So. We’ve moved on from the COLD and CHAOS of Nepal to the HEAT and HORNBILLS of Thailand!
But first, let’s finish our Nepali trip:
Did I really whine that much in my last blog post about how hard it was?! I don’t know what that was about. Though in Kathmandu that last week, whenever we’d see a poster of the high Himalayas, we’d get this queasy feeling in our stomachs!
Our last few days of trekking (in the lowlands of 9,000 feet), we DID have to go UP quite a lot (and down and up and down), and by the end, when there were GIANT steps up to our guesthouse, I had to DRAG myself up the last bit. But the good news, YES, we CAN go uphill again (which I’m sure our boss at the Forest Service is happy to hear)!
We got filmed at least twice on our last couple of trekking days (maybe more, it’s such a blur). People going UP (many people from India, but also some Nepalis too) would ask our age, notice we’re carrying our own stuff, no guide or porters, and they’d shake our hands and give us thumbs up, and say, “You’re strong!” We felt like celebrities! I think they thought it amazing that people who looked as old and decrepit as us could do such a thing! In December! (Just FYI, I am 68, Marc is 59.)
And they don’t ask to film you and do a little interview, they just do it, but they are so very nice and enthusiastic about it all. Several different guys (at different times) from Bangladesh gave us hugs! We're like, are we on a reality TV show or something? Kind of fun to feel like something special!
So we FINALLY made it to Lukla, the place with the tiny tilted airstrip, where we had tickets to fly back to Kathmandu (safer, we figured, than another 10-hour wild jeep ride).
And THEN we went out for coffee!
Well, actually, it was the next day, but really, nothing important happened until we had our first coffee in six weeks! And not just any coffee, but COFFEE at "The Place Formerly Known As Starbucks Lukla," now known by some less than exciting name like, “Fresh Coffee.” It wasn’t a real Starbucks, back 14 years ago. They just "borrowed" the name. The logo, though, was absolutely incredible – looked like a real Starbucks logo, but instead of the mermaid in the middle, it had Ama Dablam (as drawn by the barista’s husband), one of the most beautiful mountains anywhere – and the mug I bought at that time is one of my most prized possessions. BUT, the coffee (as the barista assured us), was JUST AS GOOD as before, and so we each had TWO lattes, and spent hours in their sun room (since there’s no heat anywhere, places arrange their spaces to take advantage of the sun).
So. Flying out of Lukla back to Kathmandu:
Our little 18 seater plane backs up to the wall at the top end of the (short, steep) runway. This is after the pilots have been delivered their tea/coffee through their cockpit window, and then the glasses retrieved after drinking. The motor revs. The brakes are released. The plane careens down the runway. You imagine the plane getting to the end of the runway and just tipping off over the cliff! But NO! It actually lifted off BEFORE getting to the edge!
THEN, we’re heading up through a layer of cloud. Wait a minute – can this plane fly in a cloud? Do they have instruments up there in the cockpit? Do they know where they’re going? Don’t they need to SEE to fly this thing? Don't they realize there are mountains EVERYWHERE?
Suddenly we pop out above the cloud layer – WOW, sun on clouds and BIG mountains floating on the sea of clouds. The plane rattles and shakes and sounds like it’s going to shake apart! I can just about see screws and various pieces flying away. But then, BACK down through the cloud layer.
REALLY, CAN THEY FLY IN THIS?
I wait impatiently until we’re through and below the clouds again. Then of course, I notice the TURBULENCE as the rattling and shaking gets worse. I stare at the houses and rivers and fields below, imagining how hard the landing would be.
BUT, FINALLY we land SAFELY at Kathmandu! Whew!
When we got off, I heard another passenger saying to his friend, “At takeoff, I thought I was going to die. And then I didn’t!”
Yeah. Exactly.
A few days later, the newspaper reported that the VERY NEXT DAY after we flew, a plane flying IN to Lukla (mainly cargo) lost a window mid-flight! (See article below.)
Our last week in Kathmandu was spent wandering the narrow streets and alleys of the Thamel district, breathing a lifetime’s worth of vehicle exhaust, as well as cigarette smoke (even though smoking and selling cigarettes are supposedly banned in Kathmandu).
Visited the famous “Monkey Temple” (Swayambhunat Stupa), and made sure to AVOID any kind of eye contact with the monkeys – and certainly brought out NO FOOD – the monkeys will jump on you for it and amazingly some tourists are oblivious to this fact. We just did not want to spend our last week in Nepal getting rabies shots.
