Festivals, fire and foreign languages

Our leisurely tours of Kathmandu came to an abrupt halt when 14 other volunteers arrived and ‘In Country Training’ started. Our colleagues include volunteers from the UK, Ireland, India, Uganda and the Philippines:

Most of our training involves learning the Nepali language (although other sessions include such diverse topics as earthquakes and diarrhoea). The teachers are really friendly and use a variety of methods. We get lots of homework, which the unsuspecting guest house staff usually bear the brunt of.

Although our training includes cultural awareness, we got stuck into Nepali culture on our day off, when we joined in with the Hindu festival of Holi. This is the festival of colours and involved lots of water and coloured dye being thrown around.

Initially we decided against going out amongst the chaos and instead took part in a water fight from the relative safety of the guest house roof:

Unfortunately, this tactic didn’t keep us dry as even the usually sweet and placid Amega (who does the cleaning) got her revenge on us, for not making our beds properly, and delighted in throwing bucketfuls of water over us all:

So we decided we might as well venture out with the following result:

Also, during this Holi-day period, we decided to get our Himalayan experience off to a gentle start by climbing ‘Nagarjun’, a nearby hill. This was a fun, though tiring, adventure which got more interesting when we reached the top only to see a large forest fire now blocking our exit route:

We eventually found our way down, albeit through a military checkpoint. After persuading the armed soldiers that we had a valid reason for not leaving by the main gate, we continued through beautiful countryside and villages:

We eventually arrived weary and relieved back at our Guest House just 4 hours after expected. Luckily we telephoned ahead 10 minutes before a search and rescue operation was launched!

For a bit of a change, we hope to take you on a ‘sensory tour’ of Kathmandu in our next few blogs. We’d also like to make the blogs a bit more interactive so please send us any comments or questions to our email address and we’ll try to respond to them in following posts.

Arriving in Nepal

After our long and exciting journey, here we are in Kathmandu, capital of Nepal.

We bypassed the hundreds of touts at the airport by hitching a ride with Lorna who had a pre-arranged lift. Parting company with her when we arrived at our guest house seemed strange after 17 days of traveling together, sharing a cabin and super noodles.

The staff at our guest house are extremely friendly and welcoming and an excellent source of practice for our still struggling Nepali.

Since we had five days until the rest of the VSOs arrived, we thought we would explore the city.

First impressions: Noise and bustle,

pollution,

friendly people,

ornate temples, shrines and religious monuments around every corner,

lots of tourists and some interesting wildlife surviving despite pollution.


We braved the very touristy area of Thamel where everyone tried to sell us things at ‘very good price’. Steve couldn’t resist buying the Nepali national board game, ‘Moving Tiger’ which has been a good conversation starter when Nepalis see us playing it.

More details on the photo-album caption.

The other 14 new volunteers have now arrived and we have started our training. Nepali is tricky but the teaching is good. More details next time.

Olympics and Chopsticks

Due to travellers’ time lag, we are a few days behind ourselves so this blog is about China even though we arrived in Kathmandu, Nepal, on Saturday. Hopefully we will catch up with ourselves soon.

Beijing was a highlight of our 17 day journey and not just because we were glad to spend some time off the rails. After Moscow, Beijing initially appeared chaotic but a more regimented side soon became apparent. There seemed to be almost as many people in uniform as not, although they were friendlier than Mel remembered from her previous visit and didn’t have guns.

There was no escaping that the Olympics will be held in Beijing in a few months time. There were logos, fresh coats of paint and building work everywhere we looked. Contrasting this was the beautiful traditional architecture. Our favourite was in the Forbidden city (a walled town which only the Emperor and his family and friends could enter for hundreds of years). There are hundreds of temples, palaces and other intricately designed and decorated buildings.

A more modern ‘Forbidden’ area for us, for most of our stay, was the area known as Tiananmen square and the surrounding government buildings. On a few occasions we had to walk a kilometre or two out of our way when officials directed us away from the area. The hostel staff told us that there was a ‘political conference’ which meant that the area was closed off to the public (not so different to Parliament Square and Downing Street in the UK).

We loved the little alleyways and traditional streets called ‘Hutongs’ which, despite lots of demolition and building work, can still be found around Beijing. We enjoyed eating street food, shopping with local traders and trying out our very basic Chinese.

