Nepalese, if you please...

What an adventure! We've been in Nepal for just over a week now, and we just got back to Kathmandu after a 4 day walk around Kathmandu Valley. The city of Kathmandu is chaotic, polluted, crowded and dirty. The streets are narrow; barely even built wide enough for horse and carriage. On our first day here we got caught in a traffic jam of tricycle rickshaws, motorbikes, bicycles, and pedestrians. We were literally at a standstill while on foot for a full few minutes. Cars are a curse to Kathmandu. They brought them here in 1955, piece by piece, carried on the backs of porters, before there were even roads and petrol. That was a mistake. There are no emission regulations (of course) and there is so much pollution that shoots out of the exhaust of all these millions of cars that the air is turned black. Since Kathmandu is a valley, you could just imagine all the smog that just sits above the city. Breathing can be difficult and everyone here is constantly coughing up phlegm (sorry to be gross). Seriously, everyone from the dude serving you dinner to the little kid asking for a pen - they are all hocking loogies!
But gosh, we are loving Nepal! The people here are the most wonderful, friendliest, most helpful people we have met on our travels so far. The country is beautiful and exotic. In every alleyway, around every corner is a shrine or a temple, either Hindu or Buddhist - the 2 religions harmoniously coexist side by side in this little newly communist country (they just booted out their king in May).
OK, so what have we been up to? We spent the first few days just hanging out in Thamel - the backpacker district of Kathmandu - sleeping off jet lag, eating(!), orienting ourselves. We visited a huge Buddhist temple in Bodnath just outside the city. It was so tranquil and clean!
On Friday we put on our hiking shoes and headed for the hills! We went to a bus stand to wait for a bus that was supposed to arrive at 1:30. We waited for 3 hours. The bus never came. We walked back to our guesthouse, and the next morning we took a cab to the small village of Nagarkot, at an elevation of 7200 ft. in the foothills of the Great Himalayas. It was a 2 hour drive up narrow, winding roads (they love to use their horns here - around corners, as they pass, when they come up behind another car - it's constant!) We found a guesthouse easily enough when we arrived in Nagarkot and spent the day wandering around the village. The views were spectacular! The snow-capped peaks stark white against the blue backdrop. It was like the mountains were just suspended there. We took a walk down the steep side of a mountain through a jungle to an old Hindu temple. We were looking for a large temple - which we never found - but we found the ruins of a very old temple - well, it was a rock with red paint on it.
That night we climbed a hill to watch the sunset into the mountains. At the top of this hill was a little shack with an Om flag flying on top. Inside the shack sat a Sadhu (a holy Hindu man), named Naga Baba. He was a little crazy, but he invited us to share some Nepali tea and sacred herbs with him, so we of course accepted! I have no idea what he said the entire time, but he shouted a lot and said his name repeatedly, "Naga Baba!" It was definitely a holy experience.
After we climbed down from our "high" hill, we had a candlelit dinner (sounds so romantic, but every dinner here is candlelit since they cut the power for the whole country for 3 hours every night from around 6ish). There were some locals dancing around a t.v. screen to Nepali music in the bar of our guesthouse and as we were about to head off to bed, they invited us to join them. So what the hell! Have you ever tried to dance to Nepali music? Have you ever even heard Nepali music? Think high-pitched, quick, short beats. So we kind of just jumped around and waved our arms. It was pretty crowded in this little square of makeshift dance floor. There was only one other girl, Pispa, and she we pretty drunk. All the guys wanted to dance with me trying to put their hands on my boobs - what is it with these people?? And Pispa wanted Michael to take her to her room. It was getting a little weird, so we decided to leave. When we were saying goodbye to everyone, one of the dudes reached out a grabbed my boob. Seriously. He put his hand on my right boob and squeezed! WTF!! So I smacked him *SMACK* square in the face. Holy cow, it was such a loud smack. No one saw what happened, but they all heard the smack. I yelled out, "You're friend here is a total perve and just grabbed my boob! That's so not cool!" Michael nearly lost it. He had some choice words for the fellow, but I'm sure you can what was said. We are not violent people, but Michael's fists were clenched and I had to pretty much pull him out of the bar. Oh boy, so much excitement.
