Chitwan

Last week we enjoyed a six-day trip to Chitwan Nat'l Park and the Trisuli River (redux of the failed rafting trip that was supposed to happen on the 11th). Chitwan is southwest of Kathmandu and lies along Nepal's border with India. The weather was warm, the land flat, and the people kind. We met up with our friends Peter and Krish (who we strolled the Annapurna Circuit with) and had a great time being full-on tourists for a few days. We checked out the park via elephant, canoe, jeep, and foot; I felt a little like Mowgli amongst pythons, domestic and wild elephants, huge rhinos, a grizzly-sized sloth bear, bison, tigers, crocodiles, and more!

It also seemed like all of our friends converged in the park while we were there. In addition to getting to hang out Peter and Krish, we also ran into friends Bishnu (who owns Adventure Aves, a new rafting/kayaking tour company out of KTM) and Alex, a volunteer with NOH. Check out the new Chitwan gallery to see the pics...

On the roof of the bus between Chitwan and Trisuli (coming back towards Kathmandu) I managed to step on a backpack that had a few porcupine-ish quills in it. One of them pierced my foot right next to my big toe .. in one hole and out another! Although the thin fountain of blood that streamed out of the top hole was pretty exciting for a second or two, a bit of pressure stopped the bleeding in less than 45 seconds, and two tiny wounds are the only sign of the incident. So far I've had no swelling or signs of infection (although I'm taking a round of antibiotics just in case) .. and hardly any pain. Kinda weird to have such an invasive trauma result in such a minor wound...

After a night sleeping in a tent on a roof in the river-side town of Fishling, we joined Bishnu for a huge rafting trip he'd organized down the Trisuli. I safety kayaked while Ashley joined the 80+ Nepali clients paddling the rafts and having a great time in the splashy class II/III under a hot Nepali sun. We rode on the bus roof back into KTM, and due to increased highway patrols within the city limits had to lie down flat for a solid half hour to hide from the cops... NOT the most comfortable thing in the world, but kinda fun to evade johnny law.

We've been pretty busy volunteering with FoST and the hospital since we've been back, and are now in the midst of exit-maneuvers as we prepare to depart from what has become a friendly new home for us. The last few days have included of lots of goodbye's, yummy dinners, joining part of a Newari wedding, observing a leg amputation, and the beginning stages of packing.... More to come...

Final Stretch . . .

We're down to our last two weeks in Nepal and have bittersweet feelings about being so close to the end. 99% of our time since we returned from Langtang has been spent in Kathmandu, and we're both a little tired of being stuck in the city. I even tried to escape yesterday to safety kayak for a commercial rafting trip, but an accident that shut down the highway about two hours outside Kathmandu forced the entire trip to turn around when we were only halfway to the river!

Of course, Kathmandu has had its fair share of fun activity lately.. The first national games in ten years were held last week, and despite a ton of furor about which groups could compete (even the athletic teams are divided by political and militia lines, and the People's Liberation Army protested the last-minute inclusion of the Nepali Army by pulling out all of their own athletes), the games seemed to go off rather well.. and it was fun to see all the athletes walking around Kathmandu in their warmups between contests. There was also a festival (I can't remember many of the details) that involved this large chariot (at left) that was hauled down the main boulevard from Jhamel to Patan amidst a lot of fanfare. Coming up on the 14th is the Nepali New Year, and cultural festivities are starting to pop up here and there in preparation.

Last week Sanu returned from international conferences in Kampala and Cyprus, and is now loaded with fresh ideas he'd like to apply here in Nepal. In Kampala FoST was recognized (one of four prizes awarded to a pool of 200+ participants) for its efforts to go beyond efficient stove design (what most other participants presented) and focus on alternative fuels (briquettes). We're already drawing up a few ideas for prototype production, and I joined Sanu a few days ago on a field trip to some of Kathmandu's metal yards, scrap yards, and large-scale metal fabrication shops to learn more about available materials and communicate our new ideas.

In other news, Sushmita (NOH employee) spent a few days in Dumrikharka last week, and reported that multiple families are continuing to produce and burn briquettes. They're even producing extras and stockpiling them for the wet monsoon months this summer! I've been considering returning to Dumrikharka myself to make sure everything was going smoothly, but with this good news I may save myself the LONG bus ride it takes to get there and back. I'm hopeful that the report I wrote will help NOH and future volunteers keep this project running strong in the coming months and years.

Our friends Krish and Peter (who we did the Annapurna Circuit with back in December) just got back from their 2nd trip round the Circuit, and we're excited to spend a few days with them down in Chitwan National Park between the 14th and 17th. We're super-psyched to see the Nepali lowlands, ride elephants, maybe see some rhinos, and avoid the malaria-ridden mosquitoes.

