China (Part 1): A really interesting place with great trains, amazing cultural heritage, some great and some terribly-functioning systems, and… now, this may come as a shock… a LOT of freaking people!

 

China was not our favorite destination as a whole, but within it, we did see some REALLY incredible things!  The top highlights include The Great Wall and a spectacular Chinese Acrobat show around Beijing; the Terracotta Warriors in Xi’An; the Panda Research Base & Breeding Center in Chengdu; beautiful, top-notch Chinese gardens in Suzhou (near Shanghai); and, for me at least, riding a levitating bullet train in Shanghai.  I think if we had to pick THE one favorite thing for the whole country, though, for both of us, it was definitely the Pandas!

Since we saw so many things in China, I’m gonna have to break this post up into two pieces.  This first one will talk about Hong Kong and Shanghai.  I’ll get to Beijing, Xi’An and Chengdu in the next one, so I don’t overwhelm you.

We begin this post in Hong Kong, where we first arrived in China… sort of.  Since Hong Kong is a weird, Special Economic Zone of China, neither Jime (as a Tica) or me (as a Gringo) needed a visa to visit.  And, since we didn’t have time to get ALL of our visas for this trip while we were in the US, we took this option to land in Hong Kong, and apply for our China visa from there.  We had Jime apply as a Tica, since fees for US Citizens are MUCH higher than for every other nation (because the US charges everybody else too much money). 

Side note:  Speaking of money, Hong Kong is a bit interesting with their money.  Despite the fact that they are officially part of China now, Hong Kong very much still is it’s own place.  Aside from not requiring a visa for me, Hong Kong also has their own money (you know, like Eddie Murphy in “Coming to America”).  But that’s not what’s actually weird.  What’s weird is… their money is printed by PRIVATE banks… THREE DIFFERENT private banks!  I mean, talk about being owned by corporations, in these city, even HSBC can literally print their own money!  It’s so weird to see 3 bills of the same denomination, and then to notice that every single one of them not only looks different, but was printed by a different bank!  Weird!!

(100 Hong Kong Dollars = about $13 US)

Back to the China visa thing, though… we had a bit of a scare about how much of a visa they were actually going to give me.  Despite the websites I read online that said that while 30 days was normal, I could probably even get a 90 day visa, the reality turned out quite different.  The visa agency we hired for rush service said that lately, they had recently been giving gringos only a 15 day visa… whereas we needed at LEAST 30 days, or we were going to be completely screwed.  So, we had ourselves one nice night of worrying what the hell we could do… since our Visa for Vietnam, the next country after China, wasn’t valid until 30 days away anyway.  We’d be in limbo for 2 weeks!  So, when the visa arrived the next day… “The Envelope please…  and the winner goes to… 30 days!  30 days, ladies and gentlemen!”   Woohoo!  Yay for 30 days!!  Yay, we didn’t get screwed!

Aside from the visa roller coaster, we also had some other ups and downs in our two nights there.   For starters, we were unable to find a SINGLE hostel/hotel online that was not fully booked.  But, we didn’t panic.  Jime found on the wikitravel page for Hong Kong that there were a couple different high rise buildings (locally called mansions) just FULL of hostels that don’t have web pages, and that the typical backpacker thing to do was to just show up at the building, start at the top, and work your way down.  So, we did just that. But after a full hour of walking every floor in the 15 story building, we found  NOTHING.   Every single place was either filled up completely, or so ridiculously over-priced as to be out of our budget. 

Eventually, as we were sitting in a hallway, defeated, sweaty, tired and worried, this Indian guy walks up to us and asks if we’re looking for a hotel.  “Yep!”, we say.  He says “OK, I have one over here, if you’d like to see. It’s not big, but you can look at it, and if you like it, you can stay.”  Turns out it was perfect.  It was exactly what we needed:  two beds, AC, a bathroom and a door.  Hell, two beds with or without a door would have been enough at that point!

