair - but it really stank the place out).

Have to go now!!! Back for dal bhat yummmmmm! :) actually very very tasty, so long as you don't mind monotomy.

Pokhara

Now I can finally tell you the name of my volunteer placement (or maybe not...).To find out information such as this has been surprisingly difficult. Louise (rapid fire): "What's the name of our orphanage? Whereabouts in Pokhara is it? How old are the children?" Bijen (relaxed shrug): "Well, you will find out when you get there". Seems that they place you where you are needed at the time, depending on how many volunteers are available, how many have buggered off trekking, etc. So we are here.

The settings have been somewhat grim. The bedding had not been changed and the toilets have not been cleaned for 2 years up until this week. Pretty dire. Ann and Katie (our fellow volunteers) seem to have it all figured out and have done wonders for the place already. We have been painting the walls (to cover the mould, yummm), so it's looking much more friendly now. The kids are wonderful. We have been teaching them English and they all seem incredibly eager to learn - I sat with a group of three this afternoon for about an hour, reading them sections of their English books from school. I love it.

I'm still waiting for the mist to unveil the vast mountains that I can see faintly painted in the sky.

Nepal!

I have been sick today. Ate some dodgy egg mayo at a restaurant. (Mat: "Hmm, I'm not eating anymore of that, it tastes a bit rancid." Louise: "No it doesn't, it tastes great!" - why tastebuds why?!)

However, this was a (thankfully) short episode and I'm now feeling much better, although still a bit tender...been having a lot of stomach trouble recently, on and off...it's possible I've accidentally drunk some tap water somewhere along the way and acquired some parasitic friends...gonna try another course of drugs and see if this fixes it!

I'm sick of eating in restaurants. I want to cook for myself, know exactly what's going in, how long it's been sitting there, and how clean the hands that made the food were. But this is impossible...there are no hostels (or at least, none with cooking facilities). And the food itself is already contaminated when you buy it...sat out in the sun all day with flies sitting all over it...I was surprised to see 'supermarkets' here in Nepal (nonexistent in India)...but they don't seem to sell food unfortunately. Doesn't guarantee it would be hygienic anyway...I opened some pre-packaged sweets a few weeks ago to find a lovely long black hair nestled within them. De-lish.

Anyway, food rant over, I'm in Kathmandu in Nepal! We have spent the past week doing some training for our volunteer placements. I have learnt quite a lot of Nepali, which is going down well with the locals...also done some sightseeing around Kathmandu. Lots of temples. Kinda sick of temples. But I'm N.I.I! A lot of the volunteers here have come straight from England or Australia to Nepal and they were all like 'woah, it's so dirty here, and the streets are crazy...' hehe. It's practically a walk in the park after India.

I hope India wasn't the peak of the challenges I have yet to face...hehe...I'm sure Fate smiles conspiratorally, fingers in a scheming triangular stance, plotting away...

The train incident...

This is something that I forgot to blog about.

The train incident.

Booking a train is generally a simple process, right? You go online, you find the train, you book the ticket, you get on the train, you get from A to B. Ta-da!

But ohhhh no. Not in India. I am thinking of turning this into my catchphrase for this country...'Not in India'. Anything you would assume to be normal or rational...N.I.I. Firstly, booking an online ticket is quite an ordeal, although physically possible once you know what to do. Secondly, it kinda helps if the train you booked actually exists.

I can imagine the double take here. I'm sorry? It has to exist? Apparently not, in India (there we go again, N.I.I.). You can pay perfectly good rupees for trains that are no longer running.

This, of course, was not really the main issue. The main issue was sitting at a random train station for 3 hours only to find that our train was decidedly apocryphal; in the dark, in a town we knew nothing about, miles from the nearest hotel with only our luggage for company. Plus being unable to reach our desired destination. Fabulous. I was very tired after a long day's travel and a long night's small talk with a Chennai cricket team who were on tour. They were incredibly proud of their (admittedly impressive) trophy, and asked John and I to pose with them for photographs. This sent me off on another internal rant about how everybody in India wants something from you, they never just want you for the sake of 'you'! Grr grr grr stomp stomp stomp. At least these boys had pretty good english and understood our humour.

Demi-luckily, another train was arriving later in the evening...however, this train had no seats left, except in general class. Perhaps I need to explain this a little more. Indian overnight trains have several options...first class, second class, third class, sleeper class, and general class. The first four classes give you a 'bed' to sleep on at night...admittedly, not much more than a plank of wood with a bit of foam on it, but you get to be horizontal, and you normally get your seat.

