Nepal - Chitawan - Day 1
Today started early, checking out from the Temple House hotel (guest house), and finding my driver at Durbar Square to take us to Chitawan on the tour that we’d bought the night before. Almost miraculously, it went exactly as planned! The driver took me through the streets of Kathmandu to collect Ayreen from John’s house, and then we set off to Chitawan. Frankly, I wasn’t looking forward to this trip, in spite of the private car being the best/most cost effective option on offer, because the trip of 140km was predicted to take five-and-a-half hours! Seriously, that couldn’t be good, could it?
Well, friends (especially Australian friends that would think 140km was a whip-down-the-shops), it was not good. The driver was wonderful and did all that he could to make the journey comfortable and short. However, the odds were stacked against him and he even suffered a fine (500NPR ~ $5.75AUD) for transporting me (an obvious foreigner) around in a private car (Ayreen regularly passes for Nepali being Bengali). The problem was, the whole trip was one-lane-each-way highway, filled with traffic (especially slow-moving trucks), and routinely and regularly degrading from rough bitumen surface to total chaos of disturbed road-base and washed away sections of road. They (the Nepali government?) were working on repairing and upgrading the road pretty much the whole way (in the classical Asian way – just working right there in the flow of traffic with little or no safety arrangements in place), so we drove constantly through road works or areas that needed road works through a stream of trucks, buses, cars, scooters, and other vehicles. It was your typical big Asian city traffic chaos on a crumbling mountain road. Not only was the duration a problem for me, folded up in the back of a *small* sedan, but the constant bouncing and jostling of the car from the very rough road surface was surprisingly tiring. The heat and the dust didn’t add to the trip either. Anyway...
Here are a few pictures that I took, trying to capture the countryside as it changed on the trip. In truth, it didn’t really change much as we were driving through the ‘low mountains’ part of Nepal. As Ayreen described it, there are no valleys in Nepal, just mountains and ravines. I couldn’t get any photos of the road in the ravines because of the density of the traffic and/or the amount of bouncing around going on.
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The solar panel on a post adjacent was one of a line of maybe 20 and they were all exactly the same – so covered in dust (from the road) that it seems impossible to me that they are producing any energy. And “who will clean them and how?” sprung immediately to mind. |
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In due course, we arrived at the River Bank Jungle Resort in Chitawan. We were greeted by a lovely man who proved to be our guide for the day’s activities. He very politely provided us with insight into what was now going to happen to us. (I express it that way because he was very sincerely informing us of how the things that were included in our tour package would unfold. There was some flexibility – taking different tours in the morning or afternoon, for example – but there was an inevitability about how he said that each thing we would do would happen.)
We checked in, settled in, and re-grouped at the reception to begin our first experience – a traditional village tour (which I frankly cringed at) and the watching the sun set from a bridge over the river nearby.
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We were loaded into a big eight-seater tour jeep for the excursion. We drove about 2 km from the resort (along what would become a very familiar route) to a local village still actively inhabited by the local Tharu people. We alighted and inspected their living conditions. This sort of activity is something that I feel quite uncomfortable about; imagine if people showed up at your home each day and poked around critiquing your standard of living and lifestyle? It was gratifying (to me) to see that the village was transforming from the small mud and thatch-roof huts that the indigenous folks existed in for hundreds? of years to small, sturdy, colourfully presented concrete homes. It spoke to me of increasing community wealth and welfare. The community was still a village though, with bare-arsed children playing in the dirt and livestock wandering around the small houses, while the adults were busy preparing the night's meal on open fires (in the traditional huts).
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After self-consciously wandering along the road observing the village life going on, we got back in the jeep and drove along the river to turn into the Chitawan National Park and up to the bridge that crossed the Rapti River. The Rapti River is the only river in Nepal that runs East-West; all other run North-South, apparently. The sun was still quite high in the sky for a sunset viewing, so the guide entertained us with discussion of the wildlife that we might see along the river banks and in the river and flying overhead. And we did see some of that wildlife! Especially in the water. We were able to watch schools of very large fish, staying stationery in the current and feeding on the food washing down river, while a very large (~5m by guesswork) Gharial (needle-nosed) crocodile glided around trying to select from the menu.
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In due course, the sun went down – which meant that Nepal had delivered where Oman had not!
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We were delivered back to the resort in time to get ready to witness the next cultural experience: a dance performance by the local Tharu people. This traditional dance troupe were wonderful, and especially so because they put on a full-force performance for an audience of four (which did grow to eight during the performance). Our MC for the evening event was Babu. He turned out to be the longest-serving guide/ranger/manager in the resort (and I suspect owner, but he didn’t say that) and a substantial character, even though he was built on a typical Nepali scale. He introduced each of the four dances, the fourth called the ‘invitation dance” because you are invited to dance with the troupe. Normally, I would shrink from such behaviour but as they had an audience of four, we couldn’t really say No. Ayreen was keen actually, so there was additional pressure not to lose face in front of my friend.
The performance was very entertaining and involved about a dozen women dancing in a constantly rotating circle beating either sticks or small skin drums in time to the drumbeat provided by the (male) musicians (off-stage). The beating of sticks was an intricately choreographed process of each woman (or sometimes pair of women) waving their stick (or sticks) around in what is clearly a martial form and having the sticks clash with other dancers, all in immaculate time and resulting in a very pleasing and slightly threatening display of dance and martial aptitude. The skin drum dance involved dancing in the rotating circle banging on the drum which had peacock feathers attached to one side. Periodically, the drum was waved around as if it was a peacock fanning for its hen. Again, a pleasing display of dance and musicality.
The invitation dance came around and we were politely asked to join in – “just follow the steps of the dancers.” Well, that proved to be a bit more challenging than one might imagine (or at least that I imagined) as the dancers were already rotating in the circle and we were inserted almost like a conga line and had to pick up and keep up without actual instruction. Anyway, it was fun, and I’m sure outside observers would have been amused to see a huge white giant stumbling around trying to keep up with but not step on the petite dancers who knew what they were doing. (I found out later that our private driver was there and videoed the event! I’ve told him not to surface it on the internet – nobody needs to see that!)
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