It’s hard to beat seeing a foreign country by bicycle. It’s slow and low enough to the ground so you can really see, smell and taste the world but fast enough so you can cover some decent ground. The video below is akin to my previous Savage Cat Bicycle Gang video I shot of a nocturnal ride in San Francisco. Sorry it’s so bumpy, but Kathmandu roads aren’t the smoothest.
Archive for March, 2009
Kathmandu by bicycle
Published 8 March 2009 Uncategorized Leave a CommentTags: Bicycle, Bike, Nepal, Savage Cat
Food, glorious food. Part 2
Published 7 March 2009 food 1 CommentTags: China, food, Nepal, traditional
Traditional Nepali dinner
Part 2 of our food exploits lands us in Kathmandu, Nepal. One of the beauties having friends in foreign lands is you getting to see and do things off the touristy path. With Rosie we had the great fortune to eat a traditional Nepalese meal at the home of a local family, Anu and Namaraj, with whom Rosie has been visiting regularly since she arrived in Nepal.
Nepalese food I found to be very similar to Indian food and much less like Chinese food (these being the two countries that incase Nepal). Samosas are found aplenty walking around the streets of Nepal for just a few rupees a piece (argh I could write a whole post on those. They were delicious), and many meals contain your standard rice and saag and paneer.
The standard dinner (or perhaps any meal) for Nepalis is called daal bhat, literally translated to lentils rice. An ENORMOUS quantity of white rice is usually eaten with a lentil mixture that is cooked in a broth and poured over the rice, then eaten with your hands.
An aside: Daal bhat is basically synonymous with “food” in Nepali, to the extent that a friend of Rosie’s who works in a hospital told us that often Nepali parents come in worried about their children, anxiously saying the children haven’t eaten in days. After some initial confusion the friend came to understand that generally it is not that they haven’t eaten any food, merely that they haven’t eaten any daal bhat. Similarly Rosie was amused to find a coworker of hers, who was in the middle of an 11-day fast, eating a full American lunch in the middle of the day. Apparently fasting refers only to the abstinence of daal bhat.
Is happening in the Lawrence family!!!!! A brief respite from the China updating to announce that my sister Ms. Alexis Carey Lawrence is engaged (to Mr. JP Craford)!! We offer all our congratulations from the Far East and propose an online toast to you both. Please find a beverage wherever you may be, and drink to their happiness.
Lex and JP!
Seriously, I am incredibly happy for you both, and JP could not have imagined a better addition to our family.
In case you were wondering this all happened when I was in Nepal or perhaps Tibet or a cross-continental train, so I found out a little late and only after I thought there was a death in the family from all the emails I got telling me to call home as soon as possible. I was very relieved to discover otherwise.
One of my favorite activities in all of our Nepal adventures was our trip to the Vajrayogini Temple. Lonely Planet lists it as one of their favorite spots so we thought it might be worth a trip. (They described it as a hidden temple full of fountains and chattering monkeys — who wouldn’t want to go?)
At first we planned to bike out of Kathmandu to the village of Sankhu, above which the temple lies, but a nasty stomach bug kept my activity level low for the duration of our stay in Nepal so we decided to have an adventure with the local bus system. With the help of a local taxi driver we navigated through the streets of Kathmandu to the bus station — basically a dusty lot filled to the brim with even dustier buses. We wandered the lot repeating our destination to everyone we could find until someone pointed us to a bus that was supposedly heading towards Sankhu. We climbed aboard.
Kathmandu, as most westerners know it, is actually two distinct cities encircled by a large ring road and separated by the Bagmati river. To the north is Kathmandu proper and to the south is Patan. Our dear friend Rosie resides on the southerly side of the fragrant “Bag” and Steph and I spent our first day wandering the tiny and labyrinthine streets of the ancient city where we met new friends, made new keys and drank much tea.
Click below to keep reading and check out a bunch of pictures from Kathmandu including some panoramics from our bike ride of the surrounding villages.
Continue reading ‘Friends, keys and teas in Nepal’
An ode to Rosie. And her roommates. And her landlord.
Published 2 March 2009 Uncategorized Leave a CommentTags: China, Kathmandu, Nepal, Patan, Rosie
We successfully arrived at the Kathmandu airport on February 11th and were greeted by a smiling and exuberant Rosie Hughes (fellow Dartmouth alum), with whom we stayed during most of our sojourn in Nepal.
She skillfully bargained down our taxi price in Nepali and whisked us away to her home, across the Bagmati River and south into the Kupandol district of Patan. Kathmandu is ricketier than Beijing, and older-seeming in ways that give it charm and character. Where most of Beijing has been replaced by tall buildings and enormous apartment complexes, Kathmandu seemed full of winding streets with colorful houses. Rosie lives in the Kupandol area of Patan, down a street that seemed far too narrow for a cab but through which he magically fit, and in a house right next to a yarn-dyer who lays out a new color of beautiful yarn to dry every day. It seemed magical, somehow, to me.
Today, a mustardy lime green. Rosie's house is just behind us.
Rosie is in Kathmandu on a ten-month assignment with the International Rescue Committee, a non-profit humanitarian aid organization dedicated to emergency relief, human rights, post-conflict development, and resettlement services. She is there as their Grants and Information Fellow, which I understand means she does a lot of communication work, both to the outside world about the IRC’s work in Nepal, and also to local Nepalese staff, teaching them grants and information writing skills. (Rosie, please correct me if I’m wrong). Some of her professional work has been published by Reuters, such as a piece she did on the flooding in Nepal and northern India from the Koshi River. She also has a personal blog where your can follow her exploits in Kathmandu and beyond.
We give all our thanks to Rosie and her two Australian roommates Gemma and Avigail for letting us stay with them and showing us so much hospitality. And also to their landlord who did not kick us out of our new home despite the city’s severe water shortages, though I think she may have wanted to. Immense thanks to you all!
Just like the White Mountains?
Published 2 March 2009 Uncategorized Leave a CommentTags: China, Everest, Himalayas, Nepal
One of the most spectacular parts of the trip thus far has definitely been our flight from Lhasa to Kathmandu, which took us directly over the Himalayas. Below are a couple of photos of the mountains, as seen looking back from the plane.
View from the plane.
Everest on the far left, Nuptse on the right.
In the U.S., fireworks are most easily available in red states. In Red China they are available everywhere and are in fact distributed by the government during the lunar new year. We spent the last day of the new year, which ends with the first full moon of the year, in Chengdu where we had a one-day layover on our way to Kathmandu. Fortunately, we spent it with our wonderful new friends Root and Owen who have lived in the city for several years and took us out for a delicious dinner.
But most important, Root and Owen can speak Chinese and therefore haggle with the fireworks vendors. For only a few hundred Yuan you can buy some serious explosives. And with the vendors help, Owen set off a couple of boom boxes in the middle of the intersection. Afterwards, we headed back to our hosts’s rooftop to enjoy the view of the city. Being the last day of the new years celebration everyone was cleaning out their caches and ringing in the new year. Check out the pics.
