04.25.2015

Namaste.

I just donated to Direct Relief, one of the highest ranked non-profits according to Charity Navigator. Please consider donating to their Nepal Earthquake program.

https://secure2.convio.net/dri/site/Donation2?df_id=2105&2105.donation=form1&_ga=1.191646378.1428624615.1430013169

The week that starts it all

Kat Man Doooo!

Our first week of travel in Nepal's crazy and surprisingly hazy capital

"ppffffftt!!! ppfffffftt!!" 

In a daze, we woke up around 6 am, confused about that strange noise and what seemed like a LOT of crowing/chirping/singing. Once we figured out that it was just 6 am and we weren't on some plane or in some airport anymore, we realized we had slept for nearly 10 hours after a 36 hour flight from California to Nepal. We got up, dressed and went outside and finally figured out what the strange noises were: hundreds and hundreds of birds were flying ALL over the place and the tea-shop owner three stories below had just opened up his shop and was sweeping the entrance -- "ppffffftt!! ppfffftt!!". This was the second day of a three-day 'strike'; apparently a very common occurrence in Nepal. Even though our guesthouse had promised that they would pick us up from the airport the day before (like, 99.9% of the reason we picked it in the first place!), no one showed up at the airport even after we waited for about an hour. They then informed us that the 'strike' we heard about from the taxi drivers at the airport was indeed real and that the guesthouse driver was not able to get through the traffic jam. We were upset initially but we then laughed about it as we remembered what our friends who had been to Nepal before warned us about: expect nothing to go as planned and you will have a blast! 

Kanghsar Guesthouse in Thamel, Kathmandu wasn't all that bad. For 16 bucks we had a 'soft' bed (later on we'd find out how much of a luxury this was), our own bathroom (a western toilet would also become a luxury), a hot shower AND breakfast. Plus, there was a pretty cool rooftop garden with some tables that offered a spectacular view of... the haze. Apparently it's 'not pollution' but there is a crazy dense haze that hangs out around Kathmandu Valley around March/April and visibility just, well, pretty much did not exist. 

The 'view'!

Thamel is the most touristy area of Kathmandu. We usually don't like doing the 'touristy' thing but we just wanted to start off easy. Plus we heard that there was very good and very cheap food all over the place, all within walking distance. Our first week in Nepal, thus, consisted of lots of eating, walking around and trying not to pass out before 7 pm - the jetlag was intense. Our favorite place to eat was this Pilgirm's bookshop/restaurant that served freshly prepared organic, vegetarian food and had an amazing selection of food and literature (plus fast wi-fi). 

Hygiene in Nepal needs some work, especially seeing the butcher shops scattered down the dusty, unpaved alleys. It is hard to recount how much raw meat we saw just sitting out in the open with dozens of flies all over.... refrigeration is hard to count on when there is very little electricity due to very limited supply of energy in Nepal (most of which is imported from India; the oil is imported too and there are multi-hour lines for gas). Even though we purchased a Steripen at REI before we left (it sterilizes tap water with UV light), we bought bottled water: the tap water was literally brown and the rivers that go through the city were just a tad too smelly and littered with garbage and raw sewage. 

How would you like that cooked?

Day at the beach?

After overcoming the initial shock, we sought out some culture: we visited the monkey temple, walked around the neighborhood of Boudha and we went to a Hindu festival in what they call "little Varanasi", i.e. where they burn/bury dead bodies along the river. The monkey temple is actually a very significant Buddhist Stupa (religious center) in Asia and many mothers come with their sick children to pray to one of the goddesses for their children's recovery. 

Swayambunath, aka, 'monkey temple', it's watching you...

Boudha, east of Kathmandu is a really beautiful spot and we even liked their Stupa even better. We discovered that Boudha has the second largest concentration of Tibetan refugees (outside China), second only to Dharamsala in India. We also visited a very beautiful Tibetan monastery (Kopan Gompa) sitting on top of a hill right above Boudha and enjoyed wonderful conversations with some of our friends who were living there, learning and practicing meditation. That same day it just happened to be one of the most important Hindu festivals of the year so we walked on over to Pashupattinath and it was crowded with literally THOUSANDS of people burning/burying their dead in the river. We couldn't really see much but it was really cool to see the crowds and feel the energy. Boudha was by far our favorite part of the city and we will spend a few nights there before we leave Nepal.

