Funny, funny (looking back)

The other day I had an...episode  I guess you could call it.  For the past week or so I've been sort of frustrated about I have no idea what, but nontheless the feeling was there.  I had been sort a pretty big Mr. Grumpypants for a while, and a bunch of 10th graders were staying at my house to take their end of 10th year exams.  They were all very nice, but still just added some stress.  Anyways, my friend got an iPhone from her brother in the UK and was having some trouble with it.  I kept telling her that she needed a 3G sim card to get it to work, but she insisted that she didn't.  Okay, well that was that I thought.
Nope.
She talked to people and got the internet turned on so the phone technically had access to internet, but normal cell signal is way too slow to run any smartphone apps.  So she came to me again and was like, it has internet signal but is still not working.  At the moment, I didn't have the patience to try to figure out how to explain the difference in signal speeds, so I just said, "Yeah, you need a 3G card."  And again she started arguing about it, and I kept repeating that you need a 3G card while getting super frustrated so my voice kept getting louder.  Then another guy came in and she basically just started telling him about our argument and how much of an idiot I am because cell signal is cell signal.  So I just yelled, "ahhhh!!!" and then had an extremely strong urge to be out of the house before I exploded, so I turned around and went running out of the house.

As I went running out of the house my flip flops went flying off, and stopping to pick them up was not an option in my very, very oddly frazzled state of mind.  Oh yes, did I mention it was fairly late at night.  So I got sprinting out of the house with no shoes on and off down the road.  I must of been quite a site as I went running by people's houses.  "What the hell is that crazy white kid doing now?"

I went up to a temple and just sat, and enjoyed the quiet for a while.  Then I heard the distinctive sound of a motorcycle, and saw that one of the people staying at my house and my host dad had gone out looking for me.  So I walked back.

Boy, that was emabarrassing.  Why did I get so invested in this person's problem?  It really makes no difference to me if she can use the internet or not, right?  Well, whatever.  They all think I am totally crazy now, and are very leery of talking to me about their phones.  At the time, it wasn't funny, but shortly after I just started laughing to myself about how silly I must have looked.

Mustang (not the horse or the car)

I’ve noticed that a number of people are reading my blog so I’d just like to say that the following post is, of course, completely fabricated.

This past week there were a few Hindu holidays so a friend of mine planned a nice trek up the Mustang Valley.  I jumped at the chance to go see a new place, and to take a break from life in Mallaj.  The trip was spectacular, but as usual, there were a couple times we were definitely flying using only my good luck, and maybe a little charm.

Two other volunteers and I met up in Beni on a Thursday evening and acquired some supplies and then stayed the night at one of my friend’s house.  It turns out that my friend’s husband works at a bus ticket counter so he was able to get us the non-tourist price as well as one free ticket.  We took a nice short four hour ride to get 20 km up river to a town called Ghasa which is where we wanted to start from.  Two hours into the ride we stopped at a tourist checkpoint where we were told to get off the bus and show our TIMS permit.  Well naturally we did not have one of these so I just said, “Hi there, we are volunteers.”  I was asked for a Volunteer ID card, which I do have, and that seemed to work.  So off we went.  At Ghasa we got our things together and petted a nice snow leopard (tan dog on which someone had kindly added black paint spots).  Walking through the town we were stopped at another tourist checkpoint and asked for our Annapurna Conservation Area permit, which again we did not have.  So again, “Hi there, we are volunteers.”  This time I was met by a look that seemed to say, “AAANNNNDDD??”  Shit.  These permits are found in Pokhara, but we all live past Pokhara by several hours in the direction of Mustang Valley, so we never went there to get one at a reasonable price.  They were asking a lot for a permit on the spot, and were not budging on the price or the necessity of this permit.

Now it’s time to make a few excuses.  I actually think permitting is a great idea, and paying for a permit almost always goes into protecting the place you are going against the hordes of people that visit.  But here’s what happened: the people at the checkpoint were being pretty grumpy which was making me grumpy and hot headed and after what seemed like a long time, but was probably only a minute or two of arguing I just threw up my hand and said, “Fine, trip cancelled!!”  And then proceeded to storm out of the building leaving my poor bewildered friends no choice but to follow.  We walked about 200 yards back down the path to where I had spotted a nice trail winding up into the woods at which point I told my friends, “I think it would be best if we just snuck around the checkpoint.”  So we did.  The trail, of course, quickly degenerated into some pretty world class bushwhacking, but after about an hour of sneaking (crashing) through the woods we ended up on the other side of town and more importantly on the other side of the checkpoint.  At this point I finally realized that we were going to have to come back this way and our plan was to take a bus back so we were going to have to deal with that checkpoint again and the workers probably weren’t going to be too stoked about seeing us again without a permit coming the other way.  Hmmmm…

We continued up the road/trail for a ways and were quickly greeted by a nice view of one of the shoulders of Dhaulagiri. 