While we were hanging out in Hong Kong, though, we enjoyed wandering our neighborhood, looking for yummy food.  Our first night out, within about 5 minutes of aimless wandering, we came on this really AMAZING looking noodle house with a giant pot of simmering beef stew in the window.  We could also see, through this window, a whole rack full of barbequed chicken, duck, and pork!  And, when we saw the menu, the prices seemed great.  WIN!  We went in, and they even had an English menu.   We ordered one of the beef stews, and a bowl of BBQ pork with rice.  HOLY COW!  DELICIOUS!   It was one of the best meals we’d had on our entire trip.  The beef soup was rich, meaty, savory and FULL of flavor, since it seemed like it had been stewing for hours.  The pork was perfectly cooked, juicy, and with a sweet glaze on the skin.  AMAZING food! 

Alas, in Shanghai, our next city, good food was much harder to find.  So were English menus, for that matter.  There was a restaurant at our hostel, but it was both over-priced, and under-tasty.  And, sadly, no matter how hard we looked, we couldn’t find any more places like that noodle and BBQ place.  What we DID find, though, was a place called Coco, right across the street from our hostel, that had SUPER yummy juices. 

I don’t know if you’ve seen them, but it was one of those “Bubble Tea”  or “Pearl Tea” places, where they make you drinks that have little tapioca balls in them (they call them pearls).  Well, Jime tried out a really nice combination (that she invented) where they made her a Passion Fruit slushy (como granizado de maracuyá) with the pearls.  To put this drink in perspective… shanghai was HOT.  HOT and HUMID, even at night.  It was almost unbearable… almost worse than India: less heat maybe, but more sweat.  So this drink… it was PERFECT!  It was a strong flavor, ICE cold, super sweet with a little bit of sour, and with the flavor of home from the maracuyá (passion fruit).  Even better, it turned out this juice place was a chain, so there were stores all over the city, on every street corner like Starbucks in the US.  Long story short, we went back here EVERY SINGLE DAY (sometimes twice). It was a good thing we took such good advantage of the place, because after leaving Shanghai, we would never find this store again.  SO SAD!!  Still, while we were in Shanghai, we enjoyed the HELL out of them.

Also in Shanghai, I of course road that High Speed Maglev train.  This is something I’d wanted to do pretty much my whole life, ever since I first read about them in a Popular Mechanics magazine as a boy.   I talked about this already on Facebook, but I’ll repeat myself a bit here [geek alert].  This ride was AWESOME!!   The ride is only about 7 minutes long, and goes from the Shanghai Pudong airport to about 30km into the city.  But… BUT… during that ride, this train… floating on air with freaking MAGNETS… gets up to 431 kph (268mph)!!  That makes it the fastest commercial train in the world, with speeds matching that of a Grand Prix race car.   In a plane, because you’re so high off the ground, you don’t really feel the speed, even though you might be going twice as fast.  Down low to the ground on a train, though (even one up on raised tracks like this one), you definitely DO feel it, especially when you turn a corner!  When the train turns, in order to keep you from being thrown across the cabin, the entire train leans into the curve.  Sure, other fast trains do this too.  But this train, from what I could tell, leans over WAY more than usual!  It felt like we were at least 30° over!  To picture that, think of a clock… 30° is when the minute hand is at 2 o’clock.  In a train… at 431kph.. you FEEL that shit!  Anyway… it was awesome.  It was fun.  We took a round trip, and it was everything I wanted it to be (except that like all fun rides, it was over way too soon).

Also while we were in Shanghai, Jime learned that we were really close to a city called Suzhou, which just happened to contain a LOT of classic Chinese Gardens, including two of the top four in the whole country.  And, with China’s lovely high speed train network, we could get there with just a 30 minute train ride!

