we had a superb time in kathmandu! my good nepali friend and apartment-mate from college prajjwal grew up there, so we stayed with his family. i had no idea that his father was a gordon-conwell seminary educated pastor who started from scratch what is now a massive church there that has planted 60 other churches. he is also the country director for about every agency doing good things in nepal, as well as a university architecture professor. they have a really nice house with mosquito nets over the beds (which saved our lives), and we got amazing home-cooked american breakfasts (cooked just for us – apparently nepalis don’t eat breakfast) and nepali dinners along with lots of good discussions in the evenings. as if that wasn’t enough, prajjwal’s brother ujjwal and some of his friends took us on a tour of kathmandu on sunday. all the tourist sites were rather expensive, but they insisted on paying for everything which was very generous of them.
we went to a couple durbar squares – groups of ancient temples. also went to a museum devoted to a late king (since recently there is no longer a monarchy in nepal), and a “monkey” temple complex on top of a big hill with a great view of kathmandu. all the houses are three to eight stories tall, and very distinctively nepali. the streets are all very narrow, except for one big ring road. during the recent maoist strikes tens of thousands of maoists joined hands on the ring road – completely encircling the city so no one could get in or leave unless they were desperate enough to run people over. after our tour i got to go on a long run around prajjwal’s house! in india it had been too hot to even think about running, so i’ve really missed it.
the next day, we got to deal with some more of the stupid, arbitrary bureauracy of the indian government. they just decided to implement this rule that if you leave the country, even though you have a multiple entry visa, you can’t come back for two months. that is, unless you get a special stamp that costs a lot of money and, as we found out, takes a full day of waiting to get. and the rules go on, but this is already probably boring you. you would think that they would understand that making tourists jump through randomly placed hoops of stress will only translate into less tourists and thus money. i haven’t even finished college yet and i can figure that out. anyways, this caused us to miss our bus to the far eastern end of nepal but luckily there was another one later. we took it, arriving 17 hours later in kakhadvitta, nepal, from where we walked across a river into india and caught a bus to silguri, from where we caught a crowded jeep to take us up an infinitely switchbacking road way up into the himalayan hills to an epic best-tea-in-the-world-growing/british hill station/remarkably exotic town called darjeeling!
