Mission Nepal with David and Nicola!

Me and Nic!
Picked up Nic from airport and we got a dodgy cab back to our dodgy hotel. The panoramic views of the rubbish dump festering in the heat outside our hotel didn't exactly give off a pleasant smell and felt a far cry from the freshness of the Himalayan range that lay just a few hours away.

Nic's from France, part-English, part-Chinese and lives in Barcelona. She's been my partner in crime for many a moon now. It all began in the Big Smoke during the days when we'd speed on speed through the London Underground to dingy, dodgy sqwats and psytrance parties across the city's underground scene. The Fridge, The Mass, Brixton Academy, George 4, Prince of Wales, Tysen Street Studios, Vauxhall warehouses, ex-government buildings, we were there! We've both evolved over time, but she continues to remain my ultimate partner in crime.

Stoner Princesses of the City
Me and Nic are the stoner princesses not just of the city (Kathamandu), but of the people (all guys) that we're hanging out with right now. Even our room is pink and we only have to walk up one flight of stairs. Nic's been in Nepal a few days now and we've spent a lot of time horizontal, watching movies and catching up. Sometimes we don't move for days, ordering coffee, beer and food to our room and taking it in turns to make breakfast joints. The other day, Nic actually cried while watching the movie, Spiderman! It was that scene right at the end when Spiderman's enemy is lying wounded and they become friends just before he dies. It must have felt like a pretty intense scene to Nic, but come on, It's SPIDERMAN!

So as you can imagine, it's been super swell to re-link with my partner in crime! Six weeks or six months, it doesn't take long to fall back into that Anu-Nicola mode. Here's a conversation we recently had...

Me: Nic..
Nic: what..
Me: You gotta call your uncle and tell him we can't make it. He can't see us in this state.
Nic: He's not my uncle
Me: Whatever. We can't go to a formal dinner looking like this.

20 minutes silence

Me: We've been horizontal all day nic, and look there's no more beer. Maybe we should try and move...

Nic: Mmmm... Oh.

27 minutes silence

Me: are you gonna call your uncle or what?
nic: he's not my fucking uncle!

10 minutes silence

Nic: What am I supposed to do?
Me: Go downstairs and use the phone

22 minutes later

Nic: Okay, come on, we've got to do something today.
Me: What shall we do?
Nic: Let's walk aimlessly around the city.

37 minutes silence

nic: but let's make another jay first
me: you do it.
nic: nooooo, you do it...

Francisco enters the room with Jerry and Pete. They all stare at us with blank expressions.

Francisco: (sounding totally blasé and unsurprised). You two are still lying in the same position I left you in four hours ago.

Me: Let's get the fuck out of Kathamandu, this city's driving me insane

31 minutes silence

Nicola is either staring into space or examining the yellow patch on the ceiling with a great level of intensity.

27 minutes later

Nic: I wanna go to the jungle...

*****

Les Aventeurs Psychedelique du Nicola e Moi!

Dodgy
So we found our first psychedelic trance party in Nepal. Dodgy or what! A private bus arranged by organisers took us up steep, nail-bitingly narrow and windy roads to a secret location in the Pokhara mountains with views of the Phewa Lake deep down below.

One of the organisers, Giri, had told me that his parties were geared for foreigners only. I found out why when it got invaded by a bunch of locals pissed off at the amount of money organisers were making from having a party on their land.

The organisers tried to convince us that the locals were the bad guys, but they couldn't have been further from the truth. Inevitably, the music was switched off and the decks packed away after Giri and his cronies recieved a bamboo massage that they had probably asked for. Considering the numbers that were there I suppose it was worth their while at 2000 rupees a pop.

You could say that Giri is slightly psychotic. He stopped the bus and a load of guys jumped off to place huge stones at wheels of said bus to stop it sliding backwards. In the meantime, he proceeded to scream, “I wanna check all your fucking tickets! Any motherfucker without a ticket is getting kicked off this bus! You think you can make a fool out of me? You think so? I run this show, so don't fuck with me!”

Russian Roulette
A Russian girl with balls of steel gave him a piece of her mind, “Shut the fuck up! I have a gun in my bag and I'm gonna put a bullet through your fucking head if you ask to see our tickets again!” He responded: “Any mother fucker wants to kill me, I give them $50,000 to do it now! Just try and kill me and I'll kill all you mother fuckers without a ticket! I'm the mafia here in Pokhara, I run this fucking place!” The guy was steaming. His eyes were bloodshot and he was sweating profusely. I think he was probably a “bit” agitated because he needed a fix. We all stared at him with frozen smiles, trying to make the situation appear a little lighter, but it was evident he was also trying to show off and that in itself gave us some peace of mind.

