Kilometers traveled: 4,025 km
Dearest friends and family – greetings from the Himalayas!
We have been on the road for some weeks now – and not had any access to email or the web in the places we have been, plus there have been powercuts everyday (load shedding for up to 8 hours per day)– so we have so much to update you on!
Since we last wrote we have traveled by train, bus, rickshaw and foot to get from Jodhpur in the Thar desert of India to the Annapurna range of the Himalayas in Nepal where we are now…we have seen and done so many simply amazing things its hard to know where to begin or how to describe how fantastic everything has been. Everyday begins with the unknown infront of us and ends with another brilliant adventure and lots of wonderful stories to tell.
We are now 5 weeks into our trip and are both well and very happy. We hadn’t eaten meat for a month until we had buffalo for lunch today. Despite our sometimes dodgy diet (weird things from questionable kitchens) we had both been holding up pretty well until Cisco picked up some stomach bug which makes the long bus rides an interesting & nerve-wracking experience (for us both…so far so good!)
Here are some highlights from our last 2 weeks. Please check out the photo gallery for accompanying photos. You will have to make do with the pictures from my camera as Cisco still hasn’t been able to find a safe computer on which to download his. Hopefully we will have some for the next entry. He has been taking some fantastic photos so we will try to get a preview up as soon as we can!!
Leaving Jodhpur
After we left the village in the Thar desert we went back to Jodhpur where we spent an eventful week doing all sorts of interesting things. I taught English in the afternoons at a school for girls from the Untouchable caste. Working in an open air Indian classroom was a fantastic experience but actually quite hard work because each 90 minute lesson needed planning and preparation and also for me to learn the rules behind English verb conjugation – which we all take for granted when we speak English as our first language. I also took Hindi lessons every evening on the rooftop of our guesthouse which helped me confirm the DIY Hindi I had been using for the last 2 years.
We made two cool friends while in Jodhpur: Eliza (who was my co-teacher) and Mattias (who is living in India for his geology research). See a photo of us in the gallery.
I am on the board of advisors for an NGO (Non-Govt Organisation) in Jodhpur (and Cisco helps them by taking photos of the school etc) which focuses on literacy and empowerment for girls and women in Rajasthan (http://www.sambhali-trust.org/). The founder of the NGO (our friend Govind) asked if we would help him prepare a presentation on the struggles of Rajasthani women for delivery to Austrian communities next year. For our research we put on our tidiest clothes (eg my least dirty Indian outfit) and had the bizarre experience of interviewing the Police Commissioner of Jodhpur and the District Magistrate of Jodhpur. These guys are very senior (people kept coming in bowing almost in half) but being foreigners we were ushered in straight away as for some strange reason it was a cool thing to be seen with us in their offices.
One last happy thing about Jodhpur: I got to meet the 2 children I sponsor to attend school. Their father pulled them out of school to work last year because they couldn’t afford the fees, but Govind arranged for me to fund their schooling instead. Now Deeksha (10) wants to be an engineer and Atish (8) wants to be a pilot (yay!)
On Friday 5th Dec we took a 17 hour train ride across the top of India to get to a point near to the first border crossing into Nepal; unfortunately that point happened to be Lucknow. Our train arrived at 4am, drunken fights broke out in the hotel through the night (not us this time, some other people ;-), the place was covered in thick smog dawn to dusk, and something evil infected Cisco’s guts.
Luckily we had to check out at 6am the next day so decided to get the heck out of there and make our way to Nepal. We had to take 2 buses to reach the border (190 km in 7 hours). The Indian roads are crazy at the best of times, but our second bus trip was even more hair-raising than usual. We realized our bus driver was drunk when he stopped for a leisurely 5 minute leak 2 km after we took off. He came back and for the rest of the trip he was steering with one hand, talking on his mobile with the other and facing the back of the bus as he had long conversations with the guys at the back. We lost count of the number of near head-on collisions with trucks which were wildly honking and flashing their lights – so we moved to the back of the bus where we felt safer. After a very uncomfortable journey we finally arrived in Rupaidia….
Rupaidia is a small village on the India-Nepal border, but it was heaving with life as Nepalese and Indians made their daily border crossing for work and trade on horse-drawn and cycle rickshaws. For the first time we had a glimpse of Nepalese people and were in awe of how different they look to Indians: almost like a cross between Tibetan and Chinese. We were so excited to be so close to Nepal – where it looked like we would have a completely different experience to our last month in crazy India.
See the next entry for the dramas as we tried to cross over the India/Nepal border.,.
With much love from us both,
Chloe and Fra xoxoxo