The reality of getting there took MUCH longer than 30 minutes of course, but I won’t go into that here.  We did get there though, and over two days, we saw three gardens!  The first one we saw was the Lingering Garden.  As the wiki page mentions, this is one of the largest gardens around, and it was HUGE!  It was also gorgeous.  When you first walk in, you see this gigantic main pond.  This pond is truly spectacular and right off, we bought ourselves a couple popsicles and just sat down on a while and enjoyed them while staring out at the tranquil beauty.   This one front area is already bigger than the entire grounds of the Chinese Garden in Portland. 

After taking our time there and just quietly enjoying the place and looking at the koi in the pond, we wandered on to see the rest. It was pretty, definitely, but you know what? With all that… we still felt like it wasn’t quite capturing the magic the way the Portland Chinese Garden does. We couldn’t put our finger on it, exactly (we still can’t), but… even with all of the magnificent old buildings, perfectly restored, and with all the trees and bamboo and river rock… it just didn’t have quite the same magic that the Portland Chinese Garden has.

What they DO have, though, is a really AMAZING collection of Bonsai trees.  In fact, they have a whole area of the garden, specially dedicated to just that.  And some of them are truly spectacular and amazing!

The next day, we actually saw two gardens.  We started out at a smaller one called Master of the Nets.  This is another garden that, while maybe not one of THE TOP FOUR, is still very highly regarded.  So, experts on Chinese Gardens agree, it’s a fantastic garden.  We, however, are apparently not experts.  For us, it felt a little empty, and somewhat lacking in charm. I think maybe either it was just too hot outside (which is was), or maybe we just have different tastes.   We actually didn’t spend very much time in this one, because we wanted to make sure we didn’t miss the last one, which was going to be another huge one, and another of the THE TOP FOUR:  The Humble Administrator’s Garden.

The Humble Administrator’s Garden, at long last, finally blew us away.  THIS garden was FANTASTIC!  Just like the Lingering Garden, you get your best view right when you walk in.  The main difference is… this one was “correct”.  The balance on the pond was better… both big gardens had lots of lotus plants everywhere, but… at the Lingering Garden, they were so bunched up and out of control that you couldn’t see anything.  This Humble Administrator’s Garden, though, knew a little something about proportion.  There were nice little clusters of lotus here and there, but they didn’t completely dominate the whole pond.  Also, this one had a lot of little bridges crisscrossing all over the place.  While crossing one of the bridges, we saw not just a fish, but an EEL popped up to say hello.  Hello Eel!    

Aside from the beautiful ponds and better balance of life and building and the many more trees and shade from the sun, this garden also had many little mini stages with people playing traditional Chinese instruments.  We spent about 30 minutes in one room, just listening to one woman after another play truly BEAUTIFUL music on a Chinese harp (or zither), called (I think) a Guzhang.  Whatever it was called, the women who played it had me completely mesmerized.    At the end of the day, we jumped on our train back to Shanghai.

Back in Shanghai, we enjoyed a couple museums and a nice view to finish off our visit to this city.  The first museum was the Shanghai Museum.  For starters, this museum is free, so that’s always a plus.  But beyond that, this is one of the greatest museums we’ve ever seen.  It’s well-laid out, had great signs, many floors, and some pretty incredible different collections.  Our favorite, or at least the one we spent most of our time in, was the collection of Bronze Age objects.  Some were art, some were weapons, some were ceremonial bowls.  What really blows you away is how amazing all of these pieces are (both in terms of the original skill that went into making them as well as how incredibly well they are preserved/restored) considering that the oldest pieces in there are more than 4,000 years old!!  Holy CRAP! These people were casting metal alloys with artistic value 1,500 years before Socrates was wetting his diapers.   After a few thousand years at this, you might say they got pretty decent at it.

The other exhibits in the museum were also really impressive, of course.  One of our other favorites was an exhibit on the traditional clothing of some of the minority tribes.  I think our brains were pretty well melted after the bronze exhibit, though, so we sort of floated through the rest of the museum a bit faster.