 

The trail went into an extremely lovely pine wood for a quite a while in which there was some flower blooming that smelled really good.  A short while later we stopped for a break and read in the trekking book we had that in September the villagers in that area see Himalayan Bears. Google them, they look so, so snuggly!!

I didn't take this picture.  From Google.

 

looking North from our break spot.

 

nearing the end of the first day, looking south down the valley.  Neat braided stream!

 

After another hour or so, we came to our goal for the day and found a little hotel to stay in.  Right now is off season so a lot of the hotels are closed and the ones that are open are definitely looking for business.  Our plan was to eat dinner there and then head out to the woods to sleep, but there was only one lady running the kitchen so the food took a while and after tasting her apple pie we decided that we wanted to stay and eat breakfast there in the morning for the apple pie.  My friends mingled with the other guests and I went to the kitchen and helped the lady make everyone’s dinner.  She was very grateful for the help, but when it came time to settle the bill she didn’t cut us much slack.  She was very nice and friendly the whole time and jokingly called me a beggar for asking for a discount so we still felt good about the stay.

That morning the clouds had cleared and we could see some of the enormous peaks that we were surrounded by which gave us some energy and excitement for hiking up towards the Dhaulagiri Icefall. 

Morning light looking towards Tukche Ri.

Tukche Ri

 

This was not part of the original plan, but when I heard it was an option I cast my vote to take the time to go up there and my fellow Coloradan quickly sided with me.  The person who made the plan was planning on just checking out the Buddhist culture and temples in the area, but was just as happy to go see the icefall.  We made it to Sekung Lake at around 9000ft and ditched a pack there with our camping gear since we were planning on returning there to camp in the evening.  While we were sitting there a nice yak herd came wandering up to cool off in the lake.  A sign informed us that in April there is a yak blood drinking ceremony at the lake.

A yak! With a yak bell.

Yaks!

Friends and Yaks, looking towards Nilgiri.

 

We continued up and ran into another yak herd around 10,500ft but this one contained a very small yak puppy!

A little fuzzy Yak puppy!

Up we continued.  One of friends has a bad ankle which was giving her some trouble and around 11,500ft we started hitting some snow and the trail got a little more uneven, so she opted to turn around and wait for us at the yak herder’s hut where the yak puppy was probably still sleeping in the sun.

Nilgiri

Annapurna I

A Friend and Nilgiri

My other friend (from CO) and I kept going up and up. 

Summer Yak herder huts around 12,000ft

 

I set a turnaround time at 3, and around 2:30 we were at 12,600ft and were starting a nice pattern of continuous post holing in the snow. 

Standing a harder section of snow, Nilgiri starting to sock in.

 

The weather had socked in, and we were still 1000ft from the icefall viewpoint.  We stopped and had snack while it started to gently snow on us. 

A socked in Nilgiri, but the peaks are still above these measley spring T-storms.

Looking towards the icefall.

Enjoying the mountains in some pretty incredible terrain.

 

Then back down to meet our friend and like any good trip through the soft spring snow in the mountains involved some penguining!  It was so great to be up in the mountains again!

Penguining!

No need for skis on this here powder snow, face shots!

At the lake it started to rain and I thought we should find a place to camp, eat dinner thinking by then it would stop raining.  We got a nice fire going using some of the gas from my stove to help the wet wood along, and then ate a nice dinner of oatmeal.  It was still raining after dinner so we retreated to some shed thing we found along the trail.

The morning dawned clear finding us in the middle of some very nice mountains. 

 

After a nice breakfast of oatmeal we were on our way again.  The weather held for a couple hours, but after that it rained the rest of the day and the view of the mountains left when the rain came.  It gave me a better chance to look at our more immediate surroundings.  The valley bottom is scrubland and reminds me a lot of the desert southwest in the US.  There were a lot of Pinõn pine trees and the hillsides were covered in scrub for a thousand feet or so at which point the vegetation switched to big pine forests.

Crossing a nice suspension bridge in the drizzle.