General class is not like this. General class is the desperate, metal-grate seats, free-for-all of a class. Think 'holocaust train' and you're not far off. Really, you're not. Law of the jungle rules here...whoever gets to the seat first, sits firmly on that seat for the entirety of the journey (15 hours) or else loses that seat to whoever happens to be squished in nearest to that particular seat. I imagine there wouldn't even be a choice about the matter; the sardine-canesque physics of pressure would ordain that the space be filled whether said people wished to move or not. There is no glass in the windows...the draft and the dust and the smells unavoidably invade the nostrils at ten times their usual speed (and they are intensely invasive at the best of times! Particularly as Indians seem to equate 'train track' with 'public toilet').

Hopefully you're getting the picture. But we didn't have a choice...it was GC or no seat at all. We booked the tickets and prepared ourselves for the grim night ahead.

The train arrives...we wait patiently in the queue at the door, like Good Little Westerners. Fatal mistake!! Queues?! N.I.I. We look over and find a huge gang of Indians diving in through one of the windows of the carriage. Crap. It looks hopeless...only the weakest of the species are using the door...the elderly, the frail, the families with small children. All seems lost...and then suddenly, redemption appears!

The captain of the Chennai cricket team casually wanders over and says 'So, general class eh?' We explain the situation. 'It is okay, some of our cricket team left yesterday, so we have 10 spare sleeper seats on our ticket, you come stay with us.'

YEEEEEEES!!!!

So, a relaxing evening chatting with the cricketers, we compare musical tastes on our mobiles, and a trustworthy wake-up call later (the trains are consistently about 4-5 hours late but you have got to get up at the 5am or 6am the ticket tells you , as in accordance with Sod's Law) I am starting to believe that karma really bloody exists. In India, anyway.

HHDL and the Ganges

So. His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama himself...I could hardly sleep with curiosity (well, that and my extremely hard pillow). Is it weird that I get excited about great spiritual leaders and politicians as opposed to pop stars? We got up at 6.30am to get to the teaching nice and early (it was meant to start at ten). You must remember that this is the day after a 40 hour train ride (with 2 melodious 5.30am wake up calls to the sound of 'CHAI! CHAI! COFFEE! CHAI!' blasting in my ears - 'chai' being tea, by the way). I was pretty damn knackered. But it's hardly an opportunity you can miss, right? So up we got and off we went.

MASSIVE queue for the gates...it seemed to be one line for the monks/ nuns and one line for everybody else (though of course, as with everything in India, this rule was promptly ignored as soon as the devout queue was noticed to be moving much more quickly than the pleb queue). An hour and a half later, we get to the gate - only to find that we need a special pass to get inside. PANTS. Having chatted with a few of the Tibetans in the queue and realising he was staying in Saraneth all week, we decided to come back the day after to try again. I was feeling very dejected (not to mention sleep deprived). To cheer ourselves up and do a little mental preparation, we wandered around Saraneth looking at the architecture of the different Buddhist temples (Thai, Burmese, Tibetan, Japanese, Chinese...no Indian one, strangely enough) and visited the place where the first Buddha preached his first sermon and met his first disciples. Also, a random deer park...not so many deer but we did see alligators.

After visiting the architectural museum (we were busy little bees! - please note tone of ironic sarcasm) we accidently (incidentally?) met some of our hostel buddies for lunch. They informed us that all you needed to get the HHDL teaching pass was a passport and a photocopier - both available! Additionally, there was another teaching starting at 1.30pm! Huzzah! An hour later (thank God there were only 3 people in the queue! Frickin' Indian bureaucracy) we were in! He was sat on a large platform surrounded by monks with gold sashes, reading from a huge scripture book, not dissimilar from the ones in the Sikh temple. The teaching was in Tibetan, but there was an FM frequency you could tune into to listen to a live English translation...it was pretty hard to understand unfortunately...the translator wasn't very fluent. Nevertheless, it was amazing to wander around a huge tent with 50,000 people in it (so I'm told - someone said 80,000!) listening to the dulcent tones of Tibetan. HHDL laughs quite a lot. Got quite a few curious stares from the monks...not sure they knew what to make of me!

Our auto-rickshaw home drove slap back into the middle of a Muslim festival on the way home. It seemed to be about sword dancing and polystyrene wedding cakes. The incredibly bumpy detour took an extra half an hour, slowed further by a bribing policeman and a truck trapped in the middle of the road by a cow who decided to have a little sit down there. The cows really lord it over the road here...indeed, everywhere. Nearly been headbutted by several of the horned ones and been tutted at by locals for potentially damaging the cow!