The last museum we saw in town was the Urban Planning Museum.  It was neat.  There’s a lot of high tech stuff, and some nice drawings, and some nice stories about how the city started planning its space.  The biggest spectacle in the building, though, has to be this gigantic miniature model of the whole city.  It’s FRIGGIN HUGE!  Not only that, but somebody (many somebodies) actually spent the time to make individual models of EVERY SINGLE building in the city!  That is some SERIOUS attention to detail!  Amusingly, every so often, they turn off the lights in that room, and the city lights up.  It’s cute.

Speaking of planning, Shanghai is an INCREDIBLY well planned city.  As far as the subway goes specifically, that has got to be THE best organized, best explained, and beautifully-functioning transit system we’ve ever seen.  For that matter, even the busses were organized, and you could use the same pre-paid card for both bus and subway, but I’m going to talk about the subway specifically here.  At this point, we’ve seen a LOT of metro and subway systems.  We we were already impressed by the Budapest metro system, but this was easily the best we’ve ever seen.  Here are some things that make it awesome:

* It move a LOT of people.  There are trains every 2-5 minutes, and every train is fast and carries thousands of people.

* You can pay many different ways.  You can buy one-trip tokens, or a pre-paid card with money on it, or a 24-hour pass ( I think a week pass too, but I’m not sure).   You can buy (or refill) those passes from human agents, or from machines that have VERY good and easy instructions in both Chinese and English.

* The paths from one part of the station to another are clearly marked, even color-coded (i.e. everything for Line 1 is red, Line 2 is green, etc).  There are signs EVERYWHERE (even on the floor) letting you know where you are, and which way the various other trains are, and even what attractions might be upstairs, and which exits to take to be closest to them.  Even the trains themselves matched the color codes (i.e. the seats and hand-holds were all color-coded to match their number)!

* The entire subway stations, both upstairs and downstairs on the train platforms, are VERY well air conditioned.  It might be 40C outside, but in there, it’s a cool breeze.

* There are stores and restaurants in many stations, include our favorite place, Coco.  On a hot day (so, pretty much every day we were there), there is nothing better than A/C and a Coco.

* The stations are clean… like, you could almost “eat off the floor” clean (though not quite, because every now and again, you’d see a parent holding up their tiny child to pee on the floor).  People are constantly sweeping and picking up trash.

* Waiting areas for boarding the trains are clearly marked, both where to get on, and with arrows showing people to let folks getting off the trains go out the middle, and folks getting on the trains enter from the sides.

* The routes of all the trains were mapped like a ring with spokes, and covered the entire city VERY efficiently, with many chances to transfer easily from one train to another.

All subways/light rail systems should work this well.  The level of organization was just a thing of beauty.  While many systems in China do NOT work, this one at least is a shining example for the whole world of how to do it RIGHT.

As a last stop, to wrap up our visit to this city, we walked over from the Planning Museum to the tallest building we could see, some Hyatt Hotel.  Shanghai has several spectacularly tall buildings in it, including the Shanghai World Financial Center, which, at 492m, made it the 2nd tallest building in the world back in 2007.  Alas, those pudknockers want to charge about $25 to go up there.  Jime and I both love a good view, but we were NOT going to pay almost $50 just to ride a damned elevator. So, we went to this very tall hotel, which was almost as good, has a giant, 360 degree view from a bar and restaurant at the top, and was completely free to ride up and look.  It was definitely a great view!  And even nicer without paying $50 for it.

And then it was off to Beijing!   We got ourselves a lovely ride on yet another high speed train.  And, while it may not have been floating on magnets, or quite as fast as that maglev train, it was STILL awesome, and still quite fast, at up to 350 kph (220mph).  This made a 5 hour trip out of what other trains take up to 13 hours to complete.  AND.. the train was PRETTY!  Dig it.  :)

(Is it just me, or does that thing scream “Cylon” to you?)

