THUR, 05APR2012Jomsom (2720m) – Pokhara (lakeside)

Wendy woke up early to try and book us an earlier flight out. We had confirmed (by phone with the agent in Kathmandu) about spots on a flight Thursday instead of Friday, but we still wanted to get out earlier if possible because of the horror stories we had read about high winds stopping flights. No luck though, so she came back to take some mountain photos.

I headed out after packing to get some cheesecakes for breakfast. We had heard it was good and it looked sort of authentic, so we thoughts we skip the expensive Xanadu breakfast and get cheesecake. On the way to the German bakery (yes, these are all over Nepal for some reason), I saw a local veg market open up and asked about the local mushrooms. I got two packs for a negotiated “Nepali price” and headed to the hotel for cheesecake and drip Java House coffee.

We got to the tiny airport and were surrounded by a mix of pilgrims and trekkers. No one was at the “desk” for Tara Air, but we still waiting in line like good muzungus (Kiswahili for Europeans). Once the manager arrived (the same guy from the local office), Wendy got more and more nervous as he refused to make eye contact with her. Finally after lots of up and down and back and forth, the manager traded our tickets for a blank boarding pass. He didn’t need us to fill it in or anything… we got through the security closet (where Wendy got felt up for weapons by a female cop) and made our way to a tiny 20-something seater plane! The runway was short, but the take off was easy with no wind. The two pilots worked together to take off and land, but one was reading a newspaper while we cruised at an altitude of maybe 6,000m (~20,000ft), literally snaking around peaks and over valleys! A flight attendant (seriously?) passed out cotton for earplugs and butterscotch treats as we craned our necks for a view of the peaks above us.

After a bouncy, relatively easy (but still a little white knuckle for Wendy) flight, we landed back in civilization - with roads, and people, and touts, and motorbikes, and more people…it was a bit of culture shock.

We stopped our taxi first at an ATM and then looked for a hotel. Somehow I picked a super fancy place and got sucked in by the double bed, lake views, and 35% discount rates. But it was still double the price of any hotel yet in Nepal.

We then wandered out and found a cool lakeside restaurant for lunch of fish and beer while relaxing in the warmth of lower altitudes. It felt weird to drink a beer without hiking for 6-8hrs first! Almost like we were cheating.

We got a taxi out of town to visit a famous Tibetan settlement and monastery, which we unexpectedly found full of young monks (4-10yrs old!). We hung around until they began their prayer/chanting session since we heard it was incredible. It was entertaining, but not exactly life changing, as we watched an elementary school gathering of an older monk leading the chant with a few of the younger monks following along, while the rest of them taunted, poked, and made faces at each other. There were two young monks on opposite ends of the cross-legged horseshoe, which sat next to giant gongs and were responsible for the accompanied drumming. They would try and fake each other out so that one would mess up the drumming, while the lead older monk pretended not to notice. On the way out of the monastery we were hounded by a row of tourist cheech sellers for the first time in Nepal and it felt a little like being in Kenya. We stopped to check out the (Lonely Planet) famous community run traditional rug-weaving program. Unfortunately the rugs reminded us of bad Home Depot rugs and the weavers were pushing gaudy friendship bracelets on us, so we moved through quickly. We waited for a while in the rain wondering how to get back, then met and shared a taxi with a couple of young Italians, who for some reason were trying to pass themselves off as Swiss.

We spent the hour or two before dinner wandering through the rain trying to find replacement pants for the ones Wendy gave away on the trek. Since she refused to be caught dead in the bizarre balloon-leg pants that only tourists seemed to be wearing, we had no luck… I got bored at one point and wandered off to buy windstopper gloves (for $4!) and freaked out when I almost couldn’t find her in any of the shops. She was trying on some pants at one of the shops in a “changing room” (what turned out to be the living room of the shop owner)…

We got dinner recommendations from the Swiss/Italian (who apparently had been living in Pokhara as a tourist for ~6 months, doing who knows what!). It turned out to be a great noodle place with some crazy sounding 2 for 1 drink specials that we avoided. Wendy had a mutton dish and I had a super garlicky (like 4-5 semi-cooked sliced gloves) thukpa, the noodle soup with chicken and veggies. We sat cross-legged on the floor in front of a low table, while bad 80s movies played nearby and the Nepal waiters were glued to some movie involving Michelle Pfeiffer, vampires and werewolves.

Got up early for a quick cup of coffee for breakfast. Patrick popped out to the bakery next door to get some cheesecake. He came back with 2 bags of dried local mushrooms in addition to the cake. He was very pleased with himself.

The next 1.5 hours were nailbiters.  The 8:30am plane came and went – no room for us. The airport was becoming more crowded with tourists and pilgrims desperate to leave bleak Jomsom. We all anxiously watched the windsock, which had started to flutter. If there was too much wind, flights would be stopped. Finally we were issued boarding passes for the 9:30 flight.

There were about 25 seats on the plane and they were all full. We took off from 2600 meters and flew straight into the narrow valley. I doubt we flew higher than we’d hiked. We flew over outcroppings in the valley where we were only a couple of hundred meters above the ground. We flew even with the snowline and then the treeline, passing massive peaks. Each time we crossed a perpendicular valley, the cross-wind buffeted the plane. Patrick pointed out that there was nothing to worry about since the pilot was reading the newspaper.

After about 15 minutes, we flew over forests exploding with pink blossoms. The whole mountainside was covered with blossoming rhododendron trees. We passed terraced fields that followed the natural contours of the mountain and were so narrowly spaced that they looked like fingerprint swirls on the side of the mountain.

We landed in Pokhara about 25 minutes after we took off. Pokhara is a big city (second largest in Nepal) but tourists are confined (by choice) to a small strip on the lakeside. We quickly settled on a hotel and took off for the old town, away from the trinket shops and counterfeit trekking gear hawkers.

Old Pokhara wasn’t much to see. We bought a few baskets and then continued to the Tibetan refugee camp. We quickly passed through the carpet weavers and their show room (beautiful but not our taste) to the monastery behind. To get to the monastery, we had to pass by a long row of persistent trinket hawkers with phrases directly out of the Kenyan play-book “Just look take a look…, looking is free…, support my business today…”

We timed our arrival at the monastery to coincide with prayers. We were hoping to hear the monks chanting. At about 3:15, little boys ranging in age from 3 to 13 years assembled haphazardly in the prayer room. Watching these little kids go through their prayers was exactly analogous to watching 15 boys sit through a church service. The two boys playing the large drums to the cadence of the prayers kept trying to psyche each other out, tricking the other into striking their drum at the wrong time instead of in unison. Some were yawning, sleeping with their heads down on the little benches, others were heckling each other, still other were distracted by their feet, the edge of their robe, etc… They whispered to each other and pinched each other and pulled faces. They chanted with as much enthusiasm as a catholic boys’ school mass but less in tune. We left after about 45 minutes. No adult monks appeared.

We shared a taxi back to the tourist part of town with 2 Swiss women, one of whom had been in Nepal for 6 months. She said Pokhara is her favorite place in Nepal but when we asked her about local places to eat good nepali food, she only named restaurants on the tourist strip. Living and eating on that little tourist strip in Pokhara for months at a time sounds like a fate worse than death. We had good chicken thukpa and dal bhat for dinner, although Patrick put all the raw garlic relish in the soup after which I was unable to eat it. The mojitos were also very tasty.