I was convinced all those photos including ones I took at the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort were gone forever. However about a month ago I had a care package arrive from home and inside an obscure pocket of a jacket was a long-lost memory card I'd given up for dust.
I was pleased to see at least some of the lost photos were on the card. None from the Taj, maybe one day I'll go back again, or the Red Fort but happily many from Nepal. So this is actually retro post from around October '06, very unblogventional I know, but perhaps explains the lack of anything remotely resembling details in this post.
The picture below is looking out over Kathmandu, unspectacular but noteworthy as one of the few dull landscapes in the country.
Like I said this was all a long time ago and because the acid rain in Korea (courtesy of China) has been killing my brain cells faster than I can replenish them by watching Gladiators - I can't remember where anything was. So here's a picture of, um, somewhere...
Now that I think about it, from memory, it may have been a factory outlet for Nike.Here are some sweeping generalisations, expect some revisions when I sit my Broad Stereotypes exam in May.
I went to Nepal for a way-too brief week, it was a short direct hop from Kolkata so worth a peek. I very much wish I'd been able to stay longer and organise some trekking, although I did eventually get to the Himalaya it was on the Indian side of the range. Nepal is one of those great places that allows you a visa on arrival so it took almost no organisation to get there. Once there it is a beautiful, beautiful country.
By all accounts Nepal is a poor country, and I think I remember reading something saying it's actually poorer than India. Certainly the Indian Rupee actually became a pleasantly strong currency once I landed and a western dollar went a long, long, long way. I tracked a decent amount of Kathmandu on foot and also spent a lot of hours travelling through the countryside to see a few different sides of it.
For whatever neogeosocioecoenviro reasons it didn't feel like 'that' poor a country. Certainly the disparity between rich and poor was nowhere near as vast, and the people on the streets, stalls and shops nowhere as desperate, as I had expected. I swear the kid in the green shirt escaped from the cover of Mad Magazine.
I don't know whether it's aided by such a small population, low cost of living or perhaps more equitable access to agriculture and Pokemon's, but it never really struck me as a massively poverty stricken country. Maybe because even the poor (at least the majority) were in houses. Then again, a week, even in such a small place, is no space of time at all.
I loved travelling India - there are few places in the world where you can have that kind of freedom and variety of experience - but...
...that said I can't deny that I found Nepal to be a cleaner, more honest, less desperate and hassle laden experience. There, it was rare I was treated like a walking wallet in the same way a cat looks at a bird as a drumstick with feathers and a deathwish.
This was a shot waiting for the sun to rise on a mountain, in....ah....yeah that place, to get a view of another mountain range...called....I think...shit. I give up. Anyhoo, I do remember cloud cover killed the view. Maybe it was called the 'You're Like Sooooo Stupid for Getting Up at 5am to Look At a Bunch of Clouds' mountain. Yes, true. It's a little known fact that mountains actually speak, and sound like Valley Girls when they do.
There was a Japanese guy doing some water paintings of the view. He was pretty good. Inscrutable. But pretty good.
Of course, with the cloud cover he kind of had to guess.At least I think he had to guess. I couldn't quite tell, him being inscrutable and all.
Again at the risk of offending, I wonder whether character of Nepal has some religious basis. To me the Hinduism I've encountered, including Nepal, seemed more about reflexively asking any of a million idols for material gain (even by those who possessed a fair degree of comfort) than considerations of living a good life. The curtain between the religious and the economic was rarely divinable.
Meanwhile Nepal is predominately Buddhist, the people came across as capable, reliable, steadfast and less apparently needy. Nepalese Gurkha soldiers and tribal Sherpa's are well known and respected for their hardiness. 
While I was there one of the days was a "dog holiday" with masses of happy woofers running around with leis around their necks looking for cats to wale on. I'm not exactly sure what it was about (maybe their fleas took the day off) and neither were they dogs, but they definitely made the most of it. Whatever 'it' was.
My skill level didn't allow me to do justice and capture what my eyes saw when it came to the mountains. I have great vivid memories (at least until the next time it rains) but ended up with numerous underwhelming shots of patches of grey mountain, capped in white which is only marginally more white than the background. Here's one.
A bit better quality on this one.
Especially coming from a country where the tallest natural object is essentially a granite speed hump, particularly when compared to the mountain of foreign debt, I found the mountains stunning, humbling and awe inspiring. At the time I was reading a book written about the climbing season on Everest in '96 when 15 people died (sometimes on-radio and only meters from help) shaking my head at the insanity of where they went and what they put their minds and bodies through.
Also while I was in Nepal I got a tattoo as a memento. No excess baggage or customs fees making it the travellers smart and environmentally sound (you can offset it against your methane footprint) choice IMHO. The experience was quite novel, given the artist Gagun was about 17, knew about that number of English words and moonlighted as a dentist. Hence the sign language. Still I made sure it was sufficiently sanitary and it turned out like I wanted.
Probably more concerning was the fact his gun was regulated by something resembling a hotwired car battery and that the power to the district kept blacking out. Still, aided by some candles, the fortuitous discovery of some Australian wine at the local shop and his one playable CD in the form of Pearl Jam, we got there in the end.
Have you ever seen that video of the experiment on the effect of tobacco, alcohol and drugs on how spiders make their webs? Hilarious intoxicated insect fun, I say. This particular one was clearly the designated driver when it came to Nepalese spiders. One free coke please bartender. He could seriously come to Korea and help with the architecture, although they would, as always, bury him in the basement for making a structure with a curve.
Look closely Mel. Feel the pride.
Be well.