After a couple of days enjoying Beijing, we got back on track, this time a 24 hour journey to Chengdu in South West China. After having mostly had our train cabins to ourselves, we found ourselves sharing a cabin with ‘Mr Leo’ who we fondly named ‘The General’. We are not sure that he was so fond of us and our strange English ways, as despite attempts to communicate and offer food, he disappeared for most of the journey, popping back for the odd chat and snooze. We enjoyed the gorge-ous Chinese scenery on the way.

The next day (in Chengdu), Lorna, who was able to get up early, went off to see the pandas at the panda breeding centre, while we had a lie in and a leisurely stroll around the Tibetan area and nearby park.

We also visited a large Buddhist temple and monastery (having got slightly lost for a couple of hours) and finished with a meal at a Tibetan restaurant, where our Chinese and international sign language failed us miserably, with too few desserts arriving and then too many!

The final part of our journey was by ‘evil polluting skybird’ over the Himalayas. However, one advantage of this was the stunning aerial views of Everest and other snow-capped peaks. We arrived safely in Kathmandu. More about the capital of our new home country in our next blog.

Across Siberia and Mongolia

We've just arrived in Chengdu (South West China) but here's what we wrote when we arrived in Beijing, having travelled by train across Russia, Mongolia and into China. The journey was spectacular (see our albums) and we met some interesting people and had a couple of nerve wracking moments but at least we've now all had a shower after 7 days of washing at a sink on a jerky, wobbly train!

We'd just started to get the hang of a few words in Russian when we boarded the train in Moscow only to find that the train staff were all Chinese! So our first job on the train was to look up some Chinese phrases so that we at least had a few polite words to say to our Chinese carriage attendants. Just to confuse things even more, we tried to have a Nepali lesson each day too. These weren't exactly a resounding success but by day 2 our carriage was adorned with little pictures accompanied by Devangari script (so that's why it told us to bring clothes pegs in our Trans-Siberian Handbook!)

Our Trans-Siberian journey also put our culinary expertise to the test. Because our only means of cooking was to add boiling water to things using the handy samovar at the end of the carriage, we tried to reconstitute our various dried noodles, couscous and instant mashed potato with as much variation as possible (extra flavouring using packet soups or cheese bought on platforms for example). We enjoyed getting off at almost every stop and seeing what the locals had to offer to supplement our diet. Favourites included Russian Blini (pancakes), roasted seeds and fresh fruit.

The scenery was really beautiful, ranging from total and very deep snow cover in Siberia, to dry desert (though still cold) in Mongolia. We saw pretty snow-capped mountains as well as the seemingly 'endless steppes' of Siberia and the plains and dunes of Mongolia. Lake Baikal, totally frozen and covered in snow surrounded by snowy peaks was a favourite.

Getting to know the other passengers was also good fun. Artem (pronounced 'Archom'), a friendly 4 year old Ukrainian became best friends with our travel companion, Lorna, during the journey and spent most of the days in our cabin despite our lack of ability to speak the same language. The little 'Luca and Elise' wind up trains that Mel's niece and nephew gave her certainly helped when getting to know Artem! When the Mongolian customs forms (written in Mongolian and English) were handed around, it was nice to be able to help the others in our carriage for a change. At Ulan Bataar, all of the other passengers in our carriage got off and most made a special effort to say goodbye (especially Artem of course).

The journey from Ulan Bataar to Beijing was like a different train (in fact much of the train was different - new restaurant car, some carriages removed, others added). The passengers were now nearly all Mongolian and most were University students in China about to start a new Semester. Again, we made friends pretty fast, this time with Birgun ('Beck') and Sokhbar ('Soto'), one fluent in English and Chinese, the other fluent in German and both of course fluent in Mongolian. This meant that our conversations and card playing were carried out in 3 languages simultaneously.

Between Ulan Bataar and Beijing we also had the pleasure of seeing a bit more wildlife (and some tame life too!). These included deer, yaks, horses and Bactrian camels (with two humps!). Steve's binoculars came in handy for spotting these in the distance and also for spotting the 'Great Wall of China' which our excellent kilometre by kilometre guidebook told us to look out for.