For now, I'm working on a few CAD drawings for FoST, and Ashley is continuing her observations/volunteering at Martyr's Memorial Hospital..

Back in the Big Dirty

Cloud lightning out the window of our new apartment in Thamel.

Update time!

Many things have happened in the past month since I last posted to this blog, so bear with me:

We had a fantastic time with Austin and Beth between March 5th and 25th. Thanks to a whole bunch of unexpected factors (see last post) we had a chance to show them a bunch of Kathmandu's sights and sounds before and after our trip to Langtang National Park. Once we finally got up north we had a fun, albeit dramatic, trek through fire, ice, sunshine and rain. Oh yeah, there were a few big mountains, too. Check out the Langtang photo journal in the gallery!

It was great to have a bit of home fly in to visit us, and made us extra-excited to be back in Portland. Our return date is coming up quickly (less than a month, now!) and we're scrambling to squeeze in everything we still want/need to do here.

As Beth and Austin were leaving, Ash and I were busy moving our stuff to a new apartment in Thamel, in a building owned and managed by Sanu's family. For our last month in Nepal, we'll residing in a downtown fifth-story penthouse of sorts... Amenities included consist of running water (brown), a leaky sink drain (a bucket underneath seems to take care of it), a briquette stove, a wooden bed frame, a chair, a coffee table, horribly sooty walls and ceilings, curtains (very important), one functioning incandescent bulb, and one power outlet (we still only get power for eight hours a day). A shared squat toilet, sans sink or shower, is down the hall. Despite this downgrade in accomodation, we're pretty stoked on this relatively impoverished and totally different urban experience. Not only are we in the gritty heart of urban Kathmandu, we're close to everything we need to do and have had an opportunity to get to know a few more of the subtleties of this place.

One of the biggest changes here over the past two weeks has been the onset of the spring rains! The weather patterns have been all sorts of unusual for the past fourteen months or so as Nepal experienced a dry monsoon season last summer/autumn and a very dry winter. As a result, electricity production has been pretty much impossible, and wells are drying up all over the country. A bunch of scientists are even concerned that large portions of Kathmandu valley could collapse as water tables are sucked dry. The recent afternoon rains (and snow in the mountains) have been bringing some relief and have provided some very entertaining thunderstorms in the valley. We can't get enough of it!

Over the past week I've been busy finishing up the written agenda and reports for the project we've been doing in the Ramechhap district (click here to download the latest pdf), getting photos gathered, researching product concepts for FoST and getting acquainted to our new digs, amongst other things. In April, I'll be focused on following up as necessary with Ramechhap (and maybe going back for another short visit) and developing concepts at FoST. Meanwhile, today is Ashley's first day shadowing at Martyr's Memorial Hospital, where she'll spend the next month watching and helping out on various rotations. Our friend Krish, also pre-med, did the same thing in February and had a great experience, so our hopes our high.

Aside from that, we're looking at a bit of river time (I'll be safety-boating for a large class II/III rafting trip on April 11) and three or four days down in Chitwan National Park riding elephants and (hopefully) spotting some rhinos and big bright birds.

The Royal Palace (just down the street from our new penthouse) opened as a museum about a month ago, and we joined throngs of Nepalis last Saturday to check it out. The sprawling palace and grounds have been pretty much vacant since the massacre in 2001, and sits today much as I imagine it was eight years ago. The buildings have this super-cheesy and sparse 60s/70s architecture and interior decoration, and it was pretty bizarre to consider that the place represents/ed the 'lap of luxury' for this nation..

Politics have continued to provide a never-ending comedy in the daily papers here.. Every day brings news of more back-stabbing closed-door meetings within the countless parties and subsets of parties, which usually result in pointless riots, bandhs, strikes, or killings. Nobody can figure out how to integrate all the small party-loyal militias into one army, the Maoists in charge seem to be driving for a one-party system empowered by social disorder and poverty, and China's (anti-Tibetian) whims are frequently carried out without a second thought. Stability in all sectors is still quite a ways off here...

We made the mistake of buying the first four seasons of House MD last week (ripped of course, at a cost of around $12), and have been sucked into 3-5 episodes per night lately.

We've been toying with the idea of spending a few extra days in Bangkok on our return trip to see some more temples, enjoy more massages, take care of some dental work, and maybe even participate in their never-ending political demonstrations (or not)!