We woke up early on Sunday, in time to watch the sunrise over the Himalayas. And then we headed off down the road, following a 7 year old map, towards a town called Dhulikhel. The first hour was all uphill to the highest point in the area. We passed through some military training camps and said "Namaste", to some locals hauling everything imaginable in baskets hung from their heads. At the top of the hill I climbed a lookout tower (Michael is afraid of heights) and I could see mountains from the Langtang Lirung in the west all the way to Lhotse in the east, and even the tiny, dot peak of Everest in the distance. It was the clearest morning they've had all season and it was so beautiful.
We headed on downhill from there, and it was pretty much downhill for the rest of the day. We walked through villages with names like Nala and Kavre. As we walked all the village people we passed would greet us "Namaste!" and ask where we were going, where we were coming from, and what country we were from. They all love to give directions and help you along the way. You say "We're going to Dhulikhel." and they point the way, even if there is no other path to take. We met one boy who's brother is at school in the States. He asked for our address so he could give it to his brother, and then he showed us a shortcut!
We had lunch in a town called Banepa (best veggie burgers!). Michael had actually been pretty under the weather with a cold, and at this point we had been hiking for like 6 hours (with 15 pound packs). We were both pretty beat, but Michael was starting to feel pretty ill. We were only 4 km from our destination town, Dhulikhel, and I convinced him that we could walk it, instead of making the stress of finding a bus. Big mistake. Those last 4 km were all up hill on a paved highway, with stinky diesel trucks and buses zooming past. Not good. Michael was not doing so hot. But we made it to the outskirts of town, and then this odd, wonderful man named Ojis (but his English name was Michael and he was so excited about that) found us. He asked us if we needed a guesthouse, but we already had one booked, which happened to be owned by his uncle! What luck! Ojis walked us through the winding streets, through a hidden Shiva temple, up a steep, narrow path through a jungle to a guesthouse located on the edge of a mountain in the middle of an organic farm overlooking the valley and the Himalayas in the distance. Yeah, it was pretty much AWESOME!
Michael woke up the next morning feeling pretty lousy, but he persevered and decided he wanted to move on and not spend the day in bed. We got a bit of a later start, but that was OK, since we only hiked for 3 hours. We were hiking to a village called Namobuddha, built at the base of a Tibetan monastery with the same name (the Namobuddha temple was built at the place where a Buddha gave his life to a starving tigress so she could feed her cubs). The hike (as described to us by Ojis) was up up up and then down down down and then up up up. And boy was it. The first hour we climbed up 1,000 stairs. There were a bunch of school girls walking there, too, and they kept encouraging us to continue on. Then we walked down down down through tons of little farming villages (something like 80% of the population are farmers working for absent landowners). All the little children in the village would run out as we passed through, "Hello! Give me one pen (sweet / money)!" Sometimes we pretended not to understand them, but most of the time we just ignored their requests so as not to encourage that kind of interaction with foreigners.
We made it to Namobuddha in the early afternoon, and we were the only tourists in the entire town. (Actually, we saw only one other tourist the whole time we were walking). It was a pretty sleepy town. There was one motel, the Namobuddha Motel, where we had lunch and where we rented a room for the equivalent of $4. It was as basic a room as you can guess: 2 beds - planks of wood lain in a frame with a thin, lumpy cushion (?) on top. The bathroom was outside around the corner, and it was a squat toilet. There was no running water. For water you had to go out into the town square to the village well.
We climbed up to the Tibetan monastery at the top of the mountain to watch the sunset. Michael made friends with one of the stray dogs who followed us down and spent the rest of the evening with us (stray dogs in Nepal are like stray cats in Egypt - they're everywhere!).