The valley floor

We passed through an old Tibetan refugee camp, and shortly after reached a town called Marpha.  At the first hotel we stopped at the owner seemed unprepared for guests as it was off season so while my friends sat and drank some tea I continued on to find another place.  I randomly picked one and quickly imposed my presence in their kitchen where I struck up a conversation with the owner/cook lady who used to work in health development and so we immediately had a connection.  She said she would give us a volunteer discount and everyone was very friendly.  On top of that there were a lot of other tourists there so the place was clearly in go mode.  I fetched my friends and we settled in. 

Checking out a Buddhist Monestary

I offered my help in the kitchen and they were pleased but didn’t need anything at that time.  I told them to call me if they needed help.  They said, “in fact, five of our rooms have been without electricity for 10 days.  There was a short in the wiring, and the electrician hasn’t come.  This is Nepal, so he keeps saying ‘I’ll come tomorrow,’ then the next day ‘I’ll come tomorrow.’  Can you look at it?”  “Sure,” I said.  They showed me the spot where the sparks were coming from when it was shorting, and I pried some rotten wood off and found some very old, fried wiring on which the crappy tape job had disintegrated.  I tested the wires with the back of my hand and found that none of them were live.  So I grabbed one quickly discovering that I had not tested completely after shocking the shit out of myself.  At this point the power in the town went out, and then we flipped a few main breakers that were located around the building.  I went to work on stripping the wires and cleaning up the fried parts.  Again I got lucky as it turned out because we later found out that none of the breakers actually did anything so I was playing with wires that could have become live at any point.  We found this out when the power came back on and I when I touched any other wires together you could see some small sparks come off.  After trying a few more breakers and fuses around the building I just asked for a pair of decent gloves and attached the live wires and taped them up using those.  This worked and all the lights came on in the rooms that didn’t have light. 

While I was doing this my friends were taking to a guy from New Zealand who was an electrician and they mentioned he could probably help me out, but he said he didn’t want to get near that shit.  I don’t blame him.  All of the connections were done with poorly wrapped electrical tape with lots random wires going every which way.  Also, the wires I was working with were pretty main lines coming from the outside power lines and those were probably only 14 or 16 gauge wires.  Anyways, the lady was extremely grateful and gave us a free homemade apricot juice and a free piece of apple pie.  Honestly, it is great to get an extra discount for helping out, but I truly enjoy getting involved with the places I am staying here.  I get to have some interesting experiences and I just really, really like interacting with Nepalese.  I can’t put my finger on it, but I just get along very well with probably 90% of the people I meet here.  The rest of our stay was full of yummy food and good company, and I left that hotel the next morning 15 dollars poorer, but a couple friends richer.

Niligiri casting some cool shadows in the early morning light

Zoom in of the summit area of Nilgiri.

We missed our 8:30 bus as it was actually on time so we ended up waiting until noon for a bus to come.  Getting tickets in this town was work.  The lady even called ahead for us and told them to give us a discount, but they didn’t want to.  The man was very grumpy and while I was trying to get him to lower the price my voice was definitely rising, so I walked out and we talked to some of the other Nepalese who were waiting for the bus with us.  They sided with us and told us to send one of the ladies I was with to go in to haggle.  We did so, and this worked.  The bus came and we hopped on checking out some spectacular views.  I had to look almost straight up to see some of the summit areas on the peaks surrounding what is supposedly the deepest valley on Earth which is sandwiched between the 8,000m monster, Dhaulagiri, and the 8,000m Annapurna I which boasts are pretty impressive 40% mortality rate of climbers.

Nilgiri

The Dhaulagiri Icefall from the valley floor with some strong winds whipping snow off of a false summit of Dhaulagiri.

Later we arrived in the town at which we had snuck around the tourist checkpoint.  All the white people or their guides had to get off the bus to check in.  I got off, and just sort of loitered around the bus at a distance hoping I wouldn’t be recognized as the jackass that had stormed out of the building three days earlier.  When a group of tourists came out I just sidled back into their line and got back on the bus and off we went!  We had to switch to a jeep in that town in which we spent three more hours with 11 of our closest friends (so 12 people total).  Cramped (or snuggly perhaps?), but uneventful.  As usual an awesome adventure with some great experiences and good friends.