Please enjoy the full photo set for this post here:  http://alexjimenartw.shutterfly.com/pictures/1718

Nepal

Especially after India, Nepal has been a big slow-down in pace for us. In fact, it’s almost a shame, because we feel a little bit like we haven’t seen much here. That’s not quite true, but it does feel that way.

One of the reasons we feel like we haven’t seen much is the weather. You see, Nepal is at the foothills of the Himalayas. There are parts of the country that, on a good day, you can get your mind completely blown by just how CLOSE this whole string of magnificently gigantic mountains is to you. Unfortunately, July/August is the heart of Monsoon season here. And, while monsoon season right next door in India means unbearable heat, high humidity and blistering sunny days, here in Nepal it means near perpetual cloud cover, and lots of rain (not aguaceros like in Costa Rica, but still plenty of water). On the plus side, it means there are very few other tourists here. On the down side, it also means that, despite some pretty valiant efforts, we’ve only really gotten a tiny peek at the Himalayas.

Culturally, there are definitely similarities with India, but the feel is VERY different.  For example, there were a lot of women wearing Kurtas, just like in India, but in Nepal they more typically wear them with jeans, and almost nobody wears Saris.  Also, in Nepal, the male/female ratio on the street is pretty well even, whereas in India, it was something like 75-80% men in some places.

As far as the streets and cars go, both India and Nepal (at least many of the cities we went to) have fairly small, narrow streets with no sidewalks, and the cars and motorcycles are always trying to fight their way through.  In contrast with India, though, Nepali drivers honk a LITTLE bit less, and to my ears, definitely less aggressively (usually sort of a *meep meep* instead of a *HOOOOOOOOOOOOONK!*).  Most of all, though, the TRASH level is MUCH better in Nepal.  I’m not saying there’s no trash on the ground, but there’s definitely a strong effort to clean it up.  In India, trash was everywhere, along with shit from all manner of animals, from dogs to cows to people (and even sometimes elephants).

Speaking of the streets of Nepal, one interesting thing is that they don’t seem to have any traffic lights… ANYWHERE.  At intersections, in off-peak times, everybody just eases their way through, and everybody just… melts on by.  In heavy traffic, some busier intersections have traffic cops standing on big platforms right in the middle, pretending that they’re helping.

Back to the season thing though… there ARE some nice advantages to being in monsoon season here. For one, it’s the off season, so all the hotels are MUCH cheaper than normal. Also, they’re more available, so we can pretty much have our pick of the rooms (within our budget). Even the souvenir stands that line every street corner here in Kathmandu are suffering so heavily from lack of business that you can pretty much name your price! These guys are desperate to sell. That doesn’t mean they don’t all start off TRYING to rip you off, but once you put your back into it and start the serious negotiation it works out well. Needless to say (but I will anyway), we got ourselves a couple really nice deals. :)

We have seen a few cool things here, though. In the Kathmandu valley, one of our first little outings was to see Swayambhunath Temple, the Monkey Temple. It wasn’t quite as crawling with monkeys as I thought it might be, but it was still pretty neat. The temple is pretty old, from around 500 AD. I don’t know how many (if any) of the buildings we saw are from then (they don’t look it), but the site itself is pretty ancient, and is one of the holiest places of the local (Newari) Buddhists. Also, it’s up on a hill, so it has a pretty nice view of the Kathmandu valley below.

Shortly after that, I got one of the worst illnesses of my life, with a massive fever of at least 103F/39.4C. I also had sudden and massive chills that came on in a matter of seconds (which was both weird and quite disturbing). I won’t list the rest of the symptoms, because they’re more unpleasant, but let’s just say it was ugly for a couple days. Jime found a really great international clinic for me, and in the morning, as soon as I felt like I could leave the room for long enough to reach the clinic, we went there. After a check-up and some tests, the Doctor (who happily was very nice and spoke very good English) told me I had a bacterial infection and gave me antibiotics and some drugs for the fever. While I was still in the clinic, I felt like death warmed over. The doctor said I would probably feel better within 3 days. As it happens, within HOURS of taking the pills, I felt MUCH better. By the next day, I felt downright human, and even got hungry again. Soooo… we lost a few days there, but no biggie. The room is nice, and also cheap!