If they're looking for places to stage the sequel to The Hunger Games, Kathmandu might be a good place to start. With it's crazy mixture of diverse humanity, medieval sanitation and network of monochromatic alleys that could fool the most nefarious pickpocket, Nepal's capital felt, well, post-apocalyptic! 

Our first week had started with a bang but we were ready to breathe pure Himalaya air and get our trek on! The mountains beckoned...

Himalaya BLISS

This post was co-published on www.eliotpeper.com

Kathmandu: Week 1!

Lassi and momo galore in Kathmandu!

Food in Kathmandu, Nepal has been really good so far. We arrived in the late afternoon and the first thing we had was a mango lassi from Pilgrims Feed N Read Restaurant in Thamel which tasted like heaven. Lassi is similar to kumis, which is a yogurt drink and you can get it with banana, papaya, apple and other fruit, or just drink it plain/tart. I wanted to help my stomach get used to the new diet and yogurt, with all its probiotic goodness, seemed like a great first thing to have. We also enjoyed some yak cheese and vegetable steamed momos (stuffed dumplings) along with a potato dosa, which is an Indian dish, very similar to a thin, crispy crepe. The yak is like a Himalayan buffalo and is a very useful animal, not only for food, but also for carrying goods up and down the mountains where there are no roads.

Banana lassis with dinner. Candlelight is often used since there are long power outages in the city.

We couldn't stay up past 8 pm the first night as Jet Lag hit us hard so we went to bed very early. The breakfast at our guesthouse is included and is very basic: two eggs and toast with "dud chiya', the delicious spiced milk tea. The eggs here are very tasty and I have had my share of orange yolk eggs, a good indication that the hens we get these eggs from have a good life and diet!

We went to a small Nepali restaurant for lunch on our second day, Thakali Bhanchha off of Z street and we weren't too hungry yet so we ordered one dish and got lemon sodas. Lemon soda is just lemon juice with plain soda added to it. It's really refreshing and it guarantees that your drink is safe: tap water here is not at all potable and it's best not to risk it. The mutton curry we ordered came on a metal plate with a large serving of rice in the middle, a bowl of yellow lentil curry, pickled radish, two spicy sauces, spinach, cauliflower and potato and a side of yogurt. We got free refills once we were done and we felt really bad because we shared only that one plate. The tip we gave at the end was rather large. For dinner, we went to Yak restaurant, which is a Tibetan establishment, and ordered pork and vegetable momos and also got a buffalo soup with clear noodles. We heard about the hot Tunga beer they eat there but we have not really felt like drinking alcohol so we missed out on it. Again, we passed out early as we succumbed to the intense jet lag (it took 36 hours or so just to get here!).

Lemon + Soda water

We started our morning at Pilgrims and had some lassi and we had a potato paratha (Indian dish) for a late morning snack. All the food at Pilgrims is vegetarian and this one was really tasty as it was made to order and took about one hour to come out! We changed it up a bit and met up with our friend Carole and went to an Israeli restaurant, OR2K and ordered some more vegetarian food. There was a special dish served only on Friday and Saturday so we ordered it. Jochnne, I believe it was called, is a pastry that is cooked over night and is served with a green chutney and a really good tomato garlic sauce with a boiled egg on the side. We also shared a large platter of hummus, labneh, falafel, babaganoush, tahini and a tomato eggplant dip. We also ordered mint lemonades to wash down our food and we couldn't really finish it all - the portions were very generous.

Sample platter at OR2K

Believe it or not we had dinner that night at Nepalese Kitchen, a Nepali/Newari restaurant very close to our guest house. For habit sake, we started our meal with a banana lassi, no sugar. We had a candle-lit dinner and tried Bari, which are meatballs with a sweet marinade, vegetable pakoras and a grilled chicken with pulao rice. The pakoras are basically shredded vegetables such as cabbage, carrots, cauliflower that are spiced and dipped in an egg batter and then fried. They are really good and we ate a whole plate of them. The pulao rice with our chicken was also very good, it had peas and some nuts as well as fruit. We were a little skeptical about ordering the chicken since most of the chicken shops we have seen around here have no refrigeration and chickens just sit out there at room temperature for hours... we bit the bullet though and I'm happy to say the chicken did not betray us! We were ambitious and had ordered two desserts but we had to cancel the order, we were too full and tired.

Grilled Chicken with Pulao Rice and Cauliflower side

 Suddenly, the weekend had arrived and it felt like we had already been in Nepal for ages! We had a great foodventure experience during the weekend, I'll detail them all in my next post about our first weekend in Nepal.