Life in Kathmandu is incredibly conducive to writing a blog... except if you're going on month 3 as a stay-at-home spouse with no pets, children, vehicle, disposable income, or local language skills. Under those circumstances, you may tend more towards drifting from day to day, trying to figure out exactly how you filled the previous 24 hours.
Fortunately, my luck seems to be changing a bit; just last week, both our household effects and vehicle arrived. I cannot say enough about the impact of having all of our personal belongings - from both our limbo year in DC and our previous life in Boston - tucked neatly away in our home. I'm the sort of person who needs to unpack as quickly and completely as half a pot of coffee and 2 cups of Nepali tea will allow; thankfully, Nick's the sort of person who understands how important that kind of unnecessary, slightly manic activity is to me. We have pots, pans, mugs, plates, measuring cups, books in a bookcase - and in all that time, storage, and shipping, we only lost 2 plates and a mug to less than ideal packing conditions. Personally, I consider that to be within the acceptable margin of error for kitchen casualties, given that their total distance traveled was over 8000 miles.
Regarding the arrival of The Bullpen: Aren't you hiring a driver? They ask. You're going to drive yourself in Kathmandu? They ask. Well let me tell you this: after 2 months of walking 15 minutes, often in monsoon rain (monsoon rain = normal rain in excessive quantities, combined with mud, trash, and whatever else may be on the road - and keep in mind, the city is home to legions of street dogs and a sizable number of street cows) to track down a taxi driver with whom to haggle, all the while praying that he has change, as "ATM money" - as it is commonly known in the States - is completely useless in this situation, driving our own vehicle through throngs of motorbikes, tuk tuks, and oh-my-god-people-actually-ride-on-the-tops-of-those buses has made us happier than we ever could have imagined.
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| A mountain pass, and bus, falling precipitously away... |
Finally having the ability to take to the roads, we ventured out on a little driving excursion this past Saturday, and discovered that only a few moments north of KTM valley is the Land of the Lost. Following a single road that climbed endlessly into the hills, snaking around a mostly-paved mountain pass that rose steeply to one side and fell away precipitously to the other, we were genuinely in awe.
After 10 weeks of city living, we were experiencing what we had long-expected central Asia to be: trickling streams down the sides of the mountain that became waterfalls before our eyes as the mist hurried to become late afternoon rain;
shining black water buffalo grazing in the precariously terraced rice patties and corn fields;
and a change in elevation so significant that we began well below cloud cover and within 2 hours emerged into clear day, only to find that the valleys below were shrouded so heavily as to create a sense that something ancient and unexpected was lurking around the next blind bend in the road...
as if our own day and time would be waiting for us upon our eventual descent, but for a single hour above the clouds, we were being allowed into another world.
And apparently, the restaurants in that world serve fresh rainbow trout... maybe next time...
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