Around this time, we did a bit more research into our next planned destination, which was China and Tibet. After a lot of reading, we finally realized that Tibet was just not in the cards for us, this time.

When I first researched the Tibet part a few months ago, I knew that we were going to need a special permit, and that they COULD reject us. When I checked back in later, I found an article saying China was planning on removing the special restriction entirely from visiting Tibet, but that it wouldn’t happen until after we were gone. So, too bad for us, but at least things were looking up.

This time, though, the news got worse. Rather than making things easier, China went ahead and made it MUCH more difficult for foreigners to visit Tibet. To go there, you need to A) Apply for the special permit, B) be approved to travel with a minimum of FIVE people… C) from your same nationality and that D) you must all enter AND exit the area at the same time, and finally E) that this whole application process can take up to 10 days (if you’re lucky), during which time you can’t leave the place you’re staying (because you never know when you might get called in or approved).

So… alas… no Tibet for us. That meant that this Nepal trip was going to be the only chance we had to see the Himalayas. No more train riding up in the clouds past the base of Mt Everest. DANG! Oh well, at least we have Nepal! So, we decided that if Nepal was it, we would go ahead and extend our Visa (and our plane tickets) to stay here an extra week (about the amount of time we WOULD have spent traveling to and from Tibet). Fortunately, this was fairly easy, and while not cheap, was at least less money than we would have spent on the Tibet trip.

While researching Nepal, Jime had found out that the second most popular destination (and second largest city) here is in another valley, and is called Pokhara. Not only that, but she also found out that Pokhara is supposed to be a pretty PHENOMENAL place from which to see the Himalayas. Also, the whole area has a reputation for being just amazingly beautiful, and has a really nice lake in the center of town that’s very popular to rent boats on. They say “if you haven’t seen Pokhara, you haven’t seen Nepal.”

So, we packed up some mini-travel gear in our day-bags, left our big packs here in Kathmandu at the hotel’s storage area (which, happily, was both safe and free), and hopped on a bus to Pokhara! The bus was supposed to take about 8 hours, including a couple stops for breakfast and lunch. Alas, on the way there, we hit some pretty ugly traffic, and at one point got stuck, stopped dead, for about 2 hours. We have no idea why, exactly, but it didn’t really matter. Being stuck for 2 hours always sucks. As it happens, the same thing happened on the way back, only it was more like 3 hours, and it was extra brutal because it happened when we were only about 15 km from arrival! I got the impression this may be a regular thing.

We finally did arrive, and Pokhara is indeed a VERY beautiful area! In fact, it reminded both of us quite a bit of Costa Rica. In fact, the whole country does. It’s a country with a wide diversity of climates, including tropical and sub-tropical, with a big central valley, high above sea level, and ringed by mountains. Pokhara especially (which is Sub-tropical, according to Wiki) was INCREDIBLY green. On one side of the lake, it’s every bit as green as the forests around Volcán Arenal. The difference here is that the rivers and low hillsides are all covered in rice paddies. In fact, the second half of the bus ride down here was practically a never-ending line of one rice paddy after another. BEAUTIFUL!

Our second morning in Pokhara, we got up very early, before dawn, and went up to the roof to watch the sunrise over the Himalayas. This was why we came, and we weren’t gonna miss it! Much like Retes (Jime’s family’s farm in Costa Rica), the clouds drop down in the early morning, so it can be your best chance for a good view of the mountains. The hotel manager told us the same thing, so up we went. Well, it wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty freakin’ incredible. Over the course of the 2.5 hours or so that we were up there, we never got a perfect, complete view of the whole range at once, but we did get very good views of one or two mountains at a time, and eventually we saw pretty much everything there was to see (bit by bit).