Some pictures of recent happenings

After a long storm, clouds clearing:

I thought the light on the clouds was nifty

 

Pre-storm winds (Annapurna range)

I also have been going to some Mother's group "mother child nutrition" trainings:





A long day

The other day was interesting and extremely frustrating at times.  I was told by my counterpart that my supervisor that is based out of Kushma wanted to meet with me the next day and that we would leave early in the morning.  Then he left and I didn’t see him the rest of the day.  Well, “early in the morning” in Nepal can mean anything from 4 AM to 11AM.  So, I just put it from my mind and figured I go about my normal routine until it was time to go.  My counterpart came and woke me up around 7:30 which is about when I normally get up, so big deal.  He informs me that we would be leaving in 15 minutes, and “did you forget what I said yesterday?”  “No, I didn’t.  Okay, I’ll see you at your house.”  I get up and am ready to go, but of course I can’t leave the house without drinking tea first!  Heaven forbid!  So I show up like 25 minutes after he got me up.  He says that the ambulance is coming which we will be traveling in, and we are also waiting on a sick person who will also be going with us in the ambulance.  We will be dropped in Kushma, and the sick person will go on to Pokara for treatment.  Then we sit and drink tea again.  I ask what happened to the sick person, and it turns out she fell from a tree.  Anyways, we sit and some time passes.  I wander back home to help my host father carry some stuff, and now it is around 9:30 AM.  The ambulance shows up and the sick person as well.  Well the woman who fell from the tree is like a 65 or 70 year old!  So, I sit in a little broken jump seat, the husband sits on a stool on the floor, the woman sits/lies on the bed/my counterpart has the front seat and then there is the driver.  A little crowded, I’m not so sure I should be on the ambulance.  I feel like the family should have priority, but I just sit quietly.  The lady has had no treatment, and I’m thinking maybe she should be given some wraps or something to make her more comfortable.  Something I’ve had training and can do.  We are on the road now, and the ambulance obviously has no supplies in it.  Why would an ambulance have medical supplies?

The ambulance: a TATA Ambulance.  It has been beaten and broken over the years.  The back door doesn’t open so anyone who wants to get in the back has to crawl over the front seat.  This is hard to do for an injured 70 year old.  Also, it limits how much immobilization of injured limbs is possible.  The front suspension is, as far as I can tell, gone.  No springs, no shocks, nothing.  So the ambulance sags pretty low in the front which is compounded by broken pieces of the four wheel drive system which just sort of hang loose.  Also, as you can imagine it makes every little tiny bump pretty jarring.  Also, there is no spare tire and the tires that are on it are not super awesome to say the least.

So, I ask the lady what hurts.  She says her left leg, collar bone area, ribs, and lower back all hurt a lot.  Plus she has a pretty wet sounding cough/wheeze.  I ask if she can take a deep breath, and no she cannot.  I’m thinking at least bruised ribs, and that I couldn’t figure out if the cough was something she always has from breathing cook fire smoke or developed after the fall.  On this road, we would have to stop for a long time to check her out properly, and we don’t have anything really to create splints with other than our own clothes.  I should have spoken up back in our village to make her ride a little better.  However, I consciously decided that I didn’t want to hassle with trying to talk people into letting me and my counterpart check her out before we left because I was tired and a annoyed at how the morning had gone and I just wanted to be left alone.  Very courageous.  So now, I was pretty grumpy at myself for not speaking up when I had the chance.  We finish slamming down the road, and get to another town on the main road.  Her we pick up some other random lady who turned out to be the daughter of the injured woman, but I was further annoyed at picking her up for a while until I asked who she was.  Anyways, we get to Kushma and I eat my breakfast at 11.  Then I head to meet my supervisor.  I meet him at the hospital as he is on his way out to another meeting that will be two hours long.  Okay… I met up with the other two volunteers who had been called in for this meeting, and they had shown up a little earlier and met with my supervisor who only wanted to tell them two things: please inform him when we go on vacation, and please write up a small report of our activities every once in a while and give it to him.  These two requests seem fairly reasonable to me, but probably could have been communicated over the phone fairly easily.