Michael was feeling better yesterday, and it was a good thing, too, because we had quite an adventure! Our plan was to walk from Namobuddha (down down down) 2 hours to the town of Panauti where we would catch a bus to take us to the town of Patan, just outside of Kathmandu. So we walked down down down 2 hours to Panauti. Panauti has an impressive Shiva temple on the outskirts, and we thought it would be a nice place to have a rest and a cold drink. We walked to the temple center to sit in the shade. First of all, the town was filthy. I mean, smelly, dirty, trash everywhere, a sickly cow tied to the suspension bridge to greet you. So we walked over the wire suspension bridge, hung over the most polluted river I have ever seen - people fishing and washing in it - into the temple complex. As soon as we sat down at the base of one of the shrines a man with bettel-stained teeth sat next to Michael. He said he wasn't a beggar and he wasn't trying to sell us anything; he just wanted to practice his English. We weren't really in the mood, but we didn't want to be rude, so we invited him to speak with us a bit. He was "frank" with us and told us he was a "drunkard" and he just drank some alcohol (at 11:30 in the morning). He used to teach English at the primary school, but then he (points to head) "went mental". He smelled something awful and he was sitting pretty close to Michael. I felt bad, but we didn't really want to sit there with him. He told us where to find the buses and so we were off again - back over the scary suspension bridge (dodging a beggar woman who looked like a troll), to the main part of town. The town was eerily silent. There was a cluster of buses and trucks in a square so we walked to that and tried to ask some people what bus would take us to Patan. Some drunk dudes tried to offer us some information, but we don't know what they said. Then we found some clean, young guys, and they were like shining gems in a pile of poo! They spoke almost perfect English and told us that there was no transport running - there was a strike! A bus driver had been killed like a month ago, and the government has done nothing to find his murderer, so all the truck and bus and cab drivers in that district were on strike. Our options were now to either stay in Panauti (which was a sh*thole) or walk another 3 hours to the next district to a town called Saga where we would maybe find a ride to Kathmandu. AH! Our legs were sore, our backs were killing us, we were hot, and we hadn't showered in 3 days! But we weren't staying in Panauti!
So we were off again - walking to the town of Banepa (where we'd have lunch) and then on to Saga where we would maybe find a ride and if not, then on even further to the bigger town of Bhaktapur. We were walking walking walking - luckily it was a pretty straight shot and not up or down hill at all. The only things on the road were pedestrians, yaks, bicycles, and motorbikes (kind of an eerie preview of our future...) There were special minibuses running with a sign in the window "Tourist Only". We tried (unsuccessfully) to wave them down. After the third one past us Michael yelled, "We're tourists! Why don't they put us on one of those?!" Well, we never got a ride on a special, air conditioned minibus, but we did get a ride on something almost as good! We got a ride on a wooden bicycle cart! The kind that they usually haul goods or animals to market on! It was awesome! Some dude pedalling one offered us a ride to Banepa for the equivalent of $1.25, so we hopped on! Some people we passed on the street were laughing at us, but we were laughing at them because we had a ride and they didn't!
Back in Banepa we had lunch (best veggie burgers, again!) and started walking on to Saga, when this shady dude came out of nowhere and asked if we wanted a cab. He said it so quietly, like he was offering us drugs or guns or something. Michael said, "Why, do you have one?" (cuz I really need a fix man...) You have to picture: there are no cars to be seen anywhere, all trucks and buses are abandoned on the side of the road, some are even just left in the middle of the street; so some guy offering us a taxi was like totally unexpected. He led us through some spooky backstreets to where his cab was hidden. We climbed in and were off to Patan! Our original destination! As we drove out of the city, however, we drove into a crowd of protesters waving red flags. The cabbie slowed the car and unrolled the window as the angry-looking group encircled us. I have to say that I was pretty terrified for about 30 seconds. The mean-looking protesters looked in the cab, saw that we were tourists, smiled and waved us on! Man, they love tourists here!
We made it safe and sound back to the craziness of the Kathmandu Valley and found a nice clean guesthouse in the heart of Patan. Now we rest up for the next few days before we head off again, this time on a tour, to trek this beautiful country!

*We really do love the culture and the people here, so we apologize if we sound at all negative in any of my blogs. It can all just be a little overwhelming at times, and we really do just want to give you our raw, uncensored perspectives and experiences.