After that, we did some more reading, and asking around, and learned that there was another hill city close by, called Sarangkot, that was the highest point around the valley, and had a perfect, unobstructed view of the mountains. So, we found ourselves a room, hired a cab, and up we went! Sadly, the cab couldn’t (or just wouldn’t) take us all the way up, due to the road conditions, so we ended up hiking a very steep kilometer, which Jime especially did not enjoy. But once we got there, we were the only guests at the hotel we’d chosen (which we picked for the reputation of their view), so they gave us the best room in the house, way out in the corner.

The view from our room was simply SPECTACULAR! Alas, it was not of the mountains, but rather of the valley below. It seems almost none of the hotels up there can actually see the mountains. For that, you have to hike up to a view point at the top of the hill. Still, our room was on the corner of the building, on the edge of the hill, and we had an amazing view of the Pokhara valley, with the lake laid out wide in one direction, and a river snaking away into the hills in the other direction. We looked down on clouds, and hawks, and on paragliders jumping off and soaring below us.

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Brief Interlude:

From this point on, I’m writing this post on a 19 hour “Express” train from Hong Kong to Shanghai. We have a room called a “Soft Sleeper”, and it is AWESOME! This is a GREAT way to travel! We have power, AC, TV, a window, comfortable beds with sheets and pillows, free hot water (for soup and tea), and best of all, it’s QUIET. I’m sitting here in my PJ’s, typing on a table. LOVE it!
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As for the View Point though, that was quite a hike indeed to get to. We had to climb up 293 stairs (yes, we counted)! We woke up well before dawn our first morning in Sarangkot, and started the hike up the hill. It took us probably about 30 minutes total to get there. Aside from being a LOT of stairs, they were also very BIG stairs… over-sized… so each step was extra work. Also, they were all wet, because this hilltop was up in the clouds. Plus, it was.. you know… monsoon season.

Eventually, we made our way to the top, and found some lovely benches there so we could relax, catch our breath, and wait for the sun (like a pair of suicidal vampires). When it did come up, unfortunately, we saw pretty much just clouds covering the entire mountain range, as far as the eye could see. We had hopes that the clouds would move, like they did they other day, but alas, not really. We stayed up there for a good 2 hours, and we did see one pretty clean mountain (the sharp peak of the holy Fishtail Mountain: so holy that nobody is allowed to climb it), but that was about it for the Himalayas. In the other direction, though, was an AMAZING view of the valley below, even better than from our room! It was really neat being able to look down on the low clouds floating below us, and seeing the dawn sunlight reflecting and sparkling off the rivers and lake.

After we finally called it quits for the morning, and after we hiked back down the 293 stairs, we got back to our room, started to get ready to go back to bed, and I saw something on my ankle. EEEEEE! GET IT OFF! GET IT OFF!!

It was a LEECH! (sanguijuela) And a FAT one! A more rational person than I… may have reacted calmly and appropriately, and perhaps burned it off or used medicine or something. Not me. Sorry. Rational had left the building. I swatted the fucker right off and smashed it with my shoe.

In retrospect, smashing a blood-fattened leech on the floor of our hotel room was probably not the wisest choice I could have made. Of course it exploded and left a lovely dark mark on the carpet. Fortunately, this hotel was not perfectly clean to begin with, and the carpet was already fairly dark. Nobody would notice.

Also, as it happens… leeches don’t die that easy. By hitting it with my shoe, all I did was stain the carpet, and annoy the leech. At this point, though, I was able to have some brain return to my body (not much, mind you, just a little), so I found a piece of paper to pick up the little blood sucker and THEN squished it but good. Jime then kindly took it from me to go flush down the toilet, just to be thorough. It may still be alive out there, but at least it ain’t in my world no more.

