April 15th - Visiting the mountain

It was tough getting up this morning at 4AM to head to the airport. I managed to barter a taxi driver down to 150 rupees and we headed out. We waited outside of the airport for a good hour before they opened the doors and we could enter and go through security. Security here is a joke just like it was in India. You send your stuff through a scanner that I'm not sure even works, and then they give you a cursory pat down before waiving you through. Every thing is done by pen and paper as well.

After waiting for about an hour to board our plane, we were off to see Everest. The flight is on a small plane where everyone gets a window seat. The plane flies along the mountain range then turns and flies back so everyone can see. The entire mountain range is impressive and the weather was Crystal clear. The one thing is that, we were on a small puddle jumper, so we only flew up to 25,000 feet, 4,000 feet lower than the top of Everest… Even though the sky was clear, there was a blue haze over everything, but you could still see Everest clearly sticking out of the range. An impressive dark black triangle.

We landed and I shared a cab ride back into town with three other young people from Kenya, Pakistan and Australia. Everyone back at the Deutsch house was surprised to see me back by 8AM in the morning. We all went to breakfast at our little "Just Shakes" place where they have some delicious yoghurt, muesli and fruit. After that, Mike and Andrea headed off to do some work on the computer while I putzed around a bit. Later in the afternoon, Mike had some work to do with the computer and Blaine and Bethany were occupied, so Andrea and I headed to the main temple, Bodhnath, in Katmandu. The weather was good and the photographs were helped by nice bright blue clear sky.

The temple is bright white and has strings of prayer flags. The top is covered with gold and decorated with the a painting that is supposed to represent the eyes of Buddah. While walking around the temple, I met a young monk who was very friendly and spoke excellent English. He was able to give me some background on the temple and tell me a little about himself.

There also happened to be another smaller temple within walking distance that Andrea wanted to see, so we headed out for an hour or so walk to it. The name of the temple is Pashupatinath. When we finally got there, there were monkeys everywhere.

I enjoyed trying to take pictures of some of them, but you really need to keep your eyes on them so they don't sneak up beside you or do something crazy. We found out that we somehow had gotten on the backside of the temple, so we walked up and through it to find even more monkeys everywhere.

There was a woman selling food in the middle of the temple. One of her customers was eating what looked like some sort of peas and had a monkey sneaking up behind him. The saleswoman had a slingshot that she would use to scare away the monkeys with. A bit further down the path in the temple, I met a woman and her beautiful daughter. I asked for permission to take her photo and she let me. Continuing on, we came to the middle of the temple which had a river running through it, and platforms for funeral pyres. They were in the middle of burning one of the piles as we got there.

After that, Andrea and I took a taxi ride home and joined the others for some dinner. Later that night we all decided to enjoy some rum and cokes up on the roof for our final night together. After some rum and cokes, we headed downstairs to go to bed. Andrea had bought a bigger nose stud that she wanted to put in, and we were treated to a good hour of hilarity as Mike alternated between trying to help her put it in and teasing her while dancing around on the bed and singing. The fact that the power was out didn't help the situation as we had to try the whole thing with headlamps. Finally, after an hour of screwing around, the power came on after midnight and I was able to help Andrea get her nose ring in.