There is something inherently wrong with chasing down tigers with sticks. It’s as if a band of mice decided to start a cat tracking expedition armed with nothing but broken toothpicks. Obviously, mice have better sense than men.

The reality of the situation doesn’t really hit home until you’ve canoed to the deepest part of the jungle, and are now safely on the wild animal part of the park, with nothing but a couple bottles of water. Everything is cheery until the guide’s tone turns somber and he lays down the law of the land. “There are serious threats on this side of the park. You may have heard of 3 villagers being attacked by a tiger last night, or a rhino stampeed on tourists yesterday morning.” What the fuck? This was obviously not explained in the colorful brochure just a few days earlier. “There are four things than can kill you in our park: sloth bears, elephants, rhinos, and tigers.” Somehow he forgot to include the 23 varieties of snakes in Chitiwan, but I assumed their threat was miniscule, so I ignored them. “Each animal has distinct ways of attacking, so pay attention”. At this point we partially stopped breathing, looked at each other, and tried very hard not to pass out. The guides then proceeded to explain what to do in every situation.

• Rhinos are very aggressive. They will chase you down and trample you. They will quietly lay waiting for you and side-swipe you. Oh yeah, and they can run 40kph. Luckily for us, they have horrible eye sight, though a keen sense of smell and hearing. So the trick is to throw something at them that smells like you, run in big zig-zags, and climb the nearest tree over 6 feet tall.
• Asian elephants become aggressive for as of yet unexplained and unpredictable reasons. They will chase you, hit you, trample you, and just plain grind you to a pulp. Thankfully, they cannot maneuver very well in dense forest, so pray that you’re not in open grasslands, because they too can outrun you.
• Sloth bears can climb and run, so you can’t outrun or out climb them. They sense fear and their attack is proportional to your fear. The trick is too stand together as a group, appear tall, and hit them with your sticks.
• Bengali tigers are gentle, kind, and shy– that is, unless they want to kill you. Reasons for attacking a human (which is a very easy prey) include: old tiger (lazy), sick tiger (in the head), has previously had human (we’re fat and taste good), or they’re just really hungry. So pretty much, whenever the hell he pleases. He can climb, run, go through dense forest– you name it. Lucky for us, we have a variety of deities to pray to. Hindus have hundreds of them, and Nepalis don’t fall far behind. The trick is to make sure your poop doesn’t upset your god, and hope you included someone besides your wife (who will also be eaten) as your life insurance beneficiary.

After that vivid speech, and smiles long wiped from our faces, we rapidly armed ourselves with the nearest sticks and started a 6 hour walk through the dense forest.

So… we survived after having trekked about 80kms in 4.5 days, with lots of stories and just a few blisters.

Internet is (as usual) excrutiatingly slow, and we leave in a few minutes for a 2 hour elephant ride. I promise a real post in less than 24 hours, but suffice to say that we had a great time, and Yano almost got trampled by a charging rhino (me… I was high up in a tree screaming like a little girl).

We’re in the Chitawan Reserve in Nepal, a 900 sq km reserve with elephants, rhinos, tigers, and more. Antoine, Anais, and us have decided to embark on a 4.5 day trek through the reserve (with two local guides)– all for $82 including meals and lodging. It’s the ultimate wild life viewing trek, which may render us incapacitated after walking for 6-7 hours a day, not to mention the possibility of being lower on the food chain for the first time.

Anais is worried because our Lonely Planet guidebook warns of the possibility of being trampled to death by rhinocerouses– but this happens once every few years, and mostly to a stupid tourist venturing inside the park without local guides. Antoine says he would like to see a tiger upfront because he relishes the idea of pooping his pants in fear. I, on the other hand, would prefer to be chased to death by a tiger, than being hit by a drunk driver while cycling at home. Death by tiger sounds much better in an eulogy than cycling accident.

(Holy shit, I just saw an elephant go by the dirt road next to the internet cafe! There was a local sitting on top of a big pile of hay. That’s definitely not something I’ve ever seen while sitting in front of a computer).

Crap, I forgot what I was going to write about. Anyways, we’re taking off for a few days. If we don’t write back in 5-6 days, we’ve probably outrunning some large mammal.

Wish us luck!

p.s. I promise to upload pictures when we return to Delhi, and hopefully insert some of them in past blog entries to describe things better. I know nobody wants to be reading my blog, just seeing cool pictures, but you’ll have to put up with my prose for now.

