Nepal - Pokhara

The story continues: there are now almost as many episodes as there are Bond movies... and, not to toot my own horn, but I'd say my ramblings are equally exciting.

But enough about double-oh-seven. How's Pokhara? I know that's the question on everybody's lips, but you need wait no longer; here's the answer: Pokhara's going great!

Okay, we've had our trip-ups and snags, but we're living with a really nice family in a spectacularly beautiful valley, and that's the most important stuff. The city itself is a funny kind of L-shape, since it squeezes into the space left by the "hills" around it. (and I say "hills" only to differentiate them from the truly awesome mountains that poke through the clouds on the clearest days - the Annapurnas). At the tip of the "L" is Fewa Lake, around which is the tourist district, aptly and simply named "Lakeside". Kel and I find ourselves there whenever we need a "Western comfort", like the internet or toilet paper. I'm there right now. The lake really is surprisingly clean and nice, with huge jungle-covered hills rising from its edges, and steps of bright green rice-fields near the water itself. We went para-gliding from the top of one of the bigger hills on Sunday, and we got a really great view of the town (that actually reminded me a lot of the Google Maps of the area). That was a good time, until my para-glider guy decided to do a neat little trick with me, where he spiralled at top speed toward the lake. I'm kind of impressed with myself for holding on to what was a stupidly dense pre-para-gliding breakfast.

The family we're living with has been kind and has done what they can to include us in the family. There are very old school gender roles here, and I've found the "head of the house", Ramesh, seems to do a lot more talking and wheeling-and-dealing, while Gita, his wife, gets very little credit for doing a huge amount of work around the house. The family is rather extended, and all considered (including me, Kelly and another volunteer, Hayley), there are 9 people living in the house. We eat dhal bhat (dhal and rice) for every meal without exception, although on festivals we'll also have pappadums, prawn crackers and "buff chilli" (buffalo meat fried with tomato and chilli), and sometimes Western-style hot chips. These special occasions occur about once a week; since we've arrived we've had the Cow Festival, the Father's Festival, the (3-day) Woman's Festival, and the Transport Festival (yes, the have a public holiday to celebrate transport!).

My hospital experience at Manipal has been okay, not great, not terrible. I've spent the last fortnight doing "Community Medicine", going around to various medical facilities in or near Pokhara. I've seen a facility for poor children to help prepare them behaviourally and medically for the step up to real school; a "district out-post" which seems like the Nepali equivalent of a rural medical practice; a number of homes in a small village; the Regional Tuberculosis centre (which didn't have masks for us to wear while they gave us a tour, so I was holding my breath most of the time… seriously, I looked like an idiot!); and most recently Green Pastures Hospital, which is a leprosy hospital run mostly by Europeans. This week I started doing paediatrics, but I got acute haemorrhagic conjunctivitis two days ago (which everyone in the country is getting right now), so I haven't gone in since then.

Kelly's volunteering has been simultaneously rewarding and frustrating. She's been looking after and teaching English to a bunch of frighteningly under-privileged street kids. The kids themselves are good kids, but they're dirty for a lack of clothes and knowledge about hygiene, and many are carrying significant psychological trauma related to the loss of loved ones or family violence. Some of them don't smile or talk much, and some hit out at others; a few have obvious physical scars. Despite their clear need, the orphanage they're living in "The Protection and Rehabilitation Centre for Street Children" was only started up a couple of months ago, and is managed less-than-optimally by a large group of "members" who have each contributed financially, and who all need to agree on something before any money is spent. As a result, you won't be surprised to hear that nothing ever seems to get done unless one of the volunteers or Ramesh just go out and pay for it themselves. As it is, the kids have no beds and sleep on the concrete floor, the roof leaks when it rains, the "classroom" has no tables or teaching aids, the yard consists of a parched area of dirt about 4-by-7m with a couple of old chickens pecking around in it, and the toilet door has broken off so that anyone who uses it is exposed to the yard and the road! To make matters worse, the volunteer organisation Kelly's working through (INFONepal) had been paying the rent until last week when a bizarre turn of events resulted in the head of the organisation washing his hands of the orphanage and refusing to donate any more money or provide any future volunteers. The biggest issue there is that the only love these kids get comes from the volunteers, and the only reason they don't run away to live on the street is because they get love at the orphanage…

The rain is coming less and less frequently, and the tourists are starting to arrive as the trekking season gets underway. We've been told that we ought to do our shopping now because the prices go up significantly over the next week or two!

I've come up with the top 10 creature comforts I miss the most, in order, and I'm surprised that they were all readily available in Thailand:

10: Fast internet (anything that can upload a 500kb picture in less than 5 minutes; it takes over 2 minutes just to load Gmail. I know: omfg roflmao!)
9: A consistent power supply
8: Cooper's ales (or at least any beer that's not Nepal Ice, Tuborg or Everest)
7: Beef (it's illegal to kill cows in Nepal, you get 7 years in the slammer, and buffalo just doesn't cut it as an alternative)
6: Espresso coffee (or any coffee that doesn't contain sugar and/or yak's milk)
5: Fixed prices (bartering gets old… fast)
4: Hot water (cold showers hurt, and I'm a shower princess)
3: Cold drinks (just like the showers, drinks seem to come only at or near ambient air temperature)
2: Western toilets (and toilet paper)
1: Spring mattresses and wonderful, soft, fluffy pillows (I'm tired of this torticollis)

Okay, I'm signing off. Did you hear that the Maoists quit the Government? Good move, dickheads. I don't think the November elections (here, not in Oz) are going to go ahead as planned, the Maoists will get slaughtered at the poles and they won't allow anything to give people the idea that they are unpopular, violent insurgents. Maybe if they didn't kill people who disagreed with them... As things stand, they're in the dangerous no-man's-land of being a bit violent but not entirely brutal, and they aren't stopping the press from slamming them daily. So they'll probably just kick up a big fuss near election time and stop the whole shebang in its tracks.

