Namaste & Dhanyabad
Hi friends. And family. Hi, mom.
We heard from a few of you after the last digest went out. And plainly, that felt great. Really great. To read your reactions and know what you’re doing wherever in the world you are. How home feels.
We also heard from our mothers, who were nonplussed that we had picked up hitchhikers and paid to swim with great whites.
This will come as no surprise, but Instagram and Facebook - the only other way we are publishing our travels - condense experiences into witticisms and digestible pieces. Things that are easy enough to flip through on a phone during an elevator ride. So most of what we heard about the first installment was that its depth was refreshing.
In that spirit, we’ll stick with the format from last time. Please keep sending us your thoughts. They’re helpful and we love them.
Onward.
Where we are: Nepal
How long we’ll be here: 1 month
Hello: Namaste
Thank you: Dhanyabad
Bonus word: Lalala (“we’re good, cool, all done”)
Where we’re going next: Vietnam
Our first morning in Nepal, we went for a walk through the dusty, crowded alleys of Kathmandu. The sun was out, as was a sagging haze over the city, and a man sat on the front stoop of his fabric shop. “I like those shawls,” Meredith said, so we went inside.
Within a few minutes we were on the building’s roof with the shop owner talking about the earthquake that demolished Nepal in 2015. Looking out over the city, whole neighborhoods of which are still in pieces, he said something we didn’t see coming:
“We were very lucky. The earthquake happened on a Saturday.”
Lucky?
What he meant was that school wasn’t in session. Nearly every school in Kathmandu collapsed during the quake, thousands died, but thousands more - and many more children - would have died if the ground shook on a Tuesday not a Saturday.
This man lost most of his shop, the country lost 9,000 people, and he was painting a silver lining for us. Which embodies the most transfixing, remarkable part of this country: the outlook. People we’ve met here have been impossibly generous and kind. Like, pull the money out of their pocket and hand it to you when you’re strapped for cash generous and kind.
Apparently Lincoln once said: “I have noticed that most people in this world are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”
Nepal is poor. Landlocked. In constant political turmoil. The average income is $800 a year. The city and infrastructure are dusty chaos. And yet these are the happiest people on earth, as far as we can tell.
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Meredith’s lying next to me at the moment, asleep. She’s been sick for a few days - from any number of things: pollution, dirt, water, a piece of chicken - so she’s been rolling around groaning in bed. Things here can be hard. Stepping out in the street is lunacy. Traffic pours around you with exhaust, near misses, ceaseless honking. You have to peek into the kitchens of restaurants to see how the food is prepared. Most Nepalese wear masks. There are 2.5 million people in the valley and 1 stoplight that everyone ignores.
We had what we’re calling a “soft landing” in New Zealand. Wine and comfortable hostels. Friends and well-maintained roads. Flat whites and the English language.
Nepal is the “hard landing” we often think of as real traveling. It isn’t any more real than something as sheep’s wool-gentle as New Zealand, but travelers like to talk about the struggles they went through in a challenging country and wear them like badges of courage.
We don’t take pride in the challenges here. They are annoyances like you’d experience almost anywhere, they are just foreign to us and native to Nepal.
For 4 or 5 days last week, we were in Nepal’s largest national park, 4km from the Indian border, a place called Bardia National Park. It’s known for rhinos, elephants and the bengal tiger. We were having beers at an outdoor cafe across the street from an elephant sanctuary with a guide who had taken us through the jungle. He was telling us about how a wild elephant killed 2 men a week before just down the road.
“Do people live in constant fear of dying from an elephant attack?” Meredith asked.
“It is no different I think from your country,” the guide said. “Only there you have car crash, and here we have elephant.”
Not that we need it all that often in this incredible country, but Krishna’s voice has stuck with us. We’ll find problems. Some foreign and, for that reason alone, frightening. But the foreign joys we experience here are overwhelming and enormous. Easy to celebrate and easy to see, particularly with people who feel so inclined to find joy.
When we came back to Kathmandu from Bardia, we got to participate in something called Holi. It’s a Hindu festival celebrating color and happiness. The city shuts down, cars get briefly quiet, and Hindus take to the streets and paint each other’s faces with powders of electric green and blue, hot red and yellow, pink and orange. A few hours later, everyone’s been greeted and painted by a thousand other strangers. Clothes are covered in a technicolor dreamcoat. You’ve danced on a bus, climbed on a stone temple dragon, and watched the throngs in Durbar Square.
There’s no foreboding religious undercurrent. Just the joy of it.
Like Krishna said. Fight what you need to fight, otherwise be happy. This place brings out so many reasons to embrace it.
And now, a no-frills breakdown of where we’ve been in Nepal, and where we’re headed next.
KATHMANDU
A sprawling, dusty, chaotic place of 2.5 million that gets not just bearable but weirdly charming when you find the right crevices and sanctuaries. They can be found in rooftop, shoes-off bars with views over the crumbling city; a temple that saves you from the constant honk of Kathmandu traffic; or a quiet restaurant serving momo dumplings in a curry broth. The guidebooks tell you to stay for 3 days and move on - we’ve been here a week and have only scratched the surface.
BARDIA NATIONAL PARK
Chitwan NP, we’d heard, was where all the tourists go. So we wanted to beat it and go further into the country to Bardia. That may or may not be necessary. The bengal tiger stayed put when we went searching for him, elephants are elusive as well, and the rhino we got a fun run-in with on foot.
The thing that made the place really compelling was being far away from anywhere in the warm welcome of a Dutch-Nepali couple running Bardia Homestay. We got to know their son, chased chickens around the yard, and chatted with a conservationist who re-wilds leopards for the park. Our chat with him across from the elephant sanctuary was one of the coolest nights we’ve ever had, as deep into the world as we’ve ever been.
NAGARKOT
A few days ago, we rented a beautiful, chrome Royal Enfield for the afternoon and went buzzing out of Kathmandu to a little town in the Himalayas called Nagarkot. You’re there for the view, and the view was admittedly hazy when we went, but our drive was impossibly cool and one of those things we’ll probably remember for the rest of our lives.
COMING UP:
Pokhara
My brother Doug and his girlfriend Hayley arrived today from Hollywood to join us for a portion of the trip. Step one is not getting them smushed in Kathmandu, step two is flying off to the Annapurna region of the Himalayas to a cool, small city called Pokhara.
Annapurna Circuit
In Pokhara, we meet Sherpa Ngima, who will be guiding us for 12 days through the Annapurna region, and, eventually, to Annapurna Base Camp at 13,549 ft. We’ll be sleeping in tea huts at the villages we come across along the trail, eventually making our way back to Pokhara and out of Nepal.
SPECIAL BONUS SECTION
We were lucky enough to have two extremely great people, Nate Laver and Michelle Lewis, join us for the second half of New Zealand a few weeks back. There were ethereal meals, a strange and wildly stupid exercise called zorbing, upright and sober biking through *hiccup* the Marlborough wine country, a ferry across the Cook Strait, glacial waterfalls, an aggressive evening in Wellington and afternoon tubing through the Waitomo Caves to see glowworms.
Two things: glowworms are maggots that hang from the ceiling and use their glowing excrement to attract bugs. So there's that.
Second, this was a big deal to us. Having two people come find us on the other side of the world was special. It will continue to be special. As much as we can check in with others, time in foreign places makes for conversations and big, wild moments you can't manufacture elsewhere. So a shout-out to Nate and Michelle for being ideal travel partners. And because Michelle is a great singer-songwriter, we'll even include a link to her site.
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Love, all the way over there.
Pete & Mere