Jime was kind enough to put a band-aid on me, but of course, leeches have anticoagulant in their spit, so my little ankle hole didn’t stop bleeding for a while. Fortunately, the band-aid kept it mostly under control, but when we both got our brains back, we realized we probably should have washed it off first (you know, to get rid of that anticoagulant stuff so it would STOP bleeding sooner). Whatever. I didn’t want to think about it any more.

After that mostly failed mountain viewing day, we decided to try again the next morning, but alas, the entire mountain was covered in cloud, a complete white out (we couldn’t even see out of our window). Same thing the next day, but add in rain. Eventually, we had to give up. This was the main thing we had hoped to see in Nepal, and was THE reason we had come all the way to Pokhara, so it was a hard decision to make, but we couldn’t stay up on this mountain forever. I checked the weather report, and it said we could expect thunderstorms every single day well into the future. Oh well. Back down the mountain we went.

We did do one nice thing while we were down in the valley. We rented a row boat for a day, and spent the whole day on the lake, and I rowed Jimena all around from one end to the other. :) I got a nice little ab work-out doing it. We both got some nice sun, some really pretty pictures of the forest around the lake, and we both had a really nice, relaxing day on the water.

In one area, Jime spotted us a really beautiful and very large Golden Orb Weaver spider. She knows I love critters, so she had me get our boat close, and she got me some really great close-ups! A bit later, I spotted a really pretty little blue and brown bird, so we went chasing that guy around for a little while until we could get a nice shot of him. Other than that, we just had a great time rowing around slowly, seeing all the sights, and taking a wee break for a picnic on the water. It’s truly a beautiful place!

(After some searching, I believe it’s a White-throated Kingfisher)

On the way back to the boat dock, since it was so nice and hot outside, and since I was so warm from my lovely Ab workout, I finally gave in to temptation and jumped overboard for a little swim. I couldn’t be this close to such cool, fresh water, and not get in! Also, I had seen plenty other people in the water, so I figured it was safe enough. It… was… WONDERFUL! The water was indeed cool (not too cold), beautifully refreshing, and just what the doctor ordered to cool me down. I miss swimming!

We went back to Kathmandu the next day.  With only a few more days in town, we were out of time for big trips, but we did see a couple other local sights.  One of those sights was a town called Patan.   Patan is an ancient city, seemingly preserved completely, so that when you walk through it, it’s like walking back in time.  There are multiple temples, large and small, and dozens of old buildings with incredible wood work.

In the center of the old city, where they used to crown royalty in Nepal (or at least used to) but is now converted into a really neat museum.  The museum has great examples of old Newari Buddhist and Hindu statues, including a nice demonstration of how the various metal-working techniques were performed.  Included in that exhibit are really nice explanations for what the various symbolism MEANS in all those statues (i.e., for Buddhist statues,  hand placement is very significant, and there are several very common positions that mean specific things.  There’s also a really cool section with artistically carved roof braces, with a little bit of story to explain what the symbols on those represent as well.  They even have a nice section that explains how they use that very knowledge of what all the symbolism means to identify each piece when they find it.. to tell who it’s supposed to be, and what it probably meant to the person who made it.

Elsewhere in the town are a couple particularly popular temples, including one called the Golden Temple, which has, oddly (to us) a turtle walking through it.  I believe the temple has something to do with revering the turtle as a sort of a totem, but I didn’t read its history before I got there.  In any case, the temple had statues for monkeys, elephants, turtles, lions and more.  The statues were pretty incredible, and the wood carving on the temple building itself (windows included) was just gorgeous!

On our last day in town, our flight out was VERY late (11:30pm), so we spent the day seeing one last local site. We went to a place called the Boudhanath Stupa. A Stupa is basically a large, dome-shaped holy site for Nepali and Tibetan Buddhists, and this one is of the biggest ones in the country. It was a neat, last little bit of culture, and a lovely way to wrap up our trip.

After that, it was off to Hong Kong! And that, my friends, is where I shall leave you for now.

For your convenience, here is the full set of pictures for this post: 
http://alexjimenartw.shutterfly.com/pictures/1579