NEPAL – Sunrise in the Himalayas

I decided to give myself a little “reward break” after spending some time in the crowded and busy India – and headed for the mountains, by air to Kathmandu, Nepal. And what a difference. Right away, I noticed smiles on faces of many people who treated each other with kindness and dignity.. Granted, there were still poor people but gone seemed to be the Indian caste arrogance. And people were busily tilling their terraced fields etched into the mountain slopes everywhere around, with the majestic and unforgiving peaks silhouetting in the background.

But no, one cannot see the famous Mount Everest from Kathmandu. The city features numerous monasteries and other Buddhist sites like the Budhanath stupa, 36 m high and history that dates back to the 5th century AD. 
The most imposing stupa in Asia. Kathmandu is full of Buddhist monks – and Himalayan trekkers.

If I still did not have it, I caught the mountain fever there and then.

And then - the sunrise in the Himalayas ! A lifetime experience, one just has to see it, a must. But for that one should be outside of the city, somewhere on a mountain. I did not have much time for trekking, so I organized a taxi ride somewhere higher up for that. While I don’t remember the taxi ride price, I very well remember being picked up at 2:30 in the morning – because that early was a total punishment. It was cold and pitch dark and we drove and drove, up-up-up on some logging road – or at least it felt like that. After about a 2-hour slogging, the car stopped on a nice clearing, overlooking a valley shrouded in clouds well below us. I had to believe that because I could barely see anything in the darkness. But wait – soon will be the sunrise !

To cut a long wait and story short, I just say that there was none ! Sunrise that is. As the sky was getting brighter, silhouettes of huge surrounding mountains became painted on the sky.
Then, just before the expected sunrise, like on order, clouds from the valleys below us ascended and completely surrounded us in their totally milky fog. One could barely see one’s oustretched hand in that dense fog that was getting brighter by the minute. It all happened so fast that I could not even get my camera out. Good, there was absolutely nothing to photograph for the posterity – just that milky dense fog.
It should have been like this luckier photo here :

And for me, a sunrise in the Himalayas ? Humbug – none of it whatsoever !
However, by about 10 a.m. the fog burned away and we were rewarded by a wonderful crisp view of the valleys below – with the sun happily shining way high overhead.
I felt personally cheated by mother nature. On the way back, I could not believe that we drove up the same way – the rough mountain road appeared absolutely unpassable but the taxi driver somehow managed to fly through it even back to Kathmandu.

I took a stroll through the city and yielded to a sincere invitation into one of many carpet stores. I never saw that many Persian carpets until in Nepal where they are made. Yes, the weaving skills have been shifting eastward from Persia. I like oriental rugs and the owner spoke very good English. We chatted, he was showing me this rug and that as we were sitting on a huge carpet pile and sipped local tea.
When I mentioned that I was Czechoslovakian by origin, he highly praised “one of the best books on oriental carpets in the world” - written by Czechs ! And rushed to bring it and show me.

“But even that one has errors in it, “ he confided. “You see, this and that - and that – “, he pointed out. “Write to the authors”, I suggested, “they would be eternally grateful to you”.
“Oh-noooo,”  came back a polite but firm response. “We want the errors in there as we want to keep the carpet mystigue.”  Business, I guess, often relies on some mystigue –
Errors or not, we are happily enjoying the mystigue of several of these carpets at home. But the shining pink silk one that I liked most just would not fit our cottage-style home (= I could not afford it).
I wonder if it perhaps still waits for me in Kathmandu -

Everybody (and me too) connects Nepal with Mt. Everest (8,848 metres, 29,029 ft) – and Sir Edmund Hillary’s famous “because it‘s there”. I almost did not get to see it – it is so far from Kathmandu. But I guess that’s only good because everybody and his cousin want to climb it. It’s poor peak might get worn out by the traffic. Nevertheless, expedition after expedition keeps streaming to it and up the mountain. Leaving mountains of garbage strewn along the way, along - also well over 200 corpses still on the mountain, with some of them even serving as landmarks.

While not posing substantial technical climbing challenges on the standard route, Everest presents dangers such as altitude sickness, weather, wind as well as significant objective hazards from avalanches and the Khumbu Icefall. The treacherous mountain climbing is not for everyone and the expeditions are nowadays strictly controlled, limited and - expensive.

I got to see the mountain the easy way – from the airplane on my way back. Only I am not sure which one it was in the sea of majestic peaks reaching for the super-blue skies.

And Nepalese food ?
What they eat is certainly influenced by the neighboring India. However, the Kathmandu Valley features the Newa cuisine, a subset of Nepalese cuisine.  It is one of the most celebrated food variety in the country, consisting of over 200 dishes. It is more elaborate than most Nepalese cuisines because the Kathmandu Valley has exceptionally fertile alluvial soil and enough wealthy households to make growing produce more profitable than cultivating rice and other staples.