Five Days in Dimik

Peace Corps volunteers Nick, Chad and Tia

I’m writing from Pokhara, back for the third time. Each stay gets shorter – this one is only 2 nights until Uncle Tracy gets here and we start trekking. The town has lost its novelty but the coffee is still good. The last five days I spent in Alex’s village, Dimik, four hours by bus southwest of Pokhara and the days melted away as fast as the days in Darjeeling and Delhi.

Briefly, Alex and I met this summer in Winthrop when I made her iced lattes at the bakery but didn’t talk until her sister told me she had left for the Peace Corps in Nepal. I found her on Facebook and we’ve kept each other company since, both being volunteers alone on the Indian subcontinent. The day before I was meant to go to her village, her Nepali sister said the house was too crowded and I couldn’t come for a few days. I could not mask the terror I felt at having to wait another WEEK in Pokhara so thankfully Alex convinced her sister to let me come.

Feeding time!

We had a relatively comfy bus ride to the nearest town, Galyang, ate some chow mien and walked with her sister back to their village. Most of the men work in the Middle East as drivers or in hotels on two year shifts with two month breaks so the village of Dimik is mostly women, children and toothless men. It’s interesting to me because nobody in Pamohi left the country to work and almost every student had a mother and father at home. Alex guessed that her family’s income was $6,000 per year, 2-5 times more than families in Pamohi made, but of course the children grow up without fathers…just an interesting contrast that gave Alex and me something else to talk about.

Baby Bisey

Another topic was the institution of marriage. In Dimik, all marriages are arranged. Alex’s sister’s husband saw her on the street in Galyang and “liked what he saw...” and that’s how it works. The married women move into their husbands’ houses but the husbands are gone for years at a time so often several wives live together with their children and mother-in-law. It’s difficult for me to wrap my head around, just as the mythical love-marriage is for Nepalis. I’m always surprised at how similar people in India and Nepal are to people at home – friendships between men and between women are essentially the same but marriage is simply a fundamentally different concept.

My second and fourth nights there we had massive thunder storms that lasted for hours, poured rain and hail the size of marbles and cracked lightening like flashbulbs in a stadium. It was an impressive show and a preview of what monsoon season is like. Luckily I was inside watching movies. It did, however, send all the silver dollar-sized jungle spiders scurrying inside. The outhouse had a resident makura that we named Richard “Ricardo” Nixon. I needed to know where he was every time I used the toilet so when nature called Alex and I would say we were checking on Ricardo. Ricardo was fine – he stayed on the wall – but his friends and kin made life exciting when they appeared unexpectedly. When one crawled next to me while we were eating, Alex thought my quick reaction and the aaahhhhHHHHHH noise I made meant I had either shit my pants or was about to vomit. I smacked the spider mostly dead and Alex’s sister’s husband scooped up the still wriggling body in his hand and threw it into the storm.

Kin of Richard Nixon, aka Ricardo

Every morning we got up at 7 for tea, then spent a relaxing few hours talking and waiting for breakfast. No one really spoke English so I was totally reliant on Alex to translate for me. People knew she spoke Nepali and thus assumed I did as well so many times I looked over helplessly at Alex and said “They’re talking to me!” The day began after breakfast. One day we went to a training for new mothers at the health center. The next day Alex and I hiked up to a peaceful hilltop mandir and she explained the boundaries of her district and where she went for meetings. The next day we walked to another village with Alex’s sister. A few hours later while we were waiting for her, I entertained the village kids with Inception noises. That night Alex’s sister’s husband came home for the first time in two years though you wouldn’t know it from the subdued reception he got. The day after that we spent building castles in the river sand. We didn’t do a ton because everything is spread out up or down a hill but the days always felt productive.

I learned about the Peace Corps experience in Nepal. I got some perspective on my experience with village life and made friends with a wonderful family, and I got a friendly face to talk with hours a day.

The beautiful home where I lived for 5 days

 p.s. For those concerned about the health and whereabouts of Dave, he Skyped me from work in London. He's fine. We must have just missed each other walking about town. We're DEFINITELY coming back here.

Part II

 Dave and Laura are gone, maybe the best week-long friends I’ve ever had. Laura headed off to do the Annapurna Circuit and I frankly don’t know what happened to Dave, but I’ll get to that in a sec. In the meantime, Peace Corps Nepal and my friend Alex rolled into town and I now have 18 Americans my age to party and hang out with. Seeing Alex was great because even though we’ve never really met, we’ve looked after each other over the past 6 months. Not only was she the first familiar face I’ve seen in five months, but we can just sit around and talk about Winthrop and college and crazy shit that people do in this part of the world, and generally things I haven’t talked about since I left home. So these are my new night-time friends (they have PC training for 10-12 hours each day) and I have to entertain myself sunnyside. So that’s how I came to publish two blogs in a day.

Little boy and his pink sheep

So like I said, Dave and I shortened our trek and were supposed to start two days later. For every occasion we meet outside the Once Upon a Time restaurant in the middle of town and Dave was uncharacteristically late…he was sick again, but he wanted going to power through it. We had paid $45 each for these trekking permits and he wanted to get out of town so we hired a taxi that dropped us off at the trailhead for the trek to Poon Hill. Almost as soon as we started though Dave was clearly in pain and we only walk about twenty minutes before he decided he couldn’t do it. We drank a cup of tea and Dave felt like shit on the whole. He gave me some meds and I started up the trail by myself. It’s funny how this Pokhara cocoon of friendly people to be with all day has softened me a little to being on my own. It went away quickly but I had this specific lonely feeling that I haven’t felt since I read The Road in my first few weeks in Pamohi.

Waterfall pool that I put in the sketchbook. 