We got back in time to take a complimentary boat ride along the Ganges. Our boat rower tells us he drinks a cup of the holy water each day. Please note that the Ganges has 240 dead bodies immersed in it every day, and about 5 corpses that are deemed particularly holy are left to rot at the bottom each year. Not to mention the usual additions of Indian bathing, laundry, and raw sewage run directly into it (both from pipes or the more immediate route). We went past the burning ghat where 8 open air funeral cremations seem to be going on at any one time, slap back in the middle of everyday life. Nobody cries. We saw one man matter of factly folding over the blackened skull and backbone of a family member with a stick, to stop it falling off the pyre. A little further down we see the nightly prayer ceremony to the Ganges, 6 young adolescents moving in perfect synchrony with various candles and incense sticks, all in time to music (for 35 minutes!). A small boy hops nonchalantly between the boats selling chai, with a bucket of glowing coals attached to the bottom of his kettle to keep it hot. 'Good chai madam, 5 rupees'. It actually was good chai too.

Varanasi (and a million in between!)

Oh dear.

Definitely way behind now, an insurmountable back up of information to relay...NOT GOOD. Where can I even start?!

From Agra we went to Jaipur, Jaipur to Pushkar, Pushkar to Jodphur and Jodphur to Jaisalmer. Now in Varanasi after an epic 40 hour train journey that's left me a little bit train-lagged.

What stands out...in Pushkar, we rented a scooter. 'This is sheer madness, we're going to die' says Sensible, Insurance Policy Aware Louise...half an hour later we're heading down the desert highway and I'm whooping with delight. Didn't see another vehicle for miles (unless you count sheep as vehicles, we saw about a million of those, led by a somewhat bemused sheep herder who didn't seem to like having his picture taken with his sexy harem). Wandered about in the desert for a bit, through a collective (?) of monkeys and peacocks, found a goat herding family wandering the crags. The woman of the family points a gnarled finger in the direction of a nondescript path, babbling Hindu in a well-meaning fashion. We head up the path to the top of the hill - brilliant view. I sit down and get three burrs stuck in my bum, jump up and manage to scratch my scalp on a spiky tree, then pick up the bag to get a splinter in my hand from another spiky stick that's managed to attach itself to the strap. Fabulous.

That said, still very cool. Jodphur has the most amazing fort, free audio tour included in the tourist price...it's incredibly good. You can see handprints on the wall where a maharaja's wives performed suti, the ritual of calmly throwing oneself on the funeral pyre of your dead husband. Now THAT's dedication. We also managed to pick up another travelling companion, Maria, to join us for Jaisalmer! Huzzah! think I have found my new self-help partner for my 'Masala Chai Addicts Anonymous' group that I intend to start up when I get home.

Jaisalmer is amazing. It's like a sandcastle city. The highlight was an overnight camel safari through the Thar desert. We ate, slept, and sang like the camel drivers (who wash their plates and cups using sand...I'm just waiting for the Leptospirosis to set in!) The Thar is mostly scrubland but there are pockets of smooth dunes, one of which we stopped at to watch the sunset and sleep...beautiful. We raced, rolled, and dived down the dunes, carefully avoiding the dung beetles and the necessary pre-requisite of dung beetles. The night sky was incredibly clear, but not as many stars to see as there were in Utah...it's possible that the light pollution from the Indian army panicking around the Pakistan border had something to do with this.

Additional randomness: wind turbines!! In India! Haven't seen a public bin in weeks (they drop it on the road to be eaten by the stray dogs/ cats/ pigs/ cows, or to be swept into little piles weeks later and burnt. Mmm, melting plastic). Our camel driver says it is to ensure that the army has constant power supply. Kinda glad to be away from the border.

Additional additional randomness: lots of cannabis in Jaisalmer, and nobody gives a jot who knows about it. The 'Bhang' shop casually shouts out across the road to us: 'Marijuana? Marijuana Madam Sir?' as we pass by. I chatted for a while with a Brahmin: 'Yes, so I am going to the lake also...you know, sit on the shore, meditate a bit, smoke some hash...' he explains that this is because he is not allowed to drink alcohol. Hm. Methinks somebody missed the point.

News flash: rumour has it that the Dalai Lama is giving a speech in a town 10km away from Varanasi tomorrow. We'll be getting up bright and early to go have a look see...watch this space!