And finally: what's up with this website/blog's new name? In short: 'hajur' is one of those Nepali words that can mean just about anything.. it works for 'sir,' 'pardon,' 'hello,' 'whaddup,' etc... So way back during the final days of the Annapurna trek we had a great night in Tatopani getting wasted on Marpha apple brandy. Krish (now infamous for taking gigantic gulps of the stuff rather than sipping it like the rest of us) had also been enjoying slices of a chocolate cake that was sitting under the bar. Upon finishing his second slice, Krish started talking about how much he needed a THIRD. The bartender (and cake enabler) was nowhere to be seen, and out of the blue Krish blurted, "WHERE'S MY HAJUR? I NEED SOME MORE CAKE!!" The phrase has stuck with us like .. um .. frosting on cake .. ever since and is somewhat emblematic of our whole experience here :)

All the Pieces

A few mornings back I was pleased to see a familiar face walk into the FoST workshop, where I was in the midst of building a prototype solar panel cooker.

Maya Gurung, a super progressive hotel owner who I interviewed during our trek around Annapurna Circuit, was visiting with her son. She remembered my sales pitch for FoST from her hotel in Yak Kharka, and stopped in to talk with Sanu for a bit after seeing the small FoST sign on the main street in Galkophaka the day prior. She had told me during the interview that she'd experimented with briquette making on her own in the past, but was very interested in the process and press offered by FoST, especially for use by her son, a lanky 20-year old with cerebral palsey.

Over the next hour, Sanu coached Maya's son through the processes of creating paper pulp, cutting up leaves and grasses, mixing them into a slurry of other ingredients, and pressing the slurry into briquettes. He picked everything up pretty quickly and had a huge grin on his face the whole time. He understood the concept of money, and got extra excited about the products he was creating when he learned each one was worth a few rupees.

He had so much fun that the next day he convinced his mom to bring him back so he could make a few more..

Watching all this made everything FoST stands for really fall into place for me. Here in the middle of a fairly chaotic and undeveloped nation was a mentally challenged man having a blast turning readily available waste materials into an uber-economical cooking fuel that his mom could use in her hotels. So much good on so many levels..

Whirlwind of Rhythm

Happy New Year!

A few updates just before the power goes out again:

- New Years Eve was a hoot: we helped demonstrate FoST briquettes and stoves at a table in the middle of Thamel until dusk, and then had a delicious traditional Newari dinner with solar-distilled whiskey at Sanu's house. Too tired to party, we Skyped our parents and passed out just after our clock struck 12.

- Load shedding (code for brown-out periods) increased to 12 hours per day throughout Nepal. Most days (but not all) we have power from 8am-2pm, and 8pm-2am.

- Skylark English School, attended by most of the kids from Papa's House, had a 'Sports Day' on Saturday to launch a 2-week winter vacation. Held at the National Police Academy, around 350 kids ranging from 4-17 years old displayed insanely disciplined choreographed drills and marches, and duked it out in 40 separate events, including 'Eat the Banana', 'Put the Shoe', 'Dress the Princess', and classics such as 'Wheelbarrow Race', '400m Relay', and '100m Dash'. Despite the fact that the event took ALLL day long, it was great fun to see so many active kids and their supportive parents.

- Although Ashley wasn't able to take the 2-week course at the Ayurvedic clinic (they couldn't start until the beginning of Feb), she found a doctor at the Ayurvedic hospital downtown who invited her to shadow him for the next month. Today was day #1, and she had a great time.

- Austin bought his plane tix to Nepal, and will be here March 6 - 25 .. longer and earlier than we were expecting! Since he'll be here almost twenty days, we'll most likely try to put together a self-support climbing trip in either Langtang (north of Kathmandu) or out of the Annapurna Base Camp.. I'm looking forward to attempting a peak (even a relatively small one) while we're in the Himalayas.

- Both of these factors affect our intended schedule; we're now planning to spend most of February installing energy-efficient infrastructure and helping out at the home for rescued girls in Narti (near Lamahi, in the Dang District, S-SW Nepal). I'll also go for there for a few days in the next week or two to do some preliminary research. April will be primarily spent in and around Trisuli Bazaar, although that could definitely change.

- Otherwise I've been spending my days developing concepts at FoST and working on a few other projects. We're definitely getting into a comfortable pattern, and developing some great friendships here.