Nepal - Kathmandu

Holy shit, we are in Nepal! It sort of hit us like a tonne of bricks as we left the airport. It was like being a rock star, only instead of legitimate adoration we were getting false praise and seductive offers (to stay at various hotels - I'm sure they would have offered us "a special price, just for us"). As usual, we got suckered into parting with too much money, but myeh, it wasn't so much money that we were out on the street for the night. But let's just say, 1000 Rupees is a very generous tip under any circumstance...

Neither of us were expecting quite what we've seen and done here. The first thing that hit me, and it hit me on the plane as we were landing, was just how old and bare (and at times collapsed) the buildings in Kathmandu are. We'd been to Cambodia and Burma, but this place is a whole new level of dilapidated. I really need to have a word with the guy that does the town planning. Somehow though, as a whole, it doesn't look ugly. Its a bit like a trip back in time to a chaotic, beautiful, simpler place. The legendary views we were expecting haven't really been on offer, because the clouds are hanging low in the air as is usual in the rainy season. We've been told the Himalayas will come into view near the end of the month, and we're looking for a nice new wide-angle lens so that we can take some appropriately awesome panoramic photos of it...

Personally, my time in Kathmandu was frustrated by the impending due date for what turned out to be the biggest, most frustrating assignment in my academic life. Research is boring. Really boring. And writing about it is even more boring than actually doing it. So anyway there I was, sitting in the middle of this beautiful exotic city, laptop at my fingertips, crafting this stupid clinical audit while Kelly and others were off experiencing life in a small village in the Kathmandu Valley. I did manage to see some stuff though; I got out to Patan, one of the three old cities in the Kathmandu Valley, which had some fantastic old temples and buildings, including one temple with 9999 little Buddhas carved into it. I also managed to see Swayambunath Stupa, more commonly called the Monkey Temple, a name given to it for the obvious reason that there are monkeys there. Lots of monkeys. Big daddy monkeys, mummy monkeys, little wrinkly baby monkeys, mischievous monkeys, dare-devil monkeys. They seem to live off the rice that people throw on the statues there. Its on the top of a hill near the edge of the city, so you get this fantastic view. I can only imagine how great it would be in the dry season when the snow-capped mountains rise up behind everything else and the sky is blue with streaks of white... but I'm pretty sure it would be mighty fine.

We had a few worried parents (four to be exact) after the Sunday bombings in Kathmandu hit the media in Australia. Just for the record, they were careful to avoid tourists. They were going for the monarchists, those evil bastards. I can assure you all that I am not a monarchist. I'm pretty sure the same goes for Kelly. It was a salient reminder of the instability of the country though. Its sad to see how this ongoing ridiculousness has crippled a country which could have remained the major trading route from China to India, and which could have enjoyed a rich income from its tourist trade.

The bus trip to Pokhara was at times breath-taking, and at times nauseatingly windy. Probably the goodbye drinks we had with Pete, Mike and Freddy (the first two seem to be following us like blowflies - now they say they're coming to Pokhara, sheesh) didn't help much. The road follows a valley carved by a river, so there we saw many children playing in the water, and people crossing precarious wire bridges. We ourselves crossed the river many times in our ancient bus, a couple of times over bridges that didn't seem as though they would hold our weight. We barely missed a dozen cows at different times, and we were repeatedly forced into the seat in front of us as the bus driver slammed his breaks on to avoid an overtaking vehicle coming the other way in our lane!

The important thing is, we're alive. Kelly has just started her volunteer work at the Children's Welfare Association, which is basically an orphanage for street kids. They have nothing there, even compared to the refugee school in Thailand, mostly because the CWA only just opened up a couple of months ago, in order to try to tackle the problem Pokhara was having with the street kids. Its not technically a school, just a place to stay, but most of the kids haven't learned enough self-discipline or the basic manners to be able to survive the regular school, so those kids get taught during the day, and Kelly takes the English lessons.

I had my first day at the hospital today, sort of. I went in, and everyone was more interested in just sitting and chatting to me than getting me involved in any actual medicine. I've doctors coming out the ears asking me about how to work in Australia! The teaching is run in English, and everyone obviously speaks really good English. One of the professors asked me if I wanted to "take food with him" at lunch time, so I had a really nice Northern Indian lunch. But I never saw a patient. They do "community medicine" work, which they are almost insisting I get involved in, where they travel to nearby towns and villages to supply health care. I'm not complaining, but I was planning on an anaesthetics rotation...

One plus is, I get the feeling that they aren't going to have a problem cutting my rotation a bit short so that we can do a decent trek in October.

That's about it for now. As always, we have our photos up on PicasaWeb. I've uploaded photos into the Burma, Thailand and Nepal albums, which also contain all the previously uploaded photos (but I haven't got around to copying over the comments I've made). I've put together a couple of photos from the Mae Tao Clinic, but be warned that there are some gory photos of penile surgery in that album. Don't blame me if you see things you wish you hadn't.