NEPAL

A Personal Account of a Curious Country
by Rasmus Jansson, January 2001 Last revised: July 2001

It was New Year's Day 2001. A heavy snowfall had covered southwestern Sweden with a foot of snow and it was cold. It felt good to leave this forbidding, dark place, although we knew we might be heading for much colder places still. Marcus, my travel companion, had asked me a few months earlier if I wanted to go with him to Nepal in January. It sounded very exciting, so I said "Sure, why not?" and joined in on the project. We studied travel guides on Nepal, bought down jackets, and prepared ourselves mentally for eating rice with lentils. This was the day of departure. Nervous mothers and seemingly proud fathers hugged us goodbye for what they thought would be a risky mountain adventure. Reassuring promises to the contrary had little effect as usual, but I suppose that's the way it should be.

Except for a touchdown in Amsterdam we flew directly to Kathmandu. Or so we thought. The plane was going in a funny direction and our tickets said destination "Sharjah". "Where the *bip* is Sharjah?" we asked and banned ourselves for not reading the ticket before leaving. It turned out to be in the United Arab Emirate, wherever that was. A close look on a world map revealed that we had made a touchdown in an all-sand, Arab country by the Persian Gulf. Once back in the air after dawn, we got a bird's-eye view of the country which appeared totally flat, dry, and had no vegetation in sight. Their last period with vegetation was probably at the time when the black gold of today was green fern and hadn't yet sunk into the ground.

On the plane from Sharjah to Kathmandu, we noted that the clientele had changed from normal tourists and businessmen to hippie-style yoga tourists and sluggish mountaineers. Before landing in Kathmandu, a Dutch bohemian got a terrible toothache for some unknown reason. Maybe one of his chakras got unbalanced, who knows? Anyway, he tried to cure his ailment by putting double plastic cups to his ears and after a while he seemed to feel much better - though I ascribe his fast recuperation not to the plastic cups but to the motherly care of the good-looking stewardesses. This diverted our attention from the upcoming landing in Kathmandu, which for no obvious reason made us uneasy.

If you would like to hear about the rest, we invite you to join us. Enjoy!

Note that all pictures and some words in the texts are clickable and lead to enlargements or mini-galleries of related pictures.

1 Kathmandu
2 Everest, the Ultimate Trekking Region
3 Annapurna
4 Chitwan National Park and Jungle Safari
5 Nepalese Life and People

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Thanks to Maria Jansson for valuable comments on style and layout.