Comfortable shoes and eyes wide open - let's do the flaneuse

It takes you forever to travel around Nepal - nobody even gives you the distance in miles or kilometers here, the cities are certain amount of time afar. From Nuwakot (district), Rasuwa (VDC) and Bhorle (village in the VDC) from Kathmandu you are more or less four hours away. With a break for a milk tea in a little shop on the highway's side (what a daring name for a road like this) and a fast dal-bat lunch in a restaurant located deeply off-road. Right after the landscape turns into red hills covered with maze, rice and banana trees. The more your jeep climbs those hills (in Poland these would classify as serious mountains), the more incredible the surrounding becomes. At this stage you have already forgotten the nightmarish (nevertheless fascinating) architecture of Kathmandu, with crumbled houses and crowded street. At this stage you are pretty much surprised by your own ability to completely free yourself from the urban dream and coziness, from the need of a mint granita and a cinema nearby. You experience salvation from civilization that consists of anything else than a muddy road, houses built of stones and clay, a radio owned by the community to which they all listen collectively in their free time, and spring water that rarely runs from the taps due to some mysterious rural policy.

I went to Nuwakot to build some tin shelters - just to discover that the community is already doing it very well on their own, mastering the skills that engineers from the city shared with them some time ago and combining it with local resources and knowledge. Shelters were covered by pine needles to protect them from the heat and strengthened by incredible bamboo. Humility is one of the best lessons you bring from these places, where you go as a well-educated, well-read traveler and soon you discover that in a place where there is no shop in a reasonable distance, where there is no street light at night (the night falls surprisingly fast), where heat and dust suffocate you during the nights, and impressive storms disturb your sleep, and your diet will always consist of the same boring but nutritious mixture of vegetables and eggs, and the water they drink might cause you a lethal diarrhea, you're like an infant. When two of my new friends, Ajay and Sat Lama from Bhorle, took me down to the river and then up again to the waterfall, I owed these twelve year old boys my life a couple of times. And this addictive experience of bringing your senses to yet another level.