Lions and tigers and bears

(...oh my!)

Namasté,

Well, after a six-hour bus ride through some of the most beautiful countryside I have ever seen, we are back home in Kirtipur from our weekend trip to Chitwan National Park. Overall, we found the area much more touristy than other places we've visited, but we still had a great weekend.

I still felt quite ill Friday morning, but Banu called the doctor and reported that I wouldn't feel better until all my medicine was gone, so I went, and I'm really glad I did. After arriving at our camp on Friday afternoon and settling into our rooms (which were actually more comfortable than our rooms and beds at home, I think) our guide for the weekend took us on a tour of a nearby Tharu village. Nepal has many different ethnic groups, and the Tharu people have lived in the tropical Tarai region for hundreds of years. Their longtime resence there is particularly interesting because up until the 1950s when lots of the land was cleared and sprayed, the area was largely a malarial swamp. The Tharu attribute their remarkable resistance against malaria to the alcohol and hot chilies they consume...sounds more pleasant than malaria pills, I guess!

Anyway, back to visiting the Tharu village. We (the non-Nepalis) were a little weirded out by this part - the guide was trying to get us to go into the people's houses while they were home. We were asking him more about how the program worked, and he said the people were okay with us coming but didn't get paid. It just seemed kind of odd to go on a "real Tharu village tour" and stare at the people as if we were in a zoo - and interestingly enough our Nepali anthropology professors, who have been giving us all these lectures about research ethics and the like, didn't seem perturbed by it in the least. Said awkwardness notwithstanding, it was neat to see a working village. The construction was quite different from in the Kathmandu valley; bamboo, mud/dung, and various tall grasses are the favored building materials. There were also lots of cute goats, puppies, chickens, ducks, cows, etc. everywhere... I think the baby goats in this country are cuter than anywhere else I've seen. They have enormous floppy ears, they're tiny (like, American house cat tiny), and they do this adorable little frolicking dance when they play with each other. After the cute overload we had an ethnobotany lecture with Professor Chaudhary. I'm certainly not as interested in plants as he is, but we had an interesting discussion about intellectual property rights as far as the medicinal plant knowledge of indigenous peoples is concerned.

Saturday was a most excellent, if quite busy, day. In the morning we took a canoe ride down a nearby river and saw crocodiles, peacocks, kingfishers, and lots of other animals. We then visited an elephant breeding center where they raise and train elephants to carry tourists on safari. The elephants seemed mostly well cared for - they had some space to walk around, but the mothers were chained up because they had several mother/baby pairs in the field and didn't want them to harass each other, I guess. The babies were free to walk around, and they came right up to the fence to see us. I don't think I had ever seen an elephant that closely before, and I'd definitely never touched one, but these were so tame they let them come out and walk around with us! Their trunks were really neat, very bristly and wrinkly, and they're incredibly dextrous with them. We poured some water in our hands to see if they would drink, and they did - they suck the water up their nose (it sounds like a toilet flushing!) and then spray it into their mouths. I hope I can get some more pictures up soon, because I have some adorable baby elephant shots!

After lunch and some R+R in the sun (it was much warmer than in KTM, about 70 Farenheit, I'd say) we headed back out for our elephant safari! They loaded us onto our elephants in fours and we headed out into the woods for our walk, which turned out to be over two hours long. We saw several wild rhinos, including a baby one, more peacocks (one even opened its tail for us!), lots of monkeys, and other elephants, of course...and a lot of Asian tourists who must have flashed us four thousand peace signs. All our elephants were incredibly well-trained; at the mahoutey (elephant driver/trainer)'s command, they could bend trees out of the way to let us by, pick things up off the ground for us to look at, and reach up for a high five from someone on a neighboring elephant. Still, our driver said he went out on 4 to 5 trips a day, and he made our elephant move right along - definitely not an easy way to earn one's keep.

We then visited a workshop in town where several men were carving wooden rhino and elephant statues. The largest ones took 2-3 days to make, and sell for about 1500 rupees (20 dollars or so). After some cold drinks and snacks down by the river (and a gorgeous sunset!), we went to a Tharu cultural program. There were about 20 male dancers, and they performed several variations of the Tharu stick dance (an acrobatic, rhythmic dance done to drums and that has its roots in combat and hunting), a mourning dance (two of the guys dressed up like women to do it; apparently that's common), and a dance for Holi, the festival of colours (they carried big drums decorated with peacock feathers for that one). At the end they had us all come up onstage and dance too.

This morning we got up early to go birdwatching in the jungle. It was still misty when we started out, so we didn't see much at first, but we did spot some mynahs and a tree with SIX peacocks in it! After breakfast (they served us the same food for every meal, pretty much), we all piled on the bus and now here I am...

Hope you're all enjoying that snow back home (I'm jealous, we can only see it up on the hilltops where we are), and everyone take care!

Love,
Renée