One benefit of spending a week wandering Kathmandu – there got to be a sort of familiarity with some of vendors and people that we saw daily (they with us, and us with them) which made for lots of smiles and laughing (at us and our weird ways) and joy:
The “donut” guy – he made deep fried goodness. Not really donuts, as they weren’t very sweet, and they weren’t shaped like donuts, but they WERE very greasy and delicious – good for us since we’d lost weight trekking. He always had a lovely smile when he saw us coming (even when we woke him up at his stand one day).
The woman at the “half-price-after-8pm” bakery. She greeted us each evening with a brilliant smile as we bought our half price goodies for the next day (but usually ate them that night). These are not bakery treats like you imagine – much less sweet, and much more dry and poofy, but fabulous for snacking.
The shirt embroidery guy in the alley near our hotel – even though we were never in his shop, he always had a smile for us as we went to and fro, to and fro, to and fro.
The owner of “Chef’s Burger,” where we ate dinner several times and had COFFEE several times. It’s way back in an alley, so we were usually the only customers – but it had excellent coffee, and excellent Asian food. Terrible name and logo (straight out of a strip mall in the States), but lovely, lovely people. (And I think you COULD get some kind of burger there if you really wanted to.)
The samosa guy – his stall was about three feet wide and maybe four times that deep – we bought his amazing samosas regularly.
The yak-wool woman, in her stall near our hotel.
And of course, our lovely hosts at the Hotel Acme Inn in Thamel.
And several somebodies somewhere said they recognized us by my hair – gray, not exactly common in Nepalis.
Of course, there were always lots and lots of hucksters and hawkers (and we got asked if we wanted a “smoke” – drugs – many, many times). But the smiles and friendliness of all these people we saw regularly (and more) made all the chaos in Kathmandu manageable, and even enjoyable.
AND NOW, THAILAND.
Just when we get used to one country and a little of how things work, and who a few people are – whoosh – off to somewhere else!
Different money (what? This is a BANK. You can’t change dollars into baht, even though you advertise it in your window?), different ATMs (it worked, and didn’t eat our card!), different customs, different norms, different language (still incomprehensible writing - but beautiful).
Different weather! Now we are sweltering! You in the midwest will think nothing of it, but to us it feels like we’ve just bathed in Coca Cola! One upside – my hair is FLUFFY, and I don’t really have to comb OR wash it!
We’re on a small, quiet island south of Bangkok on the Andaman sea just across from Myanmar. Ten-hour bus ride, two hour boat ride (which left an hour late because the boat was stuck in the low tide mudflats), 20 minute WILD motorbike ride across the island, each of us on the back of a different motorbike hanging on for dear life…I didn’t really want to offend the guy driving by clinging to him like a freaked out cat, so I held on tight to the seat and managed not to bounce off!
The island is pretty low-key. We’re staying in a little bungalow in the jungle above the beach. You basically just leave your door and windows open all the time. (The walls are just bamboo mats.) Mosquito net over the bed (I love mosquito nets, so exotic, AND useful.) Breeze blowing off the ocean. Hornbills and banshee bugs.
So Hornbills. They are the coolest birds! They have huge, weird beaks (see photo), and make a racket, but they actually seem quite gentle – we watched one eat some watermelon that had been placed on a shrine by our bungalow. It took pieces very gently, and continuously eyed us for signs of danger. Not at all like the chaos of crows, seagulls, and pigeons! Their eyes are like “googly eyes,” the kind you buy at the craft shop to put on your homemade projects. And the noise they make is somewhere between LOUD squeaking wheels, LOUD squeaky toys, and LOUD monkeys.
There are also some bugs here WE call Banshee Bugs. They seem like some kind of beetle, and sound like banshee grasshoppers. They all go off at sunset, like, millions of them, raising such a din you can barely hear anything else. In Cambodia we heard “chainsaw” bugs (again, OUR name) – a tiny bug that sounded just like (and as loud as) a chainsaw. These must be the Thai equivalent. For those of you who are shop nerds, Marc says they sound like the "screeching, buzzing noise of cutting a thin piece of wood on a table saw, but much, much louder.” These are beetles on steroids, but we’ve only seen ONE, when it flew off its branch and stopped making the noise. But really, they are deafening, but amazing!
So, here for a couple of weeks (to recuperate from Nepal), swimming, walking all over the island – there aren’t “roads,” just paths (and yes, we are going UP and down and up and down!), eating Thai food (which by the way has a lot of meat – different types of Buddhists have different rules for meat eating I’m learning), getting used to the heat.
Humans, we have such a narrow comfort zone.
So glad to be one.
Of course, being a hornbill doesn’t seem too bad either.