After 45 minutes on a possessed pickup rollercoaster the driver comes to an abrupt stop and tells us all to get out. “What’s going on?”  “This is it; this is the border.”  “Border, what border, this is village in the middle of nowhere”.  “Just keep walking that way.  You’ll see a bridge– cross it, that’s Nepal”. 

*blink*

So we did… we walked past a mess of bicycle rickshaws at dusk, onto a bridge, and voila– Nepal.

We stayed overnight in the town of Kakarbitta (it’s spelled differently everywhere I look).  Early on the 30th we climbed on a local bus to Kathmandu.   Everything was going fine until we got to the edge of a river and the bus stopped.  That’s it, everybody out.  We were explained that the monsoon had taken out the bridge and the bus couldn’t get to the other side.  We had to  take our bags and cross the river.  How you might ask?  Well by boat– and by boat I mean a bamboo canoe who had to be drained by bucketfulls twice a minute.  Yes, I panicked, but there was no other option, and the river was less than a mile wide, so I’m sure we could swim across, provided we could take our 25 kilo packs off our backs.

We got safely across, where we got a connecting bus (surprisingly, all covered by the same ticket– including the canoe), and continued our journey through Himalayan mountain passes to Kathmandu.  The entire journey took just over 14 hours and was well worth it.

So here we are in Nepal, wondering what the new year will bring.

Happy new year from Kathmandu.  Now onto finding that elephant sanctuary.

p.s. The internet is slow beyond description, and the 10 year old 700mhz computers overloaded with software do not help.  Needless to say, I won’t be uploading pictures until we get back to New Delhi.  Oh– and I lost the computer cable.

Traveling is the fine art of balancing distrusting everyone who approaches you and trusting (almost) everyone you approach– more or less.

We’ve become good friends with Antoine and Anais, a French couple traveling for 6 months in India and Nepal and have been traveling with them since Bodhgaya.  Through some serious harassment, we convinced them to cross the border to Nepal earlier and thus began our unplanned adventure into Nepal.

Our first step was to get out of the Himalayan town of Darjeeling and come back to sea level (Siliguri), where we could catch a 40km bus to the border.  Easy, right?

Getting out of Darjeeling was extremely hard at 6am because the taxi drivers wanted to charge 3x the amount because “Siliguri is closed”.  Saying a venue is closed is a popular scheme to get travelers to go to an alternate bus, hotel, or restaurant, so the schemers can get a commission for redirecting you.  Seasoned travelers that we are, we laughed at the audacity of claiming that an entire town was closed.  So we bargained hard and got the price down to a reasonable level.

Upon arriving in Siliguri we found there were no taxis, no rickshaws, and no open restaurants.  We asked, and were dismayed to find the entire county was on strike because Gorkahaland wants to be their own state and are lobbying in government.  So we got stranded in a town with nothing to do,  nowhere to go, and miles away from a guest house.  So yes, Siliguri was indeed closed.

No amount of rupees could convince a local to drive us past the barricade– not that I wanted to, but our friends were adamant about getting out of India right now!

We approached a young man watching the developments and he responded with a curious Indian accent with a hint of British mixed in.  He was very friendly, explained the details of the strike, and led us to a bamboo shelter to wait for a few hours.  After some chit-chat, we found out he was a sherpa (a mountaineering guide) during the trekking season working for an Australian company.  This quiet unasuming man had climbed with the greats, had summitted Everest not once, but twice, and all with no supplemental oxygen.  Needless to say I pummeled him with questions for an hour.  What does it feel to be on top of the world?  What’s the view like?  How cold is it?  What’s your greatest fear?  He explained that it’s not cold, it’s fucking cold.  You can’t feel your fingers for days.  The view isn’t that great, because the view from climbs like Gokyoryi are better, and the first time he summitted he had mixed emotions over having lost a member on the way up.  Spending time with Anand was a truly remarkable experience.

After lots of questions and answers, he invited us to his house, where his mother prepared tea and food for all 4 of us stragglers.  After some time, the strike subsided, we said our goodbyes and headed over to the border on the back of a pickup truck with 20 other Nepalis/Indians.  We hope to return one day, and trek with a man who was been on top of the world and who has climbed with such greats as Tenzing Norgay’s grandson (yes, we saw the pictures!).

p.s. Tenzing Norgay was the sherpa who, along with Edmund Hillary, were the first to climb Mount Everest.  His descendants are still great names in climbing.