To the Hills

It became apparent during the our first few days in Kathmandu that Ashley and I needed to escape to the hills sooner than later in order to get a true taste of rural Nepal. While our initial plan was to jump straight into work here, we found ourselves a bit stuck while trying to define and schedule our time over the next five months. The problem? We're hoping to accomplish a myriad of things in rural Nepal, but have no context to base our direction or decisions on. Several people recommended we go on a trek (tourist-speak for 'a long walk') to experience another of the culture here. We first planned on a short week-long self-supported trip in the mountains of Langtang, to the north of Kathmandu, leaving November 29. However, when another volunteer at Papa's House, Krish, invited us to come with him on a guided trip around the Annapurna Circuit, we quickly decided we didn't have any good reasons to say "no." We were planning on doing this trek in the spring because December is a bit past the recommended season for this route, but since weather here has been holding a pretty nice sunny pattern, we all figured (guide service included) that we would be good to go.

The guide service we're working with, Alps in Nepal, has a deal with NOH, in which 10% of the fees from volunteers who trek with the service go back to NOH. After spending a bit of time talking them down to an all-inclusive fee we could all chew on, we were told a realistic start-date for this 20-day trip wouldn't be until the following Wednesday, December 3. As we soon found, we'd need every one of those extra days in Kathmandu in order to learn some basic Nepali, visit a few of the tourist areas (finally!), replicate our documents, extend our visas, replace my walk-around lens (the aperture stopped working intermittantly .. probably due to some Thai & Nepali grit), buy snacks for the trail, do laundry, track down some Nepali kayakers who will be here in the spring, and have a few more meetings with Sanu at FoST. The horrible traffic, short days, and unpredictable power outages in this city make errands take a LONG time, and getting around is a bit draining.

We miraculously managed to finish up all of our tasks tonight, and are all packed and ready for our 6 AM departure towards the west.

Being a client on such a straight-forward hike is really strange for me .. I have almost always been a guide or independent in similar situations .. and I'm really weirded out by the porter-factor. Granted, we're going to be lodged and fed in small villages every night of this journey, so we don't need tents or cooking equipment, and we're not doing any climbing, so we don't need any technical equipment, but these guys are still going to be hauling our gear from straps on their foreheads as we, the clients, bobble merrily along with nary a care in the world on our 'holiday.' Perhaps even weirder than the porter-factor: I don't need to worry about ANY logistics.. we all just follow directions and relax. While I feel like all this service takes away from the adventure a bit, it's also the established norm on the Annapurna Circuit, so by partaking in the guide/porter option we're actually getting the 'whole' experience?? Either way, I'm stoked on our guide, Peter, and am really excited to get out of the city for a while.

I'll still be doing some volunteer work while trekking, and had good conversations with Sanu the past few days about things I can start sketching, learning, and sharing while on this mini-adventure. At all of our stops, I'll be interviewing cooks and lodge-owners about the alternative technologies they use to cook food, heat water, purify water, deal with solid waste, etc.. in order find out how some of these technologies can be improved. We're packing a few kgs of Sanu's briquttes to demonstrate where appropriate, and have a host of leaflets, videos (believe it or not, many of these remote lodges have TVs hooked up to solar-panel-powered batteries), and price lists we'll use to try and hawk Sanu's wares. In addition, I'll be experimenting with new solar-cooker forms, and sketching a bunch of ideas that I'll have the chance to build at FoST's shop in Kathmandu upon our return. I'm looking forward to this side project, and think this location will be a great place to learn and think.

A grand schedule for our time in Nepal finally began to emerge from the woodwork today, as Ashley, Sanu, and I sat down in front of a calendar and projected our goals forward. For us, this whole trip has been a study in creating our own multi-faceted adventure, and we're finally at a point where we have enough knowledge and context to start pinpointing some specific projects and needs.

At the moment, we're looking at spending another few weeks in Kathmandu upon our return, during which time I'll be primarily working with Sanu on refining existing designs and (hopefully) creating a few new ones, and Ashley hopes to take a two-week course in Ayurvedic healing. In late January through early March, we're looking at spending time in and around Trisuli Bazaar and Narti. In Trisuli, Ashley will shadow in a clinic, and I'll focus on introducing and implementing Sanu's briquette stoves to one of the schools NOH supports in a village that is a two hour hike from the main town. NOH helps support a home for rescued Kamlari girls in very-rural Narti (located in south-central Nepal), and we will help arrange a FoST workshop there, so that the rescued girls can learn to make briquettes from waste and produce a fantastic alternative to the wood currently used for cooking and boiling water.

Come mid-March our former housemate, Austin, is planning to visit us for two weeks, and we'll probably go off on a fun climb somewhere. We're saving April for project wrap-ups .. and who knows what else .. there are a lot of cool potentials in the pipeline.

We won't have any computer or internet access while we're on the Annapurna Circuit, so wish us the best, and check back just before Christmas to see pictures and read stories.. We should be back in Kathmandu December 23.

Cheers!