As trekking often goes, the walking part was not that interesting. I gained 1080 meters between Naya Pul and Ulleri. It was hard, but not as bad as I imagined. The guesthouses didn’t have any singles and the guy who ran the place I stayed simply told this Japanese guy that I would be sleeping with him. He understandably wasn’t so keen on his lack of options but he turned out to be a nice guy who had been traveling the world for 2 years. That night I didn’t have much to do so I went to bed at 6:30 and had a glorious 11-hour sleep. The next day I went up another 800 meters to Upper Gorepani but I got to the guesthouse at 11:30 even with a break to sketch a beautiful little waterfall. I was only at 2800 meters, not where I would expect to get altitude sickness but my lungs weren’t feeling quite right when I dropped my stuff in the room so I just took a nap in all my sweaty clothes! Unfortunately I didn’t bring a book so I wrote everything I could think of in my journal, wandered around a little, meditated, ate dinner and chit chatted with some nice Australian people who were finishing a 16 day trek around the Annapurna Circuit. Then I slept.

That's me!

The climb to Poon Hill started 5 and I saw the bottoms of two 8000 meter peaks. I took the requisite picture in front of the sign, and actually some other nice pictures too. I ate my breakfast with the Aussies and as soon as I was finished their guide told me I needed to leave my chair, so I took that as my cue to leave. I chugged down the mountain and finished a total decent of 2200 meters in about five hours. I forgot to cut my famously long toenails so they were a little sore but even with my new Nepali hiking boots I got no blisters. The roof of the local return bus to Pokhara seemed to shift back and forth independently of the frame, like the screws were loose and the whole thing might collapse, but it was fine and I warmly re-embraced the giant iced-lemonade and free internet that makes Pokhara great. It is the best feeling to come back to a happy, safe place with friendly people after doing something emotionally or physically draining. That was probably the hardest part of traveling in India - I might get off a sleepless night bus at 6 AM to find that my only comforts were a railway station bench and a pay-for-use toilet. Needless to say, it makes me appreciate HOME, wherever it may be. I think Dave and I decided that we could just live here…he’d rent his house and do some advertizing work on the side to live like a King on $20 a day. He didn’t know if his super-FINE girlfriend would go for that though.

Fishtail

Speaking of Dave, I was supposed to call him up when I got back but his phone was off. I knew he moved from his first guesthouse so I asked where to and his next guesthouse said he had gone to a doctor and moved out the night before to stay with a friend. The office where he bought his plane ticket back to Kathmandu said he’s never been there so I couldn’t meet him at the airport and he wasn’t at any of the usual spots. My detective work failed and I have no idea what happened to him. If you read this Dave, I’ll meet you back here in a year. 

Easy days in Pokhara

 I’ve been in Pokhara now for 10 days. I’ve been having enough fun that I’ve put this off for almost two weeks. Sorry.

Most people who come to Nepal funnel through Pokhara because it’s beautiful - on a lake in the shadow of 7000 meter mountains - and because it is one of only a few places from which to start a trek in Nepal. As a result Lakeside Pokhara is like the Disneyland of the Indian subcontinent…I would guess that nowhere in India approaches this concentration of tourists. There are dozens of restaurants, cafés with real coffee, outdoor shops, bars and gift shops. Everyone in this part of town speaks English but the salesmen are not rabid like they were in the parts of India where I was, so one can actually enjoy a walk down the street. It’s outrageously expensive, relatively, but still cheap compared to any such western resort town. On the whole it is glorious and the days just melt away.

My first day I though, Jeez, how do people make friends here? It seemed like everybody coupled up and kept to themselves. But my second day on the way back from my adventure to find the camera repair shop in the city, some other tourists joined me as I was eating momos by myself and I haven’t looked back since. Sometimes people who are overeager to make friends with me sketch me out, not the type of people I want to spend my time with, but these guys were great. They were all single travelers and they just rolled around collecting other single travelers like a human snowball. We congregated at the Busy Bee Café every night to drink two-for-one happy hour cocktails and listen to the cover band. There was an Australian woman and a Pilipino man who were sorta Mom and Dad of the group, plus a Dutch girl, an Austrian dude, a couple of British guys…I’m blown away by how friendly everyone is here. Travelers can get quite competitive especially when it comes to which routes you have trekked but I have encountered none of this.

Irish Laura and Scottish Dave. Best people to pass a day with.

 These guys have all gone their separate ways but through them I met Laura and Dave, my new best friends. Laura is Irish but lives in London and Dave is Scottish but also lives in London and I’ve done most everything with them the last 5 days...we more or less eat breakfast, lunch and dinner together. They are 30 and 32 so I’m the baby of the group but they treat me as a peer and I like them all the more for it. I don’t speak with a British accent yet but I’ve adopted all other British manner of speech, something I hated when my sister came home from England. Laura and I spent a morning watching the sunrise over the huge Fish Tail mountain, then climbed up to the World Peace Pagoda overlooking the lake in the afternoon. Dave and I rented a boat and paddled around the lake for two hours and had a great time talking about all kinds of stuff. Dave said at least 10 times that he was Definitely coming back here. This place is so comfortably and cheap that I may join him. The three of us also went paragliding a few days ago...running off a cliff until the wind lifts your feet off the ground is just about the coolest thing I’ve ever done, probably the closest thing you get to being a bird.

That's what my face looked like for 30 minutes.

 Dave and I were meant to go for a four-day trek two days ago but he got a stomach bug and today is a national transportation Bundt so no busses or taxis are running. We decided to shorten the trek by a day to see the famous sunrise from Poon Hill so Dave can get back and catch his flight to Kathmandu. Laura’s trying to get in gear to trek the Annapurna Circuit so we’re all sorta sitting around tapping our toes.