Now it is time for big meeting with the WHO (World Health Organization) about the various immunization drives and the progress they have made in Nepal.  This meeting was fairly interesting, but directed towards the Nepali health workers so I did not understand everything.  Also, it was a good three hours long, so after snack break the other volunteers and I decided to wander around for a bit.  Then they had to go home so they could get home before dark and I asked my counterpart what the status of the ambulance was.  He replied, “It is coming.”  We sat in for the tail end of the WHO presentation which only a few of the health workers did, and then around 4 we left the hospital to meet the ambulance somewhere.  My counterpart and the other guy who was to come with us were clearly in no hurry so I went and had some ice cream and then met up with them a bit later.  Soon it is 6 PM, and then 7.  I start getting grumpy about the delay.  I could have easily taken a bus, but my counterpart keeps saying it will be hear soon.  He calls the ambulance guy around 7:30 for an update.  I thought I heard something about an hour in the conversation, and ask him after how long it will be.  “15 minutes,” he replies… An hour later the ambulance shows up and we get in.  Now I am exceptionally grumpy and annoyed that my counterpart lied right to my face.  The guy clearly said an hour on the phone, and then I was told 15 minutes.  I would have gotten on a bus if he had told me the actual time, and would have been home before they even left.  But I also would have missed the coming excitement which made the whole day worthwhile.

So we get to the turn off to take the bumpy steep road up to my village.  Within a 100m we get stuck in the water that is flowing down the road over the rocks making them very slippery.  After a few tries of trying to nurse the truck through the rocks I get out and start stacking rocks to keep the tire from spinning as easily.  Then the guy backs up and I tell him to go at it pretty fast.  He goes pretty quick but is still hugging the left hand side of the road where it is the roughest because the right hand side has a pretty mean drop off into a creek 30 feet below.  I convince the driver on the next go to let me have a go at it.  I back up, and the whole time the other gentlemen are babbling at my open window.  I just sort of nod along, and then rev the engine and rally that bad boy up the road hugging the side close to the edge, but not concerned about going over having rallied a road or two in my day…  I get past the part where we were stopped go another ten feet and then hit another rough spot and get stopped.  So I back down, and now we have to do some more road rearranging.  Also, the all of them start pleading with me to get out because they were very scared watching me go up the road.  I plead for a while to let me do it, but give in and hand the car back to the driver.  After some more rearranging it is time for another go.  I tell the driver to go fast and he does, but still stays close to the left side, and gets stopped.  So I tell him to go on the right side of the road and go fast, and he does and we make it through.

Twenty bumpy minutes later we get to a pretty rutted spot that has a fair amount of mud.  Here we again get stopped.  But this time we get really stopped.  The front suspension is hanging so low that we managed to get high centered on some rocks in the mud.  The back tires have no traction so we can’t go forward or backward.  We dig around for a while with a pick and then I ask for a jack.  We have that, but positioning under the sagging front suspension would require a lot of digging so we try to jack from the steel side step things which I tell them will probably bend.  They do, and we can’t jack high to get any rocks under the tires, so I say we have to try again.  The say to just put some rocks near the tires and they will try backing off the jack onto the rocks.  Well, that sounds like a horrible idea, but go for it.  They give it a try and gain us a good 4 inches.  We are still stuck.  At this point, I get in and try some crafty vehicular maneuvers, and after much tire spinning get us another two inches.  By now it is 11:30 and they have a pow-wow about what to do.  I say I am walking home, and that is what everyone decided to do with the plan of the driver to go back very early in the morning to get help from one of the tractors that would be coming up the road.

So I have a nice hour long walk under a near full moon, and arrive home at 12:30.  I eat dinner and go to bed.

The driver went back early in the morning and got out then drove another quarter mile at which point it appears the front suspension snapped in half and now the ambulance is sitting peacefully on the side of the road halfway to my village until the people here decide to make fixing it a priority…so quite possibly forever.

And in other news, the other day I was invited to have lunch with the other volunteers from Parbat and Baglung districts with the Ambassador of the United States to Nepal.  This was to take place in Baglung district capitol so I went there and had a delicious lunch with some volunteers, the Peace Corps Nepal Country Director, the USAID Nepal Country Director, a previous volunteer in Nepal who now works in the Foreign Service here in Nepal, and the Ambassador.  The Ambassador sat at the head of the table, and the other volunteers started sitting several seats down so I snagged a chair right next to him to hear what he had to say about the Foreign Service.  First he gave a speech to all of us about the need to hang in there and whatnot that seemed pretty much scripted by our Country Director and it was pretty clear that the lunch was just a morale boost for the struggling kids in our group.  But hey, it was a pretty cool morale boost.  The ambassador had a few interesting stories, but mainly he just looked sort of tired.  It could have just been a long day, but I’m guessing that that job is just stressful.  That said, he did make the Foreign Service sound fairly interesting… After the lunch I had some more interesting transportation issues which caused me to stay in Baglung for the night and even more the next day, but that is a story for another time perhaps.