Final days in Nepal

This is our last day in Nepal so I (Garrison) thought it would be good to do one more update before the long flight home.  After the events Luke wrote about on the leech hike, we started the two day journey back to Kathmandu.   This last Nepal road trip was very instructive on the power of rain and erosion on dirt roads.  After spending a month traversing some pretty gnarly roads across western Nepal we were feeling pretty confident in the ability of our driver, Ramesh, to breeze over even the most difficult of road obstacles.  It turns out that these dry season dirt roads are child's play compared to the obstacles one faces in the wet season.  Although we were fortunate not to run into the true monsoon (average start June 9), we did have some pretty heavy rain while we were coring our last lake in Gorka (the leech hike).  This turned the descent of a road that was challenging even when dry into a nightmare of heavily gullied mud.  The heavy rain caused gullies to eat back into the road leaving chasms impossible to cross in any vehicle (usually with serious vertical exposure to one side of the road).  Every time we would run into a place like this (every five minutes or so) Ramesh would stop and peer out the window for a minute while the porters poured out of the back.  Then, after a few quick instructions regarding the plan of attack, we would all get to work piling up rocks and earth to fill ravines.  Usually we left the road in a better state than we found it although there were a few situatations where we had very big gullies to fill and not enough stones to fill them.  In these cases we used what materials we could for the first part of the obstacle then after driving as far as possible we canibalized our previous construction in order to make it the rest of the way out.  

Porters finishing up some road construction

After a long and sweaty descent to the valley floor, the road improved as we wound our way along the valley floor past endless rice paddies.  After a morning drenched in sweat, I enjoyed a quick shower in a beautiful waterfall of questionable water quality.  Luke's higher standards for bathing water (no scent of feces) prevented him from joining me and the dozen or so Nepali wayfarers who stopped at the falls for a quick dip.  

We arrived in Kathmandu the next morning somewhat daunted by the prospect of spending nearly three days in this bustling noisy city.  We felt like we had plenty of time to explore the city last time we were here so we weren't quite sure what we would do this time.  Nearly three days have passed now and we didn't have much difficulty filling up our days between drying and organizing gear, shipping samples, urban hiking, bargain hunting, and temple touring.  At least for me, one of the big highlights was hiking down to the sacred Bagmati River and gazing in awe at the mountains of trash dumped into the river.  They don't use landfills here in Nepal so all the trash of the 4 million people in Kathmandu gets dumped into waterways.  Luke enjoyed adding to what I refer to as his "postapocalyptic collection" with shots of cows grazing on the top of mounds of trash and children swimming in the toxic brown waters.  The few Nepalis we talked to down by the river thought we were lost and offered to help us get to the nearby Monkey Temple, after all, what sort of tourist would end up down in the dump on purpose?  

In a few hours we are headed over for one last Nepali meal with our hosts, then I get to have the longest birthday in history (36 hours and 45 minutes on a Friday the 13th to boot).  

Note the new extra photos link on the right of the blog.  I was able to upload some new photos from Kathmandu, but more will come along with the leopard video when we get back to the states.