Mountain Madness
Luckily, a European DJ who calls himself DJ Quick fixed the music situation with a load of banging psychedelic trance CDs / MP3s, taking over the sound system when the decks were packed away. The music on CD was better than the live sets. We boogied until about 8am and then trekked back down the mountain. It was an exhausting yet challenging mission. You could say we did our first (and only) trek through the Nepalese mountains. Steep, narrow pathways surrounded by thick jungle shrubbery (felt a bit like Lord of the Rings at the time) continued to cascade down for about three hours until we got to the foothills and finally found some flat terrain, landing in a tiny teashop.

The locals were bemused but it was impossible to speak. Stillness was bliss as we sat there sweating, tripping from the experience, and feeling far, far away... A sweet Nepalese woman handed out bananas until Nicola managed to muster enough energy to say, “water”. You could say it was quite an experience.

Chasing Waterfalls
From Pokhara to a place about half way to Kathamandu, me and Nic joined a group of others for a waterfall abseiling adventure. They call it “Canyoning” and they've only started doing it in Nepal for the first time this year. Did I shit myself? Of course I did! The initial trek to the top of the cascading waterfalls took about 40 minutes. We climbed into wetsuits, put on our helmets and were shown the rope technique for abseiling down. The waterfalls got bigger and bigger and the grand finale was about fifty-four metres high.

Don't shout at me.
I didn't quite get the hang of it to begin with and the instructor was shouting at me like an army official as I hung precariously from a piece of rope. It's his job to shout, but he didn't need to shout when I'm hanging just inches away from him! His shouting only confused me so I told him to speak to me with respect!

Anger comes from fear...
Even though they had grand plans to lower me down, there was no way I was going to let them do that to me with everyone else watching down below. I'd felt anger but realised my anger was coming from fear, so I pulled it together and abseiled down all on me own-some, yay! To be honest, I was pretty relieved when the day was over, but also felt a sense of achievement. Would I do it again? Hell, yeah!

David! (Daffyd!)
The adrenaline junkie that he is, David definitely made the right choice when he made that spontaneous decision to drop in on me and Nicola in Nepal! We linked up with David for a jungle safari escapade at Chitwan National Park in Sauhara, south of Pokhara, right after our waterfall adventure. You could say that David, like Nicola, is also my partner in crime. He loves to climb mountains and is out here for the long term to travel both Nepal and India. Me and David have put up with each for a good few years now so I guess you can say that he knows me a little too well at times! But I also know him and I have a feeling that this adventure to India that we are about to embark is going to be full of plenty of thrills and spills! David is also determined to drag me up Everest come October when I aim to be back in Nepal to renew my Indian visa. We both have a sense of adventure and the ability to be totally blunt each other. We're also fairly independent as individuals, so if he wants to go his own way, he knows that he can, and vice versa. Unlike me, David is highly organised and well prepared. He's also clued up and sensitive, yet has ability to unleash the monkey within (doesn't take much), which is why we can wind each other up without worrying about offending the other. Daffyd, dear Daffyd, do you know what you're getting yourself into here?!

Jungle Tiger Combat Girls (and Boy)!
The feeling that comes with experiencing a jungle safari and elephant bathtime in Nepal with two of my closest friends is not something that I can describe. Imagine a tin can with a tiny marble being shaken about inside it – that's me, the marble; or a metal ball in a pinball machine - again, that's me, the ball, ricocheting about the place like a lunatic - well that's how I felt inside. I had to contain myself you see. It was one of my biggest challenges as David's arrival was a surprise for Nicola...

Chitwan National Park is about nine hours south of Pokhara. The jungle spreads across 936 square kilometres of lush, vibrant green vegetation. We discovered weird and wonderful plants, including one leafy specie known to be good for diahrhea and which tasted like Granny Smith apples. We saw rhino, deer, monkeys and birds, but unfortunately, to our great disapointment, we didn't come across any tigers or cobras.

Trekking through jungle was followed by elephant safari. We were ram
sacked by the branches of towering trees. Until you're actually sitting on the elephant itself, you don't really imagine to be so high off the ground. In fact to get on the elephant herself, we had to climb up what I can only describe as an elephant-rocket launcher thing. She was absolutely humungous, yet so sweet, not to mention, feminine in the way she appeared to pirouet when she scratched her back legs!

Bathtime with Puja Kali the Magical Elephant
I seem to have a fear of absolutely everything sometimes, but these experiences are good practice to get over those fears. I mean, how on earth can anyone be afraid of an elephant that's as soft, gentle and as sweet as Puja Kali? Nicola and David had already experienced their elephant bathtime, so now it was my turn and they practically bullied me, forced me, in fact, physically pushed me on to that elephant. I finally got on and realised that she was surprisingly hairy, her skin a hard, leathery texture. The guy maneuvering her was evidently having the time of his life doing this job. I guess now, I can understand why.

Puja Kali also happened to be David's elephant. Remembering him from the day before, she greeted him with her trunk. The experience was immense. She strode into the water dunking right in and sending me flying. Climbing back on, she gave me a bathtime of a lifetime spraying me numerous time and clearly having a fine time! I was somewhere else, somewhere in elephant paradise, and loving every single magical second. I can't wait to go back to Chitwan Park to meet Puja Kali once again!