Journey to India

It is so hard to blog when you on the road, and priorities are to find transportation, lodging, food, etc. I have so much to write about. Mehdi said he would buy a laptop and I hope to do more when we get it.

 

From Katmandu we moved on to Chitwan National Park, with elephant rides and tiger camps. Needless to say we did not see any tigers, as they don't want to see us, but we did see some  crocodiles on the sandy shores of the river. They were absolutely still, so we pondered if they were not perhaps plastic replicas planted for us rather unclever tourists. I saw a woman washing clothes on the banks of the river, and it would have been one of those idyllic travel pictues, if it had not been that she was wearing jeans and a skimpy top. Since it was only 1-2 kms from the "eco" resort, I thought perhaps it was a tourist in another lodge. I asked our guide Lalu, and he called to her in Nepali and she turned around and waved to him. She was Nepali. During the jungle walk, which was largely uneventful, I had a lovely leech fall onto my clothes. Beautiful red bugs, as large as grasshoppers, but walking like beetles, were in the thousands everywhere on the path and the forest floor.

 

I had really mixed feelings about our elephant ride as it is so contrived to have loads of tourists, albeit most of them were Nepali school children, crowding together in an elephant caravan. And isn't it out and out elephant abuse? Zaman and I were of like mind, but having come this far, we decided to go with it, justifying our actions by saying to ourselves that these were domesticated elephants. In fact, they were not wild, and had been bred in captivity, much like the ubiquitous cows and bulls. We went in serach of the one horned rhinos, which we did not see. However we did get to feed the elephants a lot of green bananas.

 

The funnny thing is that I took my Danish wooden shoes off so they would not fall off on the ride. I placed them in what I was told was a secure place, but lost one somewhere in the jungle. The guides promised me that they would look for it the next day, but now it's been ten days and no word from them by email. These shoes are really comfortable, summer and winter, and nt cheap, so I was sorry to lose them. And they are still looking for them. So it brings a smile to my face that every morning, in the resorts off Chitwan National Park, a group of elephant riders are looking for a Canadian tourist's Danish wooden shoe. And by the way, I did leave the other one there too. So they could be together, and hopefully someone would use them one day. But I don't imagine they will use them. Wooden shoes in Nepal are quite an oddity.