Back and forth

After Garrison's last post, we bumped and jerked our way back out of the hills towards the south. We passed through the town with the long-staring child and his sibling (no sign of him, but we did have chia with buffalo milk), then stopped mid-afternoon for diesel at a petrol station in between steep dry hills in a town in a river valley. There was some discussion among he guides in Nepali, then we were told we were stopping in the town for the evening. Garrison and I pushed to drive further into the hills towards our next lake because it was only about 2:30 pm, but the guides warned us that the hotels were no good further into the hills closer to our coring location for the next day. We insisted, and after winding our way up switch backs through a dry pine forest, we arrived at a town with few hotel rooms and no water. So, we descended back down to the valley and stopped at a guest house on the side of the trickling river. There was still no running water, but we were able to stand in the ankle-deep flow and do our laundry on a white plastic table stuck in the mud in the middle of the river.

After a candle-lit dinner (no power after 7pm), we headed to bed and were up by 545 am drinking tea and packing the vehicle (and by "packing" I mean "watching" because the guides won't let us help, so we stood around awkwardly trying to help lift bags but being told "no problem, no problem" instead). We had a quick breakfast back in town of fried poori and a sweet fried dough with a side of curried chick peas, then we drove 2 hours back up into the hills to the lake. We carried the gear 20 minutes down to the lake side, and a fisherman told us he would paddle us around in his boat for 100 rupees per hour (after 3 hours he charged us 1000 rupees, but we figured that $3/hr is still a good deal for us to use someone's boat).

It was a frustrating experience to say the least: the lake was even deeper than we expected (50 meters according to our depth profiler), and we had to string together most of the anchor cord/rope to just get one anchor down so we could stay relatively stationary to take dissolved oxygen, salinity, and temperature profiles of the lake near its deepest point. Then the wind kicked up, dragging the boat across the lake, and the coring lines were so long that they became tangled every time we attempted to core. After hours of lowering, futile pounding, and hauling back up, we had to settle for about 20 cm of questionablely useful sediment. We walked back disappointed to the vehicle at 2 or 3 pm and drove back to the town in the river valley. Night was quickly approaching, so we decided to stay there for the night. Garrison and I took a walk out of town to the nearby farming community and sat on truck-sized grey limestone blocks at sunset watching people harvest what we assumed were crayfish from the river. I won't say much about the hotel, but I will mention that the rotting trash outside the window combined with the half-constructed brick buildings and burning rubbish made Garrison comment that it looked a bit like a "post-apocalyptic landape" when we got up in the morning.

The next day, we drove out of the hills into the flat low lands just north of the Indian border. We headed east towards Butwal, and the temperature began to climb to 35C then 40C. Water buffalo on the side of the road were attempting to escape the heat by wallowing in mud holes and in the low waters in the rivers. Mid-afternoon we finally turned north back into the hills at Butwal, and the temperature dropped to a more bearable 30C. We stopped at a roadside snack house and had a cool drink of water, some fried snacks, and mini bananas (I was feeling sick to my stomach again so garrison manned up and ate all of the food for both of us. The guides ate much less than they encouraged us to eat, and somehow seemed surprised when Garrison wasn't famished 2 hours later). Garrison cheerfully commented that it would be the last time we had to spend so much time driving through the hot, dusty lowlands.

We received bad news later that evening in the hotel: the Nepali government has refused to grant us our permits to core lakes in any of the highland national park regions near Annapurna, Langtang, etc. This turn of events has eliminated most of our top-priority lakes in addition to nearly all our backup and secondary backup lakes. We were basically left with 3 options: go home with the little sediment we have, wait 3-4 weeks for a questionable possibility of a permit, or head back out the same road we just drove on all day to western nepal to core much more remote lakes. After a discussion with the head of the guide agency, we decided to head back out to far western Nepal, near Jumla, to core some remote lakes. We are now looking at 2-3 days of driving through the lowlands in the hottest time of year. At least I managed to rig the webbing in the middle seat so I have